English Language Learners? Or Just Learners?

My grade school, middle school, and high school didn’t have a single English Language Learning. The reason for this is probably the neighborhood I lived in combined with the fact that it was 12 years of Catholic education. Since it hasn’t been something I’ve had a lot of experience with, I love learning about teaching ELL students.

I found it particularly intriguing that Graves Chapter 14 emphasizes so strongly that “Learning a second language is more like learning a first language than different from it” (414). This fascinates me. I do have a good understanding that learning a second language is easier if the first is similar, but it never occurred to me that the actual process of learning a language could be so similar. As I kept reading, it made more sense.

Every method or strategy mentioned in this section as a way to help students learning English as a second language have also been noted as ways to help English-speaking students learning to read and write for the first time. What a novel idea! We can teach students that are learning to read and write English as a second language with the same methods that we teach students who only speak English to read and write. So what are these tactics?

·         Emphasize grammatical skills as well as critical thinking

·         Help students reference their own culture (or own lives for non-ELL students)

·         Help them gain positive self-esteem towards reading

·         Use and teach “A wealth of diverse strategies” (420)

Don’t those sound like concepts we have already learned in different areas for how to help any student with reading and writing?

That being said, I also appreciated some of the differences we could make as teachers to help our ELL students (since something like 42% of us will have at least one non-native speaker in our class each year). I think these ways of scaffolding, like making sure these students really have enough time to fully read through things and respond to them, and differentiating, like allowing students to choose their language to respond on tests, with later having them translate, have the potential to really help students acquire knowledge and a positive attitude towards learning English.

The last thing I find particularly interesting is that there is no regulation for how ELL and ESL students are taught across states or across the country. Yes, every classroom is going to be different, but I think there should be some sort of consistency across schools so that all students can have these methods and special attention when they need it.