Responding to the needs of EAL students

1. Responding to the needs of EAL students BCTESOL, October 21, 2016 Hetty Roessingh, PhD

2. Overview: • High school ELLs: Who are they? • Some achievement outcomes and indicators of their learning needs • Challenges in the ELA program: vocabulary, cultural information, metaphor • Teaching ideas • Programming options: Sheltered, adjunct classes and iEAP

3. Our ELL students: ... are diverse in their learner profiles and needs. They include: • Canadian born children of immigrants (Gen. 1.5). • Students who are more recent arrivals • Refugee arrivals • International students Each have different learning needs in the context of the English Language Arts program. Many of these students are not recognized by

4. Canada’s immigration strategy: Canada recruits, selects and welcomes ‘the brightest and best’ to fulfil its human resource needs for a vibrant, competitive, innovative, complex economy. By and large, their children are expected to do well at school and most expect their children to attend university. They generally register in business,engineering and Sciences.

5. All are required to pass a Grade 12 ELA course to graduate HS Some findings from recent research (Alberta): • EAL’s are over-represented in the academic track course leading to university entrance • They score less well than their grade counterparts on Gr. 12 ELA exams. • More ELLs, regardless of LOR, fail the diploma exam than non ELLs. • They outperform their grade counter parts in math but this is not a strong predictor of future academic success.

6. Examiner’s report for ELA 30-1

7. How about BC? 60% of the final mark is based on the school mark and 40% is based on the exam mark.

8. How about BC? NOTE: Teachers’ marks of either an A (27%) or a B (36%) together comprise 63% of the marks. In contrast, on the exam, only 11% received an A, and 26% scored a B (total of 37%). This represents a significant discrepancy ... How to explain? (Alberta shows the same type of pattern). The final mark is a 50/50 split.

9. Challenges for ELLs: • Vocabulary knowledge • Reading at the inferential level • ‘Unpacking’ and understanding metaphoric references: these are often culturally constrained • Cultural references (e.g. The Game of our Lives → hockey) • Other types of literary devices and suppositions, again, culturally constrained.

10. Culture ... The everyday taken for granted ways of being, knowing and indwelling in a complex society. Cultural ‘insiders; (i.e. members of the dominant culture), have privileged access to this information from transmission from their parents and support from same-class networks of family, and friends. These leaves many ‘outsiders’ lacking access to this information even if they were born in Canada and have been schooled entirely here.

11. Visible vs invisible culture (Hanley: 1999) • Visible: • Invisible: Hanley notes that ‘the vital ingredient in cultural competence is experience …. Unmediated experience with the cultures of the individuals …. Touch it, try it, make mistakes … and try again.’ Do you think you can learn ‘deep culture’ in this way? Explain … use a personal anecdote that you can share with your partner.

12. Mediating culture ... Delpitt (1988) makes an impassioned plea for teachers to be good cultural ambassadors and to make the ‘invisible’ culture accessible and knowable to students who need this. This requires critical awareness by teachers of what the ‘taken for granted’ is all about ... What can teachers do themselves to become more aware/sensitive to cultural information and cultural differences?

13. Universalities Brown (1991) catalogued human universals. Shakespeare also understood this idea, and embedded these in contexts that transcend time and space and culture. ... ‘young/forbidden love’: ... the story of ‘ambition’: ... the story of ‘revenge’:

14. Key events in the story of R&J: • They are young. • They come from families that don’t get along. • They meet by chance (fate/destiny). • They are instantly smitten by each other. • They meet secretly. • They plan to run away. • They think they can return. • The story has a tragic ending ....

15. This could have been the story of Amandeep Atwal and Todd McIsaac ... or any number of ‘forbidden young love stories’ that have a tragic ending.

16. Ideas for teaching: • Provide a more contemporary context that students will recognize: universality vs particularity. • Create an artefact box of concrete objects relevant to the universal/them and build background knowledge. • Pre-teach vocabulary, metaphors and cultural information • YAY! For Barron’s book notes • Work with the film version • Ask students to bring a culturally relevant/similar story. Teachers need to become culturally sensitive/aware/open about culture clash/mismatch ... responding to and having ‘difficult conversations’ on touchy topics. This does not mean to avoid them!!! • In my own experience, I was often asking, ‘Why are you still single?’ ‘Why don’t you live with your parents?’

17. More teaching ideas: Nature imagery project

18. Check up: Shared cultural knowlege

19. Metaphors and other literary devices • Metaphors/idioms are hard to ‘get’. What do these mean: • ‘fair is foul and foul is fair’? (She’s two faced??) These cannot be learned from looking up the words in the dictionary, for example. This needs to be taught directly to students.

20. Cartoons Use these to glean insights into cultural differences.

21. Most non ESL academic students don’t need this support • Consider organizing an adjunct course for supporting ELL learners. This would be taught by an ESL specialist and taught as an ‘add on’ course for credit. OR A sheltered class for ELL students, where numbers warrant, taught by the English Dep’t. Keep the class size small-ish, and make sure the instructor wants to do this work and has thought it through.

22. Adjunct classes • ELLs are scheduled for a block of time with an ESL specialist who works collaboratively with the English instructor, and provides support for learning academic skills, strategies and content information. • Again, dependent on expertise, time, a critical mass of students. • Can be highly effective in bringing students ‘up to speed’.

23. Sheltered classes • Made up of only ELLs. • Decide on the core content, curriculum requirements and focus on those. More depth and less breadth in curriculum ‘coverage’ will be useful (i.e. one novel study such as To Kill a Mockingbird in Grade 10). • Taught by Eng. dep’t. • By Grade 11, students should be fully integrated with their grade counterparts in an ELA class.

24. The challenge ... • Young arrivals and CBCs often do NOT perceive of themselves as EAL/ESL learners anymore, and neither does ‘the school system’. Most have long been ‘decoded’ or ‘reclassified’: they ‘sound good’, have exceeded their time and funding, and if anything have been ‘re-coded’ as LD, slow or non-academic track learners. • We face many hurdles in convincing them to dedicate more time to working on their English language proficiency and academic skills.

25. Something to think about ... English Language Arts is a content based course, and is culturally ‘loaded’ against certain learners. This is not likely to change anytime soon. A better predictor of future academic success is students’ vocabulary knowledge and academic writing on an expository prompt. iEAP is a curriculum we created to address the transitional needs to university.

26. Academic demands at university

27. The demands of university • Academic writing: essays, reports, summaries, analyses, critiques • Lectures/note taking, formal presentations • Group work, presentations, meetings • Reading: massive amounts, and very complex. Reading GE measured at 16+. Many EALs arrive with as low as a GE 5, and if fortunate, around a GE 9. This places them at academic risk immediately! • Large class sizes, lack of relationship with instructors.

28. iEAP Can be implemented by anyone and ideally would be taught in Grade 11 or 12 to teach academic concepts, skills, strategies and vocabulary to ELLs. We had very good outcomes with this project in Calgary. www.esllearningbydesign.com

29. EALs need: • Lots of vocabulary (and this starts in Grade 1...) • Reading strategies • Background knowledge • Writing for academic purposes (register, discourse knowledge). • Other issues: • Avoiding plagiarism • Critical thinking • Academic strategies (time management)

30. Taught in the context of ‘Plan it Calgary’

31. Vocabulary growth in iEAP Gates MacGinitie vocabulary tests (Grade levels)

32. References British Columbia Ministry of Education (2016). English 12. Report to schools. https://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/exams/pdfs/1606en_rt.pdf Brown’s human universals: https://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm Delpit, L. (1988). The Silence Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children. Harvard Educational Review, 58(2), 280-298. Hanley, J. (1999). Beyond the Tip of the Iceberg: Five stages Toward Cultural Competence. Reaching Today’s Youth, 3(2), 9-12. http://www.uvm.edu/rsenr/nr6/Readings/Hanleybeyond-the-tip.pdf Lakoff, G. Metaphors we live by. http://theliterarylink.com/metaphors.html Pavlov, V. (2015). Challenges faced by English language Learners on the ELA 30-1 Reading Diploma examination. PhD thesis. October 14, 2015. University of Calgary Roessingh, H., & Douglas, S. (2012). English Language Learners’ transitional needs from high school to university: An exploratory study. Journal of International Migration and Integration. http://www.springerlink.com/content/n62629705u6jv66q/ Roessingh, H., & Douglas, S. (2012). Educational outcomes of English language learners at university. Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 42(1), 82 – 97. http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/cjhe/index