10 Things Every School Leader Should Know About ESL

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10 Things Every School Leader Should Know About ESL

By Brian Crosson

ESL is arguably the most demanding and challenging instructional area in the United States today. Nearly every problem an English language learner (ELL) faces is magnified by limitations to the student’s ability to consume and produce high-quality English. Every hurdle is a little higher; every finish line is a little farther away. ESL places additional demands on time, resources, and personnel, and involvement from families is often more difficult to obtain.

It is important that school leaders have a clear understanding of the challenges that ELLs face in and out of school, as well as the challenges that ESL teachers and specialists face when designing, implementing, and assessing curriculum. Following are 10 things that every school leader should know about ESL students and instruction, organized by the three core areas of the NASSP Breaking Ranks Framework: personalization; collaborative leadership; and curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

Personalization

General claims about the challenges that students in ESL classes and their teachers face are great for making general reforms and adjustments (and for writing articles on the subject), but the needs and circumstances of your individual students should drive your school’s policies. Moreover, establishing strong personal relationships with your ELLs will build trust, inform key decisions about their academic careers, and assist with discipline. Here are a few steps you can take to ensure that you know your students.

1. A little knowledge about your students’ lives can go a long way. Find out when your students arrived in the United States, what countries they came from, and how much schooling they have had. If possible, determine each student’s level of literacy in his or her native language: higher levels of literacy in a native language contribute directly to greater success in English. Learn about each student’s home circumstances. Is there a parent waiting at home? A grandparent? A sibling, perhaps one whom the student has to care for? Does the student have to work a job after school? How does the student spend his or her time at home? The answers to these questions can really make a difference when addressing the problems a student might be having in school.

2. Some ELLs deeply resent living in the United States. This may sound jarring, but it is true. In turn, some ELLs actually resist learning English because they view it as an affront to their personal identity. Keep in mind that the students likely had little input in the decision to leave home. They left behind friends, family, and familiarity in exchange for opportunities that they may not value or that they may find abstract. In some cases, children are coming to the United States to live with family members (even parents) whom they have not seen for years. If you put yourself in their shoes, it is easy to see why they might feel anger, resentment, and confusion. However, such resentment is likely not insurmountable. ELLs will usually come to terms with their new circumstances; you can help them do that by being patient and understanding, but also by setting and enforcing reasonable, attainable expectations.

3. Personality influences growth. Some ELLs, regardless of English proficiency level or educational background, feel an urge to weave themselves into the social fabric of their schools. This is a major advantage in English acquisition because it provides added incentive and motivation to learn as well as a broader array of learning opportunities.

Conversely, even students with talent for language acquisition and strong educational backgrounds can severely stunt their English development by failing to take risks. Fear of failure and embarrassment can be debilitating. To those students, learning becomes frightening, and isolation seems safest. If you get the sense that a student is persistently isolating or withdrawing him- or herself for fear of using English, you must get involved immediately. In the case of a student for whom fear has become an obstacle to learning, some personalized attention from a teacher or administrator can help. The observation that fear or anxiety might be holding the student back, when coming from an outside observer, might help the student come to terms with his or her fear and how it is disrupting learning.

It is important to bear in mind that a student’s reluctance to speak does not necessarily indicate withdrawal or even a shy personality. It is quite natural for a student to go through a silent period after first arriving. Problems arise when the tendency to remain silent persists even when the student has the ability to meet the linguistic demands of a particular situation. For example, if a student has been in the United States for a year or more and still refuses to ask even the most basic questions in English, the student may be held back by a fear of taking risks.

4. Construct a plan of action for each ESL student. Using your knowledge of your students’ backgrounds and personalities, consider designing an individual plan for each student. The degree of formalization of such plans may vary, but an established plan will give a student concrete steps to take toward success. Additionally, it gives you the opportunity to establish very clear expectations for members of this vulnerable group.

Such a plan might include a test-taking strategies and study tips, plans for enhancing the student’s English inside and outside of school, strategies for staying out of trouble, and tips for attaining and maintaining good grades. Such a plan should include explicit reading goals that acknowledge the student’s interest and ability level (using some independent metric such as a Lexile level). Additionally, such a plan might be rolled in with a graduation plan, postgraduation transition plans, and test-taking accommodations. Such a plan might also take into account a student’s personal strengths and weaknesses. If a student is not a risk taker and shows signs of falling behind because of anxiety, including steps specifically designed to help the student cope will be worthwhile. Guide the student towards activities that he or she is not afraid to do, then encourage him or her to branch out from there. Follow-up is important here. It is far too easy to overlook the student who wants to be overlooked; an explicit course of action makes it much harder to make excuses.

Collaboration

A significant error that schools sometimes make is to treat ESL instruction as an add-on that can be handled only by an ESL teacher or specialist. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, a collaborative effort is needed on the part of all staff members, teachers, and administrators to see to it that ELLs and ESL instruction are fully integrated components of the school culture and curriculum.

5. ESL is a schoolwide adaptation, not an additional department. It stands to reason that if the ELL population were to disappear, the need for faculty members dedicated solely to ESL instruction would as well. Conversely, if the ELL population were to grow, it is likely that a school’s ESL staffing would grow too. However, it would be an error to assume that this is the only way a school needs to adapt in response to changes in the ELL population; ESL teachers are an adaptation, but not the only adaptation. The entire system has to adapt, particularly the teachers, administrators, and whoever coordinates course offerings and the master schedule. If your staff believes that the only thing that needs to change in response to an increase in the ELL population is the number of ESL staff members, you may need to consider taking some steps to change your school’s culture in this area. It is simply unrealistic to expect ESL teachers to achieve—in isolation—the outcomes that ELLs, the curriculum, and the community demand. Additionally, isolating ELLs with their ESL teachers limits the formation of a broader array of relationships with English-speaking adults.

6. All collaborative or coteaching relationships should be clearly defined ahead of time. Collaborative or coteaching relationships can easily become singular sources of frustration. They are of great concern for ESL teachers (as well as special education teachers) because ESL teachers so frequently find themselves in collaborative relationships with content-area teachers. Problems tend to arise as a result of poor communication between the two participants. As a result, ESL teachers are frequently relegated to the status of classroom aide, expected to “put out fires” for ELLs as the content-area teachers present content geared toward a mainstream audience. The ESL teachers may have little or no role in content planning, delivery, or assessment, although the class is ostensibly cotaught to accommodate ELLs.

It goes without saying that every collaborative relationship will be different and that there is no one arrangement that will fit every relationship well. (A relationship like the one described previously will certainly fit some circumstances.) An important step in forming any collaborative relationship is to establish clear expectations well before teaching begins. Teachers should carefully consider all elements of lesson preparation, delivery, and assessment when determining how to distribute or share responsibilities. All expectations and agreements should be clearly tied to achieving the best possible outcomes for students, not to finding the most comfortable arrangements for the teachers involved.

An ESL teacher pushing in or coteaching should not be presumed to be an aide. Although he or she does not necessarily need to lead on the bulk of instruction, he or she should be intimately involved in planning, assessment, and modification of curriculum and materials to best meet the needs of ELLs.

Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment

As with all other subject areas, there are certain elements of ESL instruction that will be more or less universal. However, the ESL curriculum and assessment policies of any particular school should adapt and adjust based on the needs of its own ESL community. (This is one area in which knowing the students and their families can come in very handy.) To better adapt, there are a few things you can consider.

7. All teachers must view improvement in all language domains for all students as the responsibility of all teachers. As such, all teachers should be trained in techniques suited for teaching ELLs, as well as in ways to modify curriculum and delivery (in terms of adaptation of language) to make content more accessible to ELLs. This does not need to be an elaborate, expensive staff development program; rather, training in a handful of dependable, straightforward techniques would probably yield the most bang for the buck. It is also very important for content-area teachers to tie specific language and vocabulary goals to content goals at all times. Doing so almost always means more work for content-area teachers, but it is a worthwhile investment, especially if a school does not have enough ESL personnel to coteach in mainstream classrooms.

8. Assessment of ELLs is a balancing act. Because of standardized testing and an understandable concern about fairness within a classroom, students of disparate abilities are regularly assessed using identical mechanisms. But how do you assess an English-speaking student and an ELL using the same assessment?

Moreover, given that the purpose of testing (at least in part) is to determine the how successful the student and teacher have been, how exactly do you define success for a community of students who are starting at such a linguistic disadvantage? Has an ELL necessarily failed if he or she cannot pass a class or a standardized exam? How are those measurements related to an ELL’s improvement in the areas of production and consumption of English?

It is self-evident that academic success simply cannot be defined in identical ways for all students, even if the distribution of credits and diplomas is based on uniformity; teachers and curriculum designers have to know how to meet students where they are. This is not a new idea; it is the foundation of differentiation of instruction and assessment for all students, mainstream and ELL alike.

Although modification of standardized tests may only be possible through testing accommodations, teachers should take steps to provide more reasonable assessment mechanisms for their less experienced English learners. In conjunction with modified instructional materials, modified assessments should account for high-level vocabulary and expressions, advanced sentence structure, and ambiguous or overly complicated instructions. The watchword is clarity.

In all cases, the primary goal should be to assess students on the basis of reasonable, attainable goals. For ELLs, carefully considered linguistic goals must be tied to realistic content goals.

9. There is a world of difference between a student who does not speak English and a student who is illiterate in his or her native language. Worse still is that illiteracy sometimes goes undiagnosed because assumptions about a student’s unwillingness to function in English are explained away by inexperience or because the student manages to acquire some spoken social English. Although this may be a rare problem, your school should have a plan to address it; it is highly unlikely that an illiterate student will gain much of anything by exclusively following the same curriculum as other ESL students. Be prepared to offer some regimen of one-on-one remedial literacy instruction in the student’s native language. This will help pave the way for growth in English that otherwise will almost certainly never happen.

This concept extends to all students for whom English is a new language. The stronger a student’s foundation in his or her native language, the more efficient the student will be as an English learner.

10. For ELLs, being a “lifelong learner” will mean something different. All ELLs must understand that a second language is a skill that can be significantly diminished through disuse. As such, teaching them strategies to guide their own learning is particularly important. They must recognize the importance of exposing themselves to English in natural settings. Students who tend to function primarily in their native language outside of school are at a disadvantage when compared to ELLs who use English. This includes ordinary activities, such as watching television, listening to music, reading newspapers, or conversing with people they meet in public. Students will also have to consider how frequently they are using English on social networking sites, in texts, and by e-mail, pastimes that occupy a considerable amount of the time and attention of young people. The degree to which an ELL is willing to engage in pleasure reading in English is a very important variable as well.

This is especially true for ELLs who start their school careers in the United States in high school because they are rarely able to master academic English by graduation. ELLs who start their school careers earlier are at a natural advantage; they have more time to adapt to a new language and set of circumstances before facing the rigors of high school. When evaluating the quality of your ESL curriculum and the performance of your ESL department, consider how well the program contributes to students’ ability to guide their own learning outside of school.

Conclusion

The fact that ESL presents greater hurdles for students, teachers, and administrators is exactly that: a fact, immutable and unyielding. The question is to what degree your school must adapt. There are countless approaches, and the list in this article should not be taken to be exhaustive. That, in a sense, is exactly the problem: there exists no list of ESL-related solutions that addresses every concern. This list could have contained 100 items, and even if you could implement every one, you would still find yourself feeling as though you were not doing enough for your ESL population. That is because performing academically in an unfamiliar language is very, very difficult. It always will be. The surprising thing is not that ESL students struggle; it is that so many succeed despite how difficult their task is. In some instances, the transformation from lost, transplanted student to successful, confident graduate is nothing short of miraculous. This is a great credit to their teachers, administrators, parents, and the students themselves. With proper preparation, more miracles will follow.

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Brian Crosson () is an ESL teacher at Manassas Park (VA) High School.

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