Professional Standards for TESOL Practitioners

Professional Standards for TESOL Practitioners

Case StudyNarrative 2

This case studynarrativeis of adescribes the work of a teacher of indigenous students in the Far North of South Australia for whom Standard Australian English is a second n additional language. As a strong advocate for cultural inclusivity, this teacher highly values what her students bring to the learning situation and builds on their experiences and knowledge to scaffold their learning of English.

______

Accomplished TESOL teachers…

• use learners, families, communities and educational setting as resources for classroom activity

• understand how students’ experiences, knowledge and prior learning shape their present learning and development

• select and implement teaching and assessment practices appropriate for the learners and educational setting

• appropriately select and sequence language and culture content to provide for and critique meaning- making in diverse texts and contexts

/ The most important tasks I have when I first work with a group of students is to get to know them individually, and to show that I value them as individuals and that I value their culture. During this time, I identify their strengths and begin to plan activities that work with these strengths. I look for topics and activities they are interested in and that will be useful to them, and build lessons around these. This approach to language learning seems to be quite effective in maintaining students’ interest and engagement and achieving good language outcomes.
A major strength all my students have is excellent auditory and visual memory, which is a product of their oral language background, and this provides a wonderful scaffold for the introduction of written language. First, we focus on learning an interesting story orally, then on reading to recognise the relationships between sound and printed work, and finally on writing their own stories on the interesting topic.
Because we approach texts orally, they naturally remember the texts extremely well and can almost scaffold themselves to written texts through repetitive reading. Their auditory memory helps them to remember the sounds in sequence, and they can then quickly recognise, using visual memory, that a particular sound in a word always looks the same in print. From this starting point, we can move to helping them to recognise language patterns, see meaning in text and the rationale behind the structure of language. In short, I work at scaffolding from oral to written language, and to help students see the patterns in language and the big picture
From a focus on prior knowledge, issues to do with culture come into play immediately. The scaffolding from oral to written English involves providing them with information to make meaning from text. A very good example of this occurs in the story ‘The Little Red Hen’, which the children love, in which the Hen grows wheat grain, mills it into flour and bakes bread from it. For my students, the concept of milled flour is new; I do not think they would even have encountered it on television. It seems just a small conceptual connection, but the explanation of milling and the connection of milled flour to its use in damper, for example, helps them to gain an understanding of a foreign concept. There are many such connections that need to be made for these students in the course of their learning, and if they were not made, student learning would be far less successful.
I believe that helping the students to develop an understanding of the concepts and ideas they are exposed to in text has to be given priority over the actual language used, and although I often do this consciously, I think many times in my teaching I take on this role

• appropriately select and sequence language and culture content to provide for and critique meaning- making in diverse texts and contexts

• appreciate the pivotal role of language and culture in learning, teaching and socialisation

• are familiar with and can critique existing provisions, policies, and curriculum and assessment frameworks

/ unconsciously. So, in a way, my role is to fill in bits of a jigsaw puzzle for them, or build a bridge between their existing knowledge and new concepts. Moving from word recognition and simple patterning, we begin to look at different genres, which will determine the structure of text, the functions of various parts of the text and the ways ideas are developed through text. We will often focus on one genre and look at how different content, ideas and contexts can be expressed through that genre. Because we look at several texts to reinforce student understanding of a single genre, we simultaneously have the opportunity to expand their knowledge and worldview. This can all be done using scaffolding strategies that aid development from oral to written language, and from given to new concepts.
In choosing examples of genres, I believe it is essential to focus on the relationship between purpose and language. A role of the ESL teacher is to identify best examples of language use to suit students’ purposes. I focus on both what my students need to use language for and what they enjoy using language for. While using stories is a very good way to get children interested in language, understanding the structure of a novel might actually be a very low priority for some of them. Certainly, the structure of language emerges from studying the structure of novels, but for some children there are more relevant ways to achieve this: for example, writing a letter of complaint might be both a viable way to teach these children language structure and more relevant to their lives than the language patterns that Paul Jennings uses in his novels. The students see the purpose of such a letter, can identify situations where such a letter might be useful, and can use the genre to develop a voice in their community and a means of social impact. It provides an opportunity to reinforce essential language features such as, for example, logical cohesion in that the students quickly see that information needs to be set out in a manner that aids reader understanding. For these students, writing for particular purposes and having the flexibility to do this well can be means of empowerment. My understanding as their teacher involves knowing what contexts and purposes they might find most relevant.
Another understanding I feel is necessary to bring to this situation is the link between language and behaviour outcomes. Teachers and students need to be aware that politeness behaviours are culturally and context specific, and teachers need to appreciate that these children may communicate in different ways. I will tell students, “If you don’t say ‘please’ to the shopkeeper, the service that you get won’t be quite as good.” These lessons need to be explicit. I am particularly concerned that these students are not disadvantaged because they do not know that certain of their behaviours can be construed as rude in some contexts. I feel it is important that my students are empowered to achieve the outcomes they want when dealing with others.
As for dispositions or ways of being, I think that teachers need to have empathy for these children. I have had students in my classroom here who have had difficulty trusting new teachers until and unless they see evidence that the teacher has empathy and acceptance. Students here work under what we would see as limitations; for example, students may not have a table to do their homework on and these limitations can affect the type of work they produce and the type of progress they make. To me the biggest mistake teachers can make is to expect these students to be just like them, rather than valuing and using what these children bring to their learning situation, such as an active interest in their environment and

• are sensitive to students’ cultural and community experiences, including migration and colonisation, and the effects of these on personal and social development

• espouse the values of cultural inclusivity, multiculturalism, multilingualism, reconciliation and anti-racism

• commit to reflective practice and program evaluation that is responsive to students’ cultural and linguistic history and environment

• know how language and culture function in spoken, written and multimodal texts

/ their ability to spot tiny differences in things. This may create a tension between having good SACE percentages and doing good things for our students, valuing them as individuals and valuing what they bring to their learning, and capturing their interests and talents rather than training them for mainstream outcomes.
So, I think the relationship between a teacher and students is probably the most critical component for a successful learning outcome here. An empathetic and accepting disposition is essential for a teacher in this situation because these students must feel absolutely safe and valued as individuals before they will begin to interact with the school environment. A major focus in my classroom is to foster self-esteem and help students to see that they have something valuable to offer. This is difficult when they go through life aware that they have inherited unfair labels and that some people look at them suspiciously. I think in the long term our goal has to be to help these children to feel good about themselves and to be resilient to these negative messages. Achievement of this goal is actually a life or death issue: four secondary students hanged themselves up here in the last fortnight. It is clear that many of these children can feel absolutely worthless and it is extremely important that we find ways to help re-establish their sense of self-worth.
At the individual level, if a teacher does not get along with a student, the student will be closed to what is being offered to him or her. Also, if a teacher looks on the children as dirty and smelly, or unconsciously flinches when they lean on him or her, they will close down in their learning. Sometimes teachers must consciously stop themselves from doing this so that the students do not get the wrong message about how they are perceived.
When I work with other teachers or with people outside the school, I concentrate on making sure the students are presented in a positive way. I am very explicit about the strengths of the students, and have been known to challenge those who present a deficit model of these students. I consider the advocacy role that I play, where I get people to see the students in a different way and to value the difference, is extremely important to positive student outcomes. Many Australians have never met Aboriginal people and I think it is important to work on changing some perceptions and to help people to develop empathy for Aboriginal people. So, for example, when I hear comments about Aboriginal people and alcohol, I say “Well, I know a lot of old ladies who have never drunk any alcohol in their lives’. I believe that challenging racist comments is very important in order for these students to achieve their best in their lives and for the survival of the whole generation,
Talking with colleagues is extremely important, particularly to get different perspectives on the situations in which we are placed. We all get very frustrated sometimes, and not necessarily because of the students or the situation in the classroom. It is more to do with the larger picture, the circumstances of people’s lives and the constraints on them: historic constraints, health, families, a whole range of things. Because we do not necessarily interpret situations the same way, it is so valuable to be able to look at things from different points of view.
Ultimately, I think that whatever I do in the classroom must be relevant to my students’ lives. I have to convey my own interest in it too and I am fortunate that my students and I share similar interests. Also, I am always open to negotiation with my students and I make that very clear. Finally, all ESL teachers must have an excellent understanding of language and how it works. In fact, I think there should be a lot more training for all teachers to help them to understand how their own language works.