thoughts on teaching English language learners

My dear friend from high school, CP aka XE (long story) posted on her blog about teaching English language learners for the first time (typically enough, they just tossed a section of them into her schedule without any additional training, it appears, which is just infuriating, but as I said, typical). CP teaches writing and here is the incredibly long comment that I posted on her blog... only marginally less appropriate as a comment on someone else's blog, than as an inordinately long post on my own.

there are some great books about teaching English language learners--I really recommend reading some. There's a lot that I wouldn't have thought of on my own. All the books I know are about teaching younger kids, but I'm sure there are some for teaching adults.

Here's one I like a lot:

Working with Second Language Learners: Answers to Teachers' Top Ten Questions
by Stephen Cary

I'm not sure how this translates into a writing classroom, but the big things I try to remember are (1) everything you really really need students to know, should be conveyed in multiple ways--if you just say it, many will miss it. For adults, that probably means you should write it down & hand it out so they can read it later with the dictionary.
(2) *Experiences* sink in deeper, and cross cultures better, than words & explanations. Everything that you can bring into the classroom as an experience will create a richer learning environment that is more accessible to students from every culture. Again I'm not sure how this translates to a writing class, but for social studies, I do things like having them create a giant 3-D map in the classroom of a region we're studying (pile up chairs to make mountains, use snaking rolled-up blue sheets to make rivers and seas).

I think one thing you'll face that I faced in middle school is that I can say "be more descriptive" until I'm blue in the face, but a lot of the kids just don't know that many words. When I ask them to describe how something tastes, they say, "I dunno, good!" "Well, how good? Sweet, sour, tangy, salty?" They look a little panicked and say, "just GOOD, I dunno!!!" So I brought in some stuff to help them expand their vocabulary: I brought in colored pencils with cool color names (a box of 96 crayola crayons would have been better, but I was short on time), and I raided my wife's spice rack (she was not very pleased with that) so I could give them oregano, thyme, sage, basil and say, "these are herbs, these are herby smells," and cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and pepper and say, "these are spicy smells."

Probably one of the biggest things to be aware of--and you'll have to decide how you handle it--is that in many non-European cultures, "how you tell a story" is totally different from what we think it is. "beginning, middle, end" and concepts like climax and denouement (sp?) are very European, and in the US, white. There was a fascinating study done, where African- and European-American first-graders were asked to tell a story, it was transcribed, then read back onto a tape with a standard English grammar and accent, removing all clues to ethnicity etc. Then the tapes were played to European- and African-American first-grade teachers who were asked to comment on the stories. The Black teachers all said the Black children's stories were "interesting, engaging, varied, creative" etc., but the white teachers said the same stories were "rambling, confused, inconsistent, lacking in structure," and one teacher suggested that the child in question "might have cognitive disabilities and should be tested for special ed." Analysis of the stories showed that white kids' stories tended to have a beginning, middle, and end, whereas the African-American kids tended to tell "episodic" stories, about a series of events related to a theme or person.

This is related to the fact that "how you make a point" is also very different in different cultures. In many places, you make a point by analogies: you DON"T "tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, tell 'em, then tell 'em what you told 'em," which is how I was taught to write an essay.

Instead, you tell a series of (sometimes apparently unconnected) stories, then right at the end you explain what can be concluded from them. It's very cool to listen to this kind of narrative, because for someone trained in the European point-making tradition, you may be thinking, "what the heck is this guy talking about, he's just rambling on and on about one thing and another..." but then all of a sudden, he pulls out the connective strand from each of the five stories and ties it into a bow and you're like, "whoa, how'd he do that???"

My introduction to this came when a political group I work with was hosting a South African speaker (first language = !Xhosa, but fluent in English) and I was the moderator for his three presentations. I sat there at first, wondering if I should cut him off because he was "just rambling," or "not addressing the question he was asked, not even talking about the same subject," but I didn't, out of respect for everything he'd been through. Once I got the hang of how his "point-making" worked, I was just in awe of it and loved trying to see how it was structured.

To go back to the question of "description," and the spices and so on, I haven't heard others' opinions on this, but it also struck me (on the basis of a very small and unrepresentative sample) that the African-American kids really wanted to "describe" not with adjectives but with analogies. In one case, "what does it taste like?" was answered with, "like x, like y, a little like z." When I tried to force the child to come up with adjectives, she just boggled & panicked. But the classroom I was in demanded adjectives, so we were at a stalemate, where anything this little girl wanted to say about flavor was going to be "wrong."

It was from experiences like this that I concluded that the traditional, Euro-cultured classroom actively dis-ables students from other cultures. When teachers repeatedly and consistently ask students to do things differently from what feels natural to them, without explanation (because it's obvious to the teacher) but only repeated correction, it must completely destroy the students' confidence in their own ability to assess and improve on their language skills. I often noticed that students from non-dominant cultures became much more oriented toward "what does teacher want me to say" and lost track of actually wanting to say anything themselves.

Well, I'm wandering off track here :-), but my point is, when teaching English-language writing, there are multiple possible goals. One might be, to have the student develop the ability to write something that will sound "smart" and "right" to the average Euro-trained person; to do this, it's important to understand ***and place in context*** what those requirements are--they aren't "correct," they're just one way of doing things, but because Euro-Americans are used to being the dominant culture, they're not aware that there ARE other ways. It's definitely extremely valuable to be able to "sound smart" to a dumb American who may be in charge of giving you a job, diploma, etc.

Another goal might simply be to help the student develop his/her confidence and imagination in writing, and just help with the skills that will make that writing decode-able to the average English speaker.

I don't think these need to be two separate things. In fact, this whole experience could be an incredible learning opportunity for the students in your non-ELL section. ("ELL" is the preferred term these days, because many English Language Learners are learning their third, fifth, or fourteenth--not Second--language). You could talk about all this--different structures for stories in different cultures--and ask each student to analyze the structure of a story they heard as a child that they believe is a "folk" story or a common story for children in their culture. It's often a whole new experience for a white, middle- or upper-class person to analyze something they take for granted as "normal." How *does* "Cinderella" work, in terms of narrative shape and format? Then the class could share those analyses (maybe in groups of three?) and try to see how each other's stories "work."

That's a perfect experience-based jumping-off point for ANYTHING you want to do later.*

I got that idea from reading about a teacher who had students analyze their home versions of English. Instead of saying "my English is right and yours is wrong," the teacher had them make tapes of their family members speaking English, and then analyze the tapes to see interesting patterns of grammar, pronunciation, etc. When they started to approach this as a difference, instead of an issue of being "ignorant" or "educated," they became excited and fascinated. Then, after that, they were not resistant to learning dominant-culture grammar, because (a) they had the experience of understanding how their own family's grammar worked, so they had direct access to an understanding of grammar itself--it's not just "rules to torture you," it's a description of what living language DOES. and (b) it wasn't presented as "correcting" ignorance (not only on the part of the student, but of every person the student loved best in the world), but instead, as "this is the way to be understood by the largest possible audience."

OK, well, I've rambled on long enough, but hopefully some of that will be useful. I can give you more stuff to read, that talks about having students do these kinds of experiments, or talks about how the denigration of alternate forms of English makes it much harder for students to learn "standard" English, etc. There's so much out there to read! But I bet you have one or two other things to do with your time, so I'm also happy to summarize more. Sorry if you already knew some of this--it's been a great thing for me to collect these musings and write them down, and has actually helped me recover some of my enthusiasm about teaching that had been a little bit beaten out of me this past semester.

Good luck! Wish I could sit in on your class--I bet it's awesome to see you at work! And boy, am I envious of all those different folks you get to know. I am getting really sick of Madison being so white, white, white.

At 12:11 PM, birdfarm said...

as if I haven't rambled enough, I was just re-reading what I wrote and came back to the suggestion about having them analyze a story for structure. What I meant there, in case it wasn't obvious, was that they could generate their own ideas for what the parts of a story are, and how they work, and then when you taught them the "official" terms (like climax and denouement), they already have the *concept* for it in place. And for those whose stories have a different structure, they can come up with their own names for the parts of their stories, and then once that is clear, it will be so much easier for them to see how the "standard" U.S./European story structure is different from what they consider "normal," and how to use this structure instead or in combination with what they are familiar with.

this also comes out of watching my supervising teacher do a particularly horrendous job of explaining "climax" and "first person," and watching the kids try to struggle to use these terms that were not even remotely clear to them. It's better if they have the concept first and then learn the term to put on it.