My first experience with second language learners occurred while I was student teaching at Baldi Middle School in Philadelphia.  One of the students came from Belarus and spoke no English.  The school had a handful of these students.  To help accommodate these students, the school had 4 aides who spoke Russian (the language of the students).  However, due to the number of students, the aides were not in the classed each day, only 2-3 times a week.  To help accommodate this student, I had her create visuals from the pictures and visuals from the textbook along with the captions.  I wasn’t sure how else to accommodate her, and I certainly didn’t want her just sitting there doing nothing.  One thing I her do as she entered the classroom, as a way to help her learn some English, was to have her say “Hi” to me as she entered.  “Hello, Mr. Whalen,” she would say, very quietly with her head down and a smile.  I would smile back and say, “Hello Bianca.”  I couldn’t continue the conversation because Bianca did not have enough of a command of English to answer.  She did create a beautiful picture book of her drawings and writings (in both English and Russian) as a gift to me when I left.  Her experience as my student has always given me the understanding of what second language learners experience; an inability to speak, and a lack of understanding of content.  My next experience came during my first year of teaching.  I had a student, Richard, in my first year of teaching at Holbrook Junior High School.  He was a seventh grader and also played on the 6^th-7^th grade football team.  I served as one of the coaches and one day I remember asking Richard what happened during a play.  He struggled to answer.  I kept asking him to respond, yet he still struggled.  It wasn’t until later that I learned that English wasn’t his primary language.  His primary language was Navajo.  His struggling to answer represented his inability to quickly translate the English words in his head to Navajo to fully understand the question, then translate an adequate response back to English to share with me.  This offered me a different experience with a second language learner.  Bianca spoke no English.  Richard was fluent in Navajo, his primary language, and partially fluent in English, his secondary language.  But, the time for translation for Richard still took a moment, meaning he could not offer detailed responses immediately.  Since that experience, I’ve always looked for clues from my students about language issues that may not seem to be prevalent but are rather subtle.  These subtle difficulties do impact the student’s education, particularly if the teacher is unaware of them.

I’m curious, what experiences do you have with second language learners?  What commonalities have you seen?  What differences are there?  Have you seen some of these subtle clues?  Thanks, and have a great week!

Hi John,

Thank you for sharing your teaching stories related to English Learners. I love how your student from Belarus used drawings to share her ideas. This is a strategy I used quite a bit in my classroom through my years of teaching elementary and middle school. Pictures and drawings can tell teachers a lot about what students are understanding. Sometimes, if students cannot read or write English, the teacher thinks they are not understanding anything, but I have found that to be false. Through pictures and drawings, students can express their ideas an share what they know about a topic. We can have them build from the drawings too. Start having them label the pictures with the nouns that are in them. Then, give them sentence frames to write a sentence or two about the picture. From there, students can begin structuring paragraphs. Using pictures/drawings to scaffold learning and language acquisition for students is a great strategy!

Another strategy is to use pictures, visuals, and word/phrase/sentence cards to ask ELs questions. Since listening is the first language domain they develop, teachers can ask ELs questions and have them point to the picture that is aligned to the answer. This way, we can know if they are understanding the content and language and are just not able to express it. They can build from here as well. For example, students may point to a picture and say a word or sentence to answer the question eventually. 

I think another important aspect of helping ELs develop language and content knowledge in our classrooms is to engage them in partner and small group discussions often. This helps to lower students' anxiety and helps them to feel comfortable in the learning environment. Also, they get to hear from language models frequently to help with their pronunciation and content learning. 

Katy Long

Hello Katy and thank you for your reply.  The use of pictures and visuals offers a starting point of understanding of content for the ELL student.  It also offers a starting point for the beginning of understanding of language for the ELL student.  In my past experience as a middle school teacher, we did have difficulties that were beyond what you might expect.  Occasionally, we would get a student in the middle school age group that had never attended school before.  This presented an entirely different challenge, as these students who no pre-conceived notions of what was expected in a classroom.   Furthermore, from an educational standpoint, these students were years behind education level of the other students in their classes.  One of the other great difficulties we faced was identifying ELL students with learning disabilities.  It was exceedingly difficult to know whether the language barrier was the cause of a student’s difficulties, or if it was another issue that caused the problems with learning.

In your last paragraph, you discuss the importance of the learning environment.  The learning environment is so very crucial for ELL students, particularly the younger ones.  A study done in 2012 by Hersh Waxman, Hector Rivera, and Robert Powers stated that, “many of the fourth- and fifth-grade students in this study appear to have already ‘given up’ on school and several of the students that we informally talked to indicate that they don’t even plan to finish high school,” (Waxman, Rivera, Powers, 2012).  The effect of the quality of the classroom learning environment is so very critical for these students, putting them in a safe and productive place that encourages learning and builds on positive success.  While there are many factors that influence a child’s motivation to learn, create that positive environment is certainly one of the most crucial. 

The next question is, how does that impact us as professors at the university level?  We would be naïve to think that we do not have any second language learners in our classrooms.  How can we identify these students, and what should we do when we do suspect language may be the problem causing their difficulties?  I will examine these questions in my follow up post.

Thanks for sharing.

John Whalen

Waman, H., Rivera, H., and Powers, R. (2012), English Language Learners’ Educational Resilience and Classroom Learning Environment, Educational Quarterly Research, Vol. 35-4, p. 52-72.

Below are some comments from second language learners about their first experiences in American classrooms:

• Its was very terrible for me because I didn’t have any friends no body to talk to even when I have a question I can’t asked my teach. When I was need to go to the bathroom I couldn’t asked my teacher the permission to go. I was feel so isolated like I shouldn’t come to this country. Some time I even want to sleep school because at my school I wasn’t see no one who’s spoke my language which is french and Haitian Creole.
• My experience that when I get to school I was lost because almost nobody helped me when I needed it most. Finally, one of them offered me his help and could help me. But some of the teachers helped me a lot and for that I will be grateful.
• My first day was very sad on my life. It was boring with not friends or best friends to help you out. I find a friend from Brazil but he do not speak in English like me too but he speaks little and me and him talk about what country we from and how many month we are in USA.
• I arrived at the school that knew nothing of English, but I try harder and understand several things and I speak a little, but I will continue to strive to learn much more. I got a lot of help from my teacher, she is a good teacher helps the students and I got help from her. Another teacher who also helped me in English, to talk a little more and to lose the fear when speaking in English, although it was difficult to understand because I did not know English but in time, I lost the fear when speaking, and I understood.

The age group of these students varies, but the experience is basically the same for them.  They have difficulty understanding even basic directions, and if the course has lectures that require notetaking, the second language learners will definitely struggle.  Second language learners are not covered under ADA, meaning that it is likely that the university is unaware of them.  For nearly all your college students, this is not an issue.  However, it is possible that occasionally you might get a student whose first language is not English, and the student still has not fully mastered English.  There are some behaviors in a ground course that you might observed.  For one, the student may be reluctant to speak in front of the class.  So, an in-class discussion will likely result in no contribution from the student.  Even if you were to call on a student who may be a second language learner, it is likely that the student will not offer an immediate response but instead try and wait out the professor until someone else is called (this is an effective deflection tactic I’ve seen many times).  If they do respond, they might stutter through the words, perhaps mixing up a few, or mispronouncing some words.  One other behavior that you can observe is the student’s eye contact.  If the student does not make eye contact, even when the professor is speaking to the class, it is a sign that language may be an issue.

The online realm is much different.  Yet, there are still opportunities to observe students struggling with language.  Below are two examples of postings from students.  Is it possible their mistakes are related to language difficulties?

Example #1

I am currently a Teachers Assistant. I work in an inclusive envirnment. I am from california. I am truly starting to enjoy the education field. at first it was something that fit around my schedule, though I will say I have always wanted to be a college professor. I definitly think this is preparing for that. I also love being in the classroom. I am very interested in this course and the coursed to come. I am so ready to learn and use the information i gain in this class in my own class one day. have a great 6 weeks

Example #2

Hello everyone

I live in Texas.I am married to <spouse name> and mother of a little boy named <child name> 

am originally from <place name> I decided to continue my education over here,and heard good things about GCU .so finally m in class now,m excited as well as nervous ...heartedly would like to finish my Degree without any trouble

 I love helping everyone hope we will all finish our programs with top grads wish you all good luck and Thanks to our instructor for helping us in our new journey

In Example 1, we do see some basic mistakes.  There are capitalization mistakes and misspellings.  There is one other aspect to note that may indicate a language issue, the student’s reliance on the phrase “I am”, used five times.  Reliance on this phrase may indicate a lack of competent vocabulary to create similar phrasing when responding to a prompt.  In Example 2, we see many mistakes, particularly in grammar.  However, the second to last sentence is a clue to me.  The phrasing seems to be conversational, but even in that tone, there are some mistakes, like going from “everyone” to “hope”.  It is phrasing like this that may indicate that language might be an issue rather than lack of student diligence in editing work.

If you have experiences with situations like this, in both ground and online courses, do mind sharing them?  Thanks all and have a great Lope Week!

Our English language learners comprise only a small population of our students.  Yet, meeting the needs of this group students is necessary for their academic success.  So, what steps can we take in our classes, both ground and online, to ensure our students succeed?  There are several steps professors can take:

• Preparation- This is something all educators do, plan for their lesson.  For ground courses, preparation includes developing lesson objectives and in-class activities that include direct and indirect instruction.  If the lesson does have an amount of lecture, the professor may need to plan supplemental materials for the ELL student, information that might aid the student in understanding the material being discussed by the professor.  The same may be necessary for planned, in-class activities.  By providing supplemental materials, the professor has aided the ELL student in understanding the object of the lesson.  For our online classrooms, providing materials in different formats can help the student.  Although some translation programs are struggle with exact wording from language to language, they have improved the last few years and do offer an opportunity to share communication that might be more meaningful to the student.
• Comprehensible Input- Varying the way you offer instruction during your lesson has a clear benefit for ELL students.  By using other methods of sharing information, students gain an ability learn by using their other senses.  While this is effective for your ELL students, it is also helpful to those students who have different learning styles.  Using videos and other multimedia methods assists your visual learners in the comprehension of a topic.  For online classes, using videos can be very helpful.  I include them in many of my online classes (through YouTube).
• Assessments- Feedback is essential for all growth, and this certainly includes all forms of assessment in the classroom.  Formal assessments offer data on student knowledge gained during the period between formal assessments.  However, for ELL students, use of informal assessments is vital to their growth.  For ground courses, use of checks for understanding can be quite effective.  There use, though, needs to focus on all student learning, not just some questions and responses from a few students.  Doing an activity like four-corners, where a question is asked, and students move to one corner to represent their response, is a good method of informal assessment that does offer feedback to both the students and the professor.  In the online setting, professors can make use of CAT’s (Classroom Assessment Technique), which offer the professor a snapshot into student learning, even though it’s in a virtual environment.

 By using these techniques, professors are taking steps to try and connect their content to the student who may be trying to learn at a collegiate level but doing so through a second language.  For some students, this may not present a difficult challenge.  Yet, for others, it may present an insurmountable challenge.  But, by taking these steps, we are giving these students a chance to learn and thrive in their future endeavors.

Hello fellow Lopes and Happy Wednesday to all,

The differences between the second language learners in public school versus second language learners who enter college is vast, perhaps as vast as the Grand Canyon itself.My experience includes teaching several students over many years (dating back to my student teaching) who spoke no English at all.That’s not an issue a college professor will have.Students who apply for colleges do have some command of English.It’s a must.So, why is this a discussion topic on our faculty discussion forum?

Quite simply, as I’ve tried to point out in previous posts, just because a student is enrolled and seems to grasp English does not mean they would not be classified as a second language learner if they were enrolled in public schools.The nuances of these higher-level second language learners are subtle, but noticeable.

One of the courses I teach is ESL-523.This course introduces students to the teaching of second language learners, a topic that many of our graduate students who are actually teachers have no experience.One of my points of emphasis is the use of instructional strategies (SEI Strategies) to help accommodate those students.These are strategies that enhance the quality of instruction students receive by using a strategy that requires the student to interact with the content in a way that connects to a student’s learning style.For example, use of multimedia would enhance the quality of instruction for the visual learner, while the kinesthetic learner benefits from doing a role-playing activity.There are many other ways to connect content to learning styles, but the clear benefit is using multiple strategies in an attempt to connect to learner to the content in a meaningful and memorable way.When focused on this in class, I provide students with the document I’ve attached below that details 28 different SEI strategies.This document is edited from an online version published by the Washoe County School District.Their version contains upwards of 50.I’ve included it here in case you can make use of it, or you know others who might.

Thanks to all who’ve read my posts and best wishes to all!

Dr. John Whalen

Hi John,

Your post is timely as I have been pondering on how to better assist my ESL learners. I am a full-time psychology professor and teach undergraduate and doctoral-level psychology courses. My experience, from observation, is that many ESL students appear to understand the course content, however, when they express it in a writing assignment, the errors in their writing can make it very difficult to interpret the meaning and unfortunately nearly impossible to give them a good grade on the paper. I have requested that they consider downloading Grammarly onto their computer and to visit the writing lab to have their paper reviewed, errors explained and grammar edited. I have also offered to meet with them to review their work, however I haven't had much response. Common, more simple errors are absence of articles or errors in tense. 

As I have not been teaching ESL learners, I hope you and others with experience can suggest strategies I can employ to assist my learners in strengthening their writing. I want them to do well in my courses and I know poor grades on assignments can be deflating for them. I also believe that if they want to be successful in academics or business, they must have strong writing skills; I want to help them achieve this but am not really quite sure how. Please advise :) 

Thanks in advance, 

Julie Nelson