Reflection 3

I have been learning a lot about how immigrants learn in my TE 352 class. The different kinds of ESL classes that they take and the sheltered instruction amaze me. Recently, we read about a study that focused on two young girls. They both lived in the same community for the entire time that the study was being conducted and attended the same middle school. Therefore they were receiving the same ESL teaching. However, the girls had two very different experiences.

 The first girl is Lillian. Lillian was 12 when she came to the United States from a small town outside of Guadalajara, Mexico. She had a pretty good proficiency in her L1 (Spanish) with reading and writing, because she had been a student in Mexico. Still, she was at a “level zero” when it came to being proficient in English, meaning she could understand and speak very limited amounts. Lillian is one out of six children in her family. When her family moved here, they moved into a two-bedroom apartment with two other families. The crowd at home added to the tension on her parent’s marriage and therefore neither parent was able to be involved in Lillian’s education. She started at seventh grade at Garden Middle School.

Garden was in a community that was experiencing rapid immigrant population growth at the time. Because this change was so sudden, the school was not prepared with a set ESL program to host so many children. Sometimes, a single classroom would hold 30-40 ESL students at one time. While the school did develop a program to test the student’s profiecency, it was often not taken, because so many of them were coming in at one time. Therefore, the majority of the students would start out in beginners ESL classes and it was very hard for them to move into intermediate ESL, advanced ESL and mainstream classes. The classes were very sheltered and students spent little-to-no time speaking English at school, because they had no interaction with their native English-speaking peers. This caused many of the students to fall behind and eventually drop out of school.

The second girl that was focused on in the study was Elisa. Elisa was 13 when she came to the U.S from a very small village in Honduras. She had about the same level of proficiency in writing as Lillian, but excelled in reading in her L1. Elisa was placed into the same track as Lillian when she arrived at Garden Middle School, but was quickly advanced into intermediate ESL due to her very hard work and extra help from her mother who had been in America for eight years.

What I found so interesting about this article was that although both girls had very different pats, it was the lack of responsibility that their teachers took, that ultimately held both of them back in school. So many of the teachers at their school refused to work with ESL students, because they thought that it would threaten the academia of their other students and/or they felt unqualified to teach them. This gives me hope that I can feel better prepared through my TESOL training, and therefore not let MY fears get in the way of a students future and willingness to succeed.