day 3: March 4, 2010
So, I was looking online for some help with ideas for how to teach these high school kids effectively when I came across a paper written by a Masahiko Minami.
The paper was written while Minami was a student at Harvard Graduate School of Education. It is concerning Asian children who were living in America and attending ESL classes in American schools; more specifically the paper discusses the responses of the students to the classes.
Most of the responses are positive, although it was a little bit sobering to see that the negative responses reveal that the learners are very aware of their teacher's short-comings in terms of preparation, passion and knowledge.
Now, this having been said, I have been musing on the fact that this paper is written in a kind of mirror-image world to the one I find myself in. The students that took part in this study were all Asian children living in America. They were the minority group in a foreign land. In my world, I am the minority living in the foreign land. Many of the students record being very happy in the ESL classroom; feeling at home there, as it were, because there were many other limited-English-proficient (LEP) learners in that class. Of course this made it easier for them communicate without the fear of ridicule or judgment.
From the responses recorded in the paper I was able to distill the following two points which seem to be foremost in the minds of the learners that participated in the study:
- A good ESL classroom is a kind of safety zone for them; a place where they can be accepted and acknowledged.
- A good ESL classroom is a place where the cultures of the world are communicated and experienced in such a way that allows a LEP learner to gain a sense of ownership and belonging within them.
It is also worth noting that a key observation made in the paper is that the ESL classroom is a place where the learners "can relax a bit and relieve some of the tension they feel in other classrooms". This is due to the fact that in the ESL classroom students should feel less pressure to perform in the target language and more comfortable communicating.
Most of the negative responses recorded in the paper could be summarized thus:
ESL classrooms lack direction and seem to go nowhere; they are pointless.
This could be due to lack of experience or preparation on behalf of the teacher, or it may be due to a miscommunication of expectations regarding the class. I will not pretend to know what teachers of ESL in America teach in their classrooms but I can imagine that it must be pretty frustrating to sit in a class learning nothing but pointless conversation niceties and frivolous phrases rather anything of value.
Now, the question is this:
If what makes ESL classroom in a foreign country the most popular class is (1)the sense of acceptance and acknowledgment, (2) the interest value of dealing with foreign psychology (culture), and (3) its being a 'low-pressure' environment for students; how can I, operating in the LEP students' home country, recreate the above environment in my classroom?
Perhaps some smaller questions that I should also look at would be:
- How will I balance 'interesting-ness' and (without using a textbook) avoid the sense of this all being 'pointless' in the face of their other subjects?
- How will I create a 'low-pressure' environment when, in other subjects, importance is measured by the associated pressure?
- How will I create a safe environment for my learners when they are not all on equal footing in the other classes that they attend directly before and after mine?
If you guys have any thoughts let me know.
Oh and by the way, you can find the paper I was talking about HERE.
Give it a quick read in your spare time.
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