Language is power, to teach language is to empower.

The quotes from this post are from the article titled, English is foreign to more pupils, from the BBC News website Education section. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/education/5391960.stm

In thinking of ESL students, I usually think of them in a context of American schools. Because of that, I found this article particularly interesting. It appears that the UK also seems to have the challenge of teaching ESL students. About 9.5% of students in England’s secondary schools don’t have English as their first language. This number continues to increase. The percentage of students in the county of Suffolk who do not speak English as their first language increased by 45% from 2004 to 2006. That’s a very large amount of ESL students. Not only are there so many, but they speak a large variety of languages.

“Twenty-one languages, other than English, are spoken by Suffolk pupils, including Polish, Estonian, Malayalam and Icelandic.”

How does a teacher even go about starting to teach such a varied class? One teacher can’t know all of these different languages. In this case, the students have to be fully immersed in English. One school can’t have individual classes for each and every group of students that speaks a different language. It is important that these students master English in order for them to avoid struggling through school. As the article states,

“Research suggests that pupils in the early stages of fluency in English perform at very low levels in school assessments, while fully bilingual pupils perform significantly above the average of their English-only peers.”

So being an ESL student can be an advantage if early mastery of English is achieved, but can be a disadvantage if it is not. I thought this was a very interesting point. It does a good job demonstrating the importance of a good ESL curriculum. The article gave a brief description of some good ways to teach such a class. “Visual material and language” are important, as is “lots of talking.” My favorite point that was brought up here is that it is important to value the language skills that the students already have.

“We try to make languages really valued in the classroom and get the other children involved for example by teaching them to count to five in Polish or by learning songs.”

I had never thought about it before, but concentrating so hard on teaching English to ESL students could make them and other students feel like their language isn’t as important. This would not be good because we would be teaching students that English is the only language that matters, which isn’t the case. We must stress the importance of all languages to young students. Which leads into my next post, so I shall continue there.