No Half Measures

English Language Learners (hereafter referred to as ELLs) currently comprise 10% of the total school population in the United States (National Center for Education Statistics, 2005). It is a population that is going to continue to increase in American public education and their specific needs for learning literacy are of great importance to teachers. Since schools and teachers are increasingly judged based upon the academic achievement of students, then the success of the growing population of ELLs is going to be increasingly important. In the present paper the role of the teacher and specific research-based literacy strategies for ELLs is investigated.

In my opinion bilingualism plays a major role in the educational development of children. This is because research has shown that children who are fluent in their home language are more successful in learning a second language. Furthermore, being bilingual offers greater sensitivity to language, more flexibility in thinking and better ear for listening. It also improves a child’s understanding for the native language. Moreover, knowledge of other languages increases a career of opportunities offering several job options.

ELL continue to rise year after year. In EDUC 628, the class delved into the rise of ELL in America and how the best teaching methods to approach each learner with. Every ELL student is unique and has different learning process. Although the semester covered a wide variety of topics ranging from dialects to teaching methods, every module served its purpose in providing a framework for future ELL teachers. Learning about how to teach ELL was significant to me because when I first entered the school system in America, I was placed into ESL and I have gone through the process of many of these teaching methods. EDUC 628 main focus was preparing students whose goal in the future was to educate ELL. The articles and readings assigned in the class provided a funds of knowledge going into each new lesson. Coupled with the readings, hands on activities such as the mini lessons and designing lesson plans provided each student with experience that will reflect on their teaching abilities in the classroom. In my paper, I will be provided a step by step synthesis of what was learned and accomplished every week along with a brief summary of the readings. I will probe deeper into the modules and lessons that piqued my interest the most and that also challenge my mindset.

While some may think that this is not certain studies have proven otherwise. In The Power of a Bilingual Brain, Jeffery Kluger states that, “Research is increasingly showing that the brains of people who know two or more languages….. Multilingual people, studies show, are better at reasoning, at multitasking, at grasping and reconciling conflicting ideas.”(1) Clearly, a bilingual education places students a step ahead not only in their education careers but, as well as in their daily life’s outside school. Jeffery Kluger discusses how a bilingual brain is not necessarily smarter brain, but is a more flexible and practical brain. Evidently, demonstrating to us one of the many benefits of a bilingual

We learned in our text that the development of language is a complicated process that involves phonemes, morphemes, syntactic development among several other factors (Siegler, DeLoache, Eisenberg & Saffran, 2014, p. 218). Proper and effective development of these language skills has been shown to have a critical learning period that enables successful fluency of a language; this period usually occurs between the ages of 5 and puberty (Siegler et al., 2014, p. 220). I believe that this critical period is the backbone of the argument against bilingual education. Proponents of this argument believe that the sooner a child is immersed in the new language, the better off they will be with regards to mechanics and use of that language.

With the immigration population increase comes a language barrier increase. Therefore, English as a Second Language (ESL) tools in the classroom is essential. ESL was established in the 1970s when children of many mother tongues, crowded classrooms due to the immigration increase (Tomkins, G., 1981, p.

Strategies for Teaching ESL Student - ESL Students in the Classroom. (n.d.). Retrieved February 02, 2016, from https://www.eslpartyland.com/teaching-esl-student

“Cognitive functions can be defined as cerebral activities that lead to knowledge, encompass reasoning, memory, attention, and language that leads directly to the attainment of information and, thus, knowledge” (What are cognitive functions). Many students at Doulos are unaware of the benefits of knowing two languages. Ironically students also don’t know that their own brain and its skills are improving because of their second language. Doulos teaches classes throughout the whole day in both English and Spanish. Students are regularly changing between languages and their brain is always active with both languages. “This constant practice strengthens the control mechanisms and changes the associated brain regions” (Marian, Viorica, and Anthony Shook). People who are bilingual are capable of switching between tasks more efficiently. “For example, when bilinguals have to switch from categorizing objects by color (red or green) to categorizing them by shape, they do so more rapidly than monolingual people, reflecting better cognitive control when changing strategies on the fly” (Marian, Viorica, and Anthony Shook). Students’ cognitive and sensory process skills are more developed due to being bilingual (Marian, Viorica, and Anthony Shook). These improvements allow students to better process and understand information in different environments, thus leading to better

Due to the economic recession, some public schools have to reduce the cost of the ESL programs. In order to reduce the cost, Chen reports “some schools and states have created mandatory full inclusion programs, where ESL students are immersed in a regular paced English class, with students who are fluent in English” (¶3). This full inclusion program can have disadvantages and advantages to ESL students and fluent students. If ESL students were in the full inclusion program, then they were “in an atmosphere for learning”, but a lot of parents and educators argued that this program is “ineffective” for both ESL and fluent students. If ESL students were in the class with fluent students, then the teacher had to slow down “the pace of instruction”, which would benefit ESL students but not the fluent students. So, it is important that ESL students are in an ESL program to learn the language, even though it might take years to learn the language. Because learning a language takes time, public schools need a good ESL

An ELL student presents a challenge because they may require extra attention and instruction for basic tasks, therefore taking up important instruction time. Gottfried addresses this as well in his findings. In the study, he finds that teacher training is one of the most important things. However, years of experience have little to no impact on a teacher’s ability to teach ELL students; what did have an impact was extra formal training in English as a Second Language (ESL) courses. The more specialized training in ESL a teacher had, the better achievement and socioemotional skills both ELL and non-ELL students possessed, and this is good news for teachers. There are unlimited resources available out there for teachers to partake in to help bolster their understanding and success in teaching new things and students with different requirements. Gottfried also points out that when policy-makers, teachers, and administrators focus on how to improve classrooms without necessarily focusing primarily on academic achievement, then ELL and non-ELL students alike may have increased skills in many areas, including socioemotional. Therefore, any teacher overwhelmed with the task of teaching any student that requires special needs or attention can find resources and training to help them

Over the years, bilingual education has involved teaching children academics in two different languages so they may become competent learners and be successful at acquiring English. Before 1968, bilingual education was not a required course in American schools, but instead as a voluntary program. This changed in 1981 when a lawsuit was brought against the state of Texas that resulted in the requirement of bilingual education programs in elementary schools as English as a second language (ESL) program, bilingual programs in post-elementary grades through eighth grade, and ESL programs in high school. This type of education has been a hot topic for the state governments of the United States, debating whether to keep in the curriculum of schools. Many asking themselves, why should we to provide bilingual education for these students? What will students gain from this type of education? Studies have shown there are benefits that range from cognitive ability, educational advancement, to employment opportunities with a bilingual education, while the critics label it as a “failed experiment” that costed a whole lot of money and years to maintain a basic foundation in the second language. Although the cost is hefty for this exploration of a new language and is time consuming, the cognitive abilities, educational advancement, and employment opportunities greatly outweigh these opposing factors.

Classes in ESL Services are designed for their students’ needs and the faculty helps them to achieve their English goals. The English Language Program (ELP) has not been fully developed. The class I observed is just beginning to incorporate the needs of non-English speaking students due to the need of ESL students. A teacher assists 4 students.

This study is important as it extremely relevant in the globalized society that we live in today, in addition to the fact that it offers further evidence on the tangible benefits of raising a child to be bilingual that come later in his or her life. Even if the study does not show a clear and convincing correlation between raising a child to be bilingual and higher academic performance in college, I believe that my study will encourage people to think more about the potential benefits of raising a child to be

As discussed previously, bilingual education promotes personal growth, develops social skills early on, and overall can lead to a variety of personality benefits. The first among these personality benefits includes the working memory of a student. When learning a second language, it has been proven through studies that the memory of young students will improve as they learn the language. Studies have also shown that it can increase their ability to process new sounds and students are much less likely to develop personal disorders when they learn a second language. The act of learning a second language not only prevents personal disorders but can boost a child’s self esteem and make them feel much less lonely than children that has only learned one language. Overall, having a student learn a second language does nothing but good for their overall anxiety, anger, and feelings in

Because learning a new language can greatly improve the functions of the brain, bilingualism has also been proven to have a positive effect on the grades of students across the world. A study by the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) showed that students who studied a foreign language did much better academically than others who had not taken a foreign language. The study was taken on the ACT test scores of almost eighteen thousand students applying to college from the years nineteen eighty-one to nineteen eighty-five. The results found that high school students who had studied a foreign language consistently scored higher on the english and math portions of the test than those that had not studied a foreign language (Olsen, 1992). With the addition