April 2008 — Features
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ELL Spoken Here
"With so much of the testing hinging on the ability to read in English, ELL teachers must not only teach the content, but also the academic English needed to simply understand the questions," explains Arturo Guajardo, instructional technology facilitator for Texas' Austin Independent School District.
Under NCLB, teachers have three years to bring students to fluency in English; after three years, ELLs can no longer take state tests in their native language. And no allowances are made for the test scores of ELL students when a school's adequate yearly progress rating is determined.
Yvette Hernandez, a sixth-grade teacher at Ysleta Elementary School in El Paso, TX, where roughly 60 percent of the students are ELLs, says that NCLB mandates are asking teachers to get results in less than half the time that research says is required for students to learn a new language.
"According to research, it takes seven to nine years for a person to develop fluency in a second language-and that doesn't include academic content-but NCLB says that students in our nation must be ready to do it in three," Hernandez says. "If I were to go to another country, let's say Germany, I could not see myself performing academically in three years."
"Because we're in education, how can we say that we don't know how to teach something? You don't want to admit that you're lost, that you need support."Yvette Hernandez, Ysleta Elementary School
In addition to dealing with more acute accountability pressures, ELL teachers often must contend with students who are entirely new to an academic environment. "Our kids aren't just learning English," says Robert Hillhouse, chair of the social studies department at International High School in Austin. "There are so many deficits."
Hillhouse's school serves newcomer immigrant students- 200 in grades 9 and 10, about a dozen per classroom. Many of them have never been in a school before or had formal education of any kind. "You have to teach them skills that other kids already have," he says, such as how to study, academic preparedness, storing and filing paper-skills that mainstream high school students are long past acquiring.
The load placed on ELL teachers can create another stressor unlikely to be shared by other teachers: a sense of isolation.
"If you teach first grade," says Kristen Gundry, the ELL resource teacher for Wisconsin's Eau Claire Area School District, "chances are there is another person around who teaches first grade. If you teach eighth-grade social studies, chances are there is another person around who teaches social studies. If you are an ELL teacher in a small district, you may be it."
Without an actual physical presence to engage with, Gundry explains, ELL teachers have to seek help and commiserate digitally. "Online resources help you connect with teachers who harbor similar feelings and can keep you going," she says. Among Gundry's favorite websites is the very first one she discovered as a new ELL teacher: Dave's ESL Café, which has provided her with many ideas for working with ELL students at all levels.
