Musings on ESL and on the ELLs it Exists to Benefit

Over many decades, in the history of both bilingual education and ESL, there have sometimes been  very bad tradeoffs: good things that went bad, and bad things replaced by different bad things, with unintended consequences for students.

Some examples: 

1. Zero pressure to use the English the students are being taught, i.e., underestimating their motivation, ability, and strength: 

 The deplorable practice of punishing children for speaking Spanish (in the bad old days) been replaced by a great reluctance to ever say, “All right, this is English time now. Use your English! Stretch your English! You can do it!!” Sometimes it's actual reluctance; sometimes it's just not on the teacher's radar. But the end result is a reinforcing of students' very natural human tendency to prefer less effort to more effort.

2. Overprotective language policies:

By the same token, some policies intended to help students have had the effect of ensuring that many ELLs are NEVER in a situation wherein they need to delve into the very bottom of their cup of English in order to communicate with a teacher—with whom, ideally, they want and need to communicate. To illustrate: I taught bilingual language arts and ESL to a girl who had completed 4th grade in Mexico, but had been placed in 4th grade again in her Texas school due to not knowing English. The child proved to be quick and motivated, but her English progress was slow because she was never in a situation in which she really needed to use it. Her other teachers and I wanted to move her into a higher math class, with a non-Spanish-speaking teacher. We were not allowed to, because, "according to district policy, as an ELL she must always be with a teacher who is bilingually endorsed." Thus, the child was effectively protected from the "stress" -- and the joy! -- of practicing and stretching the English she was learning, in situations where she couldn't fall back on Spanish.

3. Correction-phobia:  

A reaction against punitive, discouraging, constant corrections has led to its opposite: an attitude of “anything goes,” “They’ll learn to self-correct eventually, “Don’t break their spirit with corrections,” “Grammar instruction is boring, difficult, and counter-productive,” and so on. But our students depend on us for something more than just survival English, and no, they won’t always learn things just because they hear us modeling correct English.

I have a relative who immigrated here at the age of nine. Yes, he became fluent in English, but now -- a college graduate in his late twenties -- he never learned to hear, and thereby to correctly and consistently pronounce, the English /v/ sound. Had he been taught and corrected, clearly and intentionally, in childhood, it would have become second nature long before middle school.

Another example: A sixteen year old student of my acquaintance (He was not my student) habitually said such things as "Did you saw it?" and "He didn't came." I corrected him and explained it this way: "DID and DIDN'T are past helping verbs. SAW and CAME are also past, past main verbs. You can't have both a past helping verb and a past main verb together." He thanked me. He understood. He began to self-correct. But no one had ever corrected him, in or out of ESL class, though he had been in the U.S. since about the age of eight. 

Some conclusions:

In earliest childhood, it is true that children "acquire" rather than "learn" English (See Stephen Krashen's theories), i.e., pick up their second language much as they did their first: through meaningful communication, unconsciously, without "teaching." However, in late childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, conscious learning is a shortcut. Intentional teaching to promote conscious learning takes advantage of the older student's greater cognitive development and can (a) substitute for the thousands of repetitions necessary for the unconscious acquiring of a skill, structure, or morpheme and (b) aid the acquisition process by alerting the student to the existence of something never before noticed, such as the /v/ phoneme, to give one example. This I know, both through teaching experience and through my own language-learning experience.

We need to give students as many tools as possible for both learning and acquiring English. To do otherwise is to shortchange and underestimate them.