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Article Excerpt
Across the United States--in small Midwestern towns and rural areas, in the Southeast, as well as in coastal metropolitan areas--classroom teachers are increasingly seeing English language learners (ELLs) (1) in their classes. In 2003, 18.7% of 5- to 17-year-olds in this country spoke a language other than English, up from 8.5% in 1979 (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2005). Between 1990 and 2000, the enrollment of students with limited proficiency in English increased by 105%, compared to a much lower 12% overall enrollment gain (Kindler, 2002). Whereas some of these students are able to participate in mainstream classes, many face a daunting challenge in learning academic content and skills through English while still developing proficiency in English. Yet, most mainstream classroom teachers are not sufficiently prepared to provide the types of assistance that ELLs need to successfully meet this challenge. At present, the majority of teachers have had little or no professional development for teaching ELLs (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2002); few have taken a course focused on issues related to ELLs (Menken & Antunez, 2001); and most do not have the experiential knowledge that comes from being proficient in a second language (Zehler et al., 2003). It is not surprising, then, that the majority of teachers report that they do not feel prepared to teach ELLs (National Center for Educational Statistics, 1999).
In response to the growing presence of ELLs in preK-12 schools, a number of recent articles and books have examined ways to adapt mainstream teacher education to prepare all teachers to teach ELLs (e.g., Brisk, 2007; Valdes, Bunch, Snow, & Lee, 2005). Consisting primarily of program descriptions, small-scale qualitative studies, and program evaluations, this literature highlights approaches being used by teacher educators to prepare all teachers to teach ELLs, including the addition of a single course or field experience to an existing curriculum (e.g., Walker, Ranney, & Fortune, 2005); the revision of one or more existing courses or field experiences to incorporate attention to teaching ELLs (e.g., Friedman, 2002); the addition of a minor or supplemental certificate program to a standard certificate (e.g., Brisk, Horan, & Macdonald, 2007); innovative program structures that foster collaboration among mainstream, bilingual and English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teachers, and teacher candidates (e.g., Evans, Arnot-Hopffer, & Jurich, 2005); and professional development for teacher education faculty (e.g., Gort, Glenn, & Settlage, 2007). Most of this literature, however, does not attempt to fully articulate the knowledge base incorporated into the approaches being discussed.
A different body of literature has given some attention over the past 15 years to that knowledge base--that is, what teachers need to know and be able to do to teach ELLs (e.g., August & Hakuta, 1997; Wong-Fillmore & Snow, 2005). Unfortunately, this literature has not made its way into many teacher education programs. One reason may be that much of it focuses on the preparation of specialists (i.e., ESL, bilingual, or sheltered content teachers) rather than mainstream teachers. Another reason may be that these publications use linguistic approaches and terminology that can be challenging for those inexperienced in linguistic analysis. Perhaps most problematic, much of this literature seems to suggest the need for an extensive body of knowledge and skills for teaching ELLs, a daunting task for teacher educators given the tight constraints on credit hours in the professional education sequence and the increasing demands on the preservice curriculum from state departments of education and accrediting agencies.
Despite the promising evidence that some teacher educators are seriously tackling the challenge of preparing all teachers to teach ELLs, most perservice teacher education programs still have a long way to go to sufficiently develop among teacher candidates the necessary knowledge and skills. Given the growing numbers of ELLs in mainstream classrooms across the country, teacher educators need to act more quickly than they have up to now to prepare all future teachers for ELLs. Our intention in this article is to move the field in that direction by outlining the special language-related knowledge and pedagogical competence that mainstream teachers must have to begin to teach ELLs well. The article is organized into three sections. We begin by distilling from the literature on second language development a small set of principles that can serve as the linguistic foundation for teaching ELLs in mainstream classes. We then outline linguistically responsive pedagogical practices that flow directly from those principles. In the concluding section, we offer concrete suggestions for how teacher education programs can incorporate the knowledge and skills needed for preparing all preservice teachers to be linguistically responsive.
Essential Understandings of Second Language Learning for Teachers of ELLs
To be effective, today's teachers need a broad range of knowledge and skills, including deep content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, knowledge of how children and adolescents learn in a variety of settings, skills for creating a classroom community that is supportive of learning for diverse students, knowledge about multiple forms of assessment, and the ability to reflect on practice (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005). To be successful with ELLs, however, teachers need to draw on established principles of second language learning (Harper & deJong, 2004; Samway & McKeon, 2007). Language is the medium through which students gain access to the curriculum (2) and through which they display--and are assessed for--what they have learned. To succeed in U.S. schools, students must be able to read academic texts in different subject areas, produce written documents in language appropriate for school (e.g., tests, stories, essays), and understand their teachers and peers--all in English. Therefore, language cannot be separated from what is taught and learned in school. Whereas this is true for everyone, it has special significance for ELLs. Because they are learning English while learning the content of the curriculum, the process of learning English as a second language is inextricably linked with all their school learning. For that reason, a teacher who has ELLs in his or her class is best equipped to teach them if he or she has knowledge of some key principles of second language learning. Although the literature on second language learning is vast, we have distilled six principles that are highly relevant to teachers of ELLs. They are listed in Table 1, and we discuss them in turn below.
Conversational language proficiency is fundamentally different from academic language proficiency, and it takes many more years for an ELL to become fluent in the latter than in the former. The first part of this principle articulates the distinction between what Cummins (1981) originally called basic interpersonal communicative skills and cognitive academic language proficiency. (He later used the terms conversational and academic language proficiency [Cummins, 2000].) Some English learners may use their second language fluently in informal conversations but still experience considerable academic or literacy-related difficulties in school, because language varies according to the context in which it is used (Fasold, 1990). In the context of everyday conversations, speakers derive meaning not only from the words they hear but also from cues in the setting (e.g., facial expressions, gestures such as pointing to items in the environment). Because the content of such conversations is often predictable and focuses on the speaker's personal experiences (e.g., what someone did over the weekend), it is relatively accessible to ELLs. However, as communication moves further away from the immediacy of personal and shared experiences--such as in academic discourse--it increasingly relies on language itself to convey meaning, thereby becoming more impersonal, more technical, and more abstract (Gibbons, 2002). The use of written text, which makes meaning increasingly dependent on language itself, adds another layer of abstraction.
Academic language poses special challenges for learners. In school, learners use language for purposes different from those used in routine conversations. For example, they are expected to argue points of view, draw conclusions, and make hypotheses. Each purpose demands the use of specialized vocabulary and particular language forms (e.g., passive voice, a range of connecting words; see Schleppegrell, 2004). Because of "inexperience with the linguistic demands of the tasks of schooling and unfamiliarity with ways of structuring discourse that are expected in school" (Schleppegrell, 2004, p. 16), most students, but especially ELLs, experience school language as being more complex and cognitively demanding than conversational language.
Given all these factors, it is not surprising that it takes second language learners longer to develop fluency in academic English than in conversational English. According to Cummins (2008), second language learners develop conversational proficiency within 2 years of initial exposure to the language, but they need 5 to 7 years to develop academic language proficiency comparable to that of a native speaker of the same age. Classroom teachers who know the difference between conversational proficiency and academic language proficiency are more apt to understand why they need to provide ELLs in their classes with support to successfully complete academic tasks, even when the students appear to be fluent speakers of English.
Second language learners must have access to comprehensible input that is just beyond their...
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