[Note: This part is a transcription of a paper I wrote on the first day of class with Dr. Baird.]
I actually had about an hour of this class with Dr. McFadden on Monday, where I learned that students who are introduced into English language classes who are non-English speakers have about a 20% success rate in school. My hope for this class is that it will give me tools for teaching students with English as a second language so that I can have a much better success rate than that.
I also learned in my Monday class that that there are several laws, initiatives, and court rulings related to teach English learners (like title VII and Proposition 227).
I have spent a small amount of time in countries where English is not the common language. I found myself trying to imagine what it would be like to live there, and my thought was that it would be very isolating. I'm sure the English learners here feel much the same thing as they try to adjust to our language and customs, and I hope this class gives me tool for easing that feeling of isolation and getting English learners involved in class.
[Note: I am adding this part during this "second draft."]
I also started out the class with some amount of skepticism about
the
value of long term bilingual education. Certainly I felt that
"sink or
swim" wasn't going to be very effective for transitioning children to
English. One only needs a small amount of imagination to picture
how
well that would really work for any of us. However, I suspected
that a
short period of bilingual education (a year, perhaps), followed by some
sort of assisted learning might be the best approach. This
conflict in my mind only became obvious to me as we started to examine
the controversy, and it never really occurred to me that this was my opinion until the class went
on for a while.
I spent quite a bit of time during the class measuring the arguments
for long-term bilingual education versus other approaches such as
sheltered immersion and short-term transitional bilingual
education. At first the arguments for bilingual education didn't
seem very compelling to me, largely because the initial material we
examined on the subject didn't seem very rigorous, but seemed to be
mostly unsupported assertions. Also, I think I had more than a
little bit of prejudice that people who come to this country should
learn "our" language as quickly as possible.
I think it was mostly the various writings of James Crawford (class textbook) which shifted my thinking a bit. I thought that the evidence he presented was pretty rigorous and fairly balanced on the whole. I especially liked the way he presented the objections of opponents rather than dismissing or ignoring them. Also, if some area of research was a little weak, he had the guts to say that it was a little weak, and I respect that. He also did a really good job of putting bilingual education in an historical context. I guess I like to have a good feel for the history of something before I make a judgment about it.
One of the things in Crawford's material that really struck a chord with me was the figure of "U.S. Foreign-Born Population" on page xi of the textbook. In that data, you could see that the U.S. foreign-born population was around 13 or 14 percent for quite a few decades around the turn of the century, then there was a big dip in the foreign-born population of the U.S. bottoming out around 1960 at about 5 percent. This dip start in 1930 due to the national-origins quota system. Now the immigrant percentage is up around 12 percent again.
This made me think "wow, we aren't having some unprecedented new influx of immigrants. The U.S. is really just returning to normal after this abnormal dip caused by this law back in the 20s." So really, the U.S. is just returning to what made it so great in the first place - having a certain percentage of new immigrants as part of the population, here to pursue the American dream of a better life. This data combined in my mind with a lot of other data: like the stories about the German speaking immigrants having their German schools, and the data about how most immigrant families have throughout our history become assimilated by the third generation - even when they lived in their own communities that maintained their native languages.
I think all of this gave me a new perspective on immigrant families and their traditional place in U.S. society. Although I thought I was fairly open about immigrants (a lot of my friends at my old job at Intel were first generation immigrants), I think this still shifted my thinking a bit.
Another thing that shifted my thinking were the SUP and CUP models presented in the textbook by Jim Cummins. I guess that unconsciously I had been thinking in a SUP model - like first you need to teach immigrant children some basic English, and then they will be ready to learn everything else. Now it clearly makes sense to me that putting English above all other learning just puts immigrant kids behind while they come up to speed. In truth, so much of learning is independent of what language is used (even the basic concepts of sentence construction are largely common) - it only makes sense to keep students up to speed on their studies in their native tongue while they acquire their second language.
Also, I had never really given much thought to the difference between BICS and CALP levels of language proficiency. I hadn't realized before I took this class and saw the data that it can take around 5 years to come fully up to speed at a CALP level of understanding. That's a long time to be going to class handicapped with respect to your fellow students. Little wonder ESL kids have such a difficult time even after they seem to speak the language well. The theories of Stephen Krashen also helped me understand how language acquisition happens, which also helps me to understand the difficulties facing ESL students.
I tried to take some of this knowledge with me when I did my
tutoring. As I tutored my second grade level 2.5 ESL student, I
could see how his CALP level of knowledge was lacking, even though his
conversational English seemed pretty good. Words that other kids
his age would know, he did not - even though he communicated pretty
well with me. I also got the feeling that he was behind his
classmates because of this struggle that he has had to surmount with
the English language.
I might have been able to learn more about ESL students from my
tutoring, except I was dealing with an elementary school student, and I
have no basis of comparison from my own experience. In most
respects, my ESL student just seemed like another kid to me. (I'm
studying to be a secondary school teacher, and I'm very inexperienced
with kids of any age.) Still, I think I did have a chance to see
how a fairly bright and cooperative little boy could fall behind his
peers because of differences in CALP foundation, and this was a pretty
valuable lesson.
I think the main thing I discovered in this class was a new sensitivity for the difficulties faced by ESL students. I also gained an appreciation for how many ESL students there are in California. Certainly, I became more receptive to the idea of supporting bilingual education as much as possible.
There were other discoveries I had during this class that stuck out
in my mind. One thing that I learned was how common ESL students
are
in California. I want to help the kids that I teach, and now I
realized that a pretty hefty percentage of these kids are going to be
ESL. This really gives me an incentive to learn how to help kids
who
face those challenges. In fact, I want to be the teacher at my
school
that gives these kids a chance, and gives them an environment where
they can do their very best. It was pretty sobering to do
research on
local school districts, see how big their ESL populations are, and just
how little support they ESL students get to come up to speed.
I also had a chance to think a lot about the meaning of culture in our society, and to wrestle with the "melting pot" society versus the model of "many cultures in one country." To be honest, I don't think this is a rift that allows an easy repair. So many of our immigrants feel alienated (just look at drop-out rates in third generation immigrant students), and so many Americans are unsympathetic to people who come here and who want to keep some part of their own culture. I didn't learn an easy answer to this dilemma in class this term, but I learned about the problem, and seeing it is the first step to addressing it.
One thing I don't think I learned is a "magic bullet" approach for
teaching my ESL secondary school math students. Still, I have
come up with some approaches that I think will work: I want to
shorten lectures to leave more time for experimenting in class and use
more visual aides (animated slides especially) to reinforce the
words. I also want to encourage more collaboration than I see in
most of the classrooms I observe, so that students can help each other
understand anything they weren't able to pick up from listening to
me. I think these will help ESL students somewhat, but only
experience will tell if that is the case.