Theory Into Practice, 51:297–304, 2012
Copyright © The College of Education and Human Ecology, The Ohio State University
ISSN: 0040-5841 print/1543-0421 online
DOI: 10.1080/00405841.2012.726059
Mari Haneda
Gordon Wells
Some Key Pedagogic Principles for
Helping ELLs to Succeed in School
In this article, we put forward 4 pedagogic principles that we consider to be particularly important in helping English language learners (ELLs) to succeed in school. These principles are: creating multiple and varied opportunities for ELLs to use the target language in both speech and writing, promoting high engagement by building on students’ interests, connecting the curriculum to ELLs’ lives and their funds of knowledge, and working toward a tangible goal. We illustrate these principles in action by presenting 2 case studies drawn from our research. They show how the teachers with whom we worked used these principles to meet their students’ needs in two demographically different classroom contexts.
Mari Haneda is an associate professor in the School of Teacher Education, College of Education, at Florida State University. Gordon Wells is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Mari Haneda, School of Teacher Education, College of Education, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
32306-4459. E-mail: mhaneda@fsu.edu
| T |
HE PERVASIVE EDUCATIONAL underachievement of children of immigrant families continues to be a matter of serious concern, both for those families and for the nation at large. As is well documented, a high proportion of immigrant youth are unable to obtain a college degree, and many even fail to graduate from high school. Consequently, lacking the knowledgeable skills necessary to compete in today’s technologically advanced society, they are confined to insecure, poorly paying jobs that offer little opportunityfor advancement. Not only is this personally unfulfilling, but it is also a loss to society as a whole, because these young people are unable to make the contribution of which they are potentially capable to the nation’s competitiveness in the global economy. With their limited educational, cultural, and financial capital, they will also have difficulty in providing the necessary support for their own children to escape from the trap in which they, themselves, are caught. For all these reasons, it is essential to improve the educational opportunities available to immigrant youths.
Many of these immigrant children are also English language learners (ELLs) and, for those who arrive in the late elementary and middle school years, the dual task of learning the curricular content while learning the language of instruction is particularly acute. They have only a short time to reach the level of fluency in spoken and written academic language necessary to succeed in the high school classes that will enable them to be eligible for entrance to a higher education institution where they can gain a qualification in their chosen field.
Clearly, there is no simple solution to the problem that schools face in providing equitable learning opportunities for ELLs, given these students’ vastly different levels of proficiency in English on arrival. Ideally, all teachers would be professionally prepared to meet the dual needs of these students, but that is certainly not the case at the present time. However, there are steps that all teachers can take that will make it possible for newly arrived ELLs to settle in and to participate to the full extent of their capabilities from the very beginning. In the remainder of this article, we outlinesome general principles that have been found to be helpful in this respect, and present two short case studies to illustrate ways in which teachers have tried to put these principles into practice.
Principles
Frequent Opportunities to Talk and Write
To learn a language, one has to use it. This is the most important principle to help newly arrived ELLs develop language skills. This principle is quite evident when learning the mother tongue (Wells, 2009), but it is equally true of learning an additional language when moving to a new country or language community in later life. In all these settings, learning language is an intrinsic aspect of becoming a member of the new community and learning how to take part in its activities. In these circumstances, motivation to learn is not an issue: survival depends on it. When this learning takes place in school, on the other hand, the situation is not so straightforward because (a) the activities in which students engage in the classroom are, for the most part, less directly related to their everyday lives outside school; and (b) there is typically only one person who is the designated expert who will model what is to be learned and provide the support that is needed. Thus, the challenge lies in making classrooms places in which all students have opportunities to learn and use spoken and written language for a wide variety of purposes, both social and curricular.
Connecting Curriculum to Students’ Lives
Organizing classroom learning so that the curriculum is connected to students’ lives, interests, aspirations, and their funds of knowledge (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) encourages students to contribute to curricular discussion on the basis of their own experiences, both inside and outside the classroom, and enables the teacher to better gauge their prior knowledge to make connections to the topics prescribed for study. As we have reported elsewhere (Haneda & Wells, 2008), this proves to be particularly beneficial for newly arrived students, as they are able to draw on the knowledge and experience gained in their home countries to contribute to their group activities in practical ways. At the same time, through their participation, students gradually learn how to talk about what they are doing together.
Selecting an Engaging Topic
Students must be sufficiently interested and enthusiastic about what they are learning to want to share their ideas with their peers and their teacher. As one teacher with whom we worked told her Grade 3 students: “You must care about your topic.” For this purpose, to ensure that her students did care, the teacher organized much of the curriculum around broad themes, giving her students choice as to which aspect of the curricular theme they wished to investigate. In addition, she encouraged them to work in pairs or small groups on the same or similar topics so that they could learn with and from each other (Wells & Chang, 1992). Similarly, when we engaged in a collaborative action research project with a group of teachers in grades 1–8 to create communities of inquiry in their classrooms, we found that, when given choice as to their topics for inquiry, students became more self-directed in their investigations and in their learning. Under these conditions, they had much to contribute to collaborative knowledge building in groups and in whole class discussion, reporting on the progress they had made, giving and receiving reactions and suggestions from their peers and, at the end of the unit, discussing what they had learned, what questions had emerged that could be further investigated and, equally important, what strategies they had found helpful in conducting their inquiries (Wells, 2001).
Working Toward a Tangible Outcome
A tangible outcome of group and class investigations—an improvable object in the form of, for example, a text, a model, a visual display—that represents what the participants have come to understand enhances students’ engagement and participation. Such an object not only motivates students’ sustained engagement but, because it is intended to be shared with others, its creation also calls for the use of language that is appropriate to the field of inquiry to explain and justify the findings and the processes involved. In this way, students not only develop confidence in communicating with others, but they also begin to master the linguistic genres of the different curricular disciplines.
Although we believe that these four principles are important for all students and all types of school, it is clear that the ways in which they are put into practice will need to vary according to the exigencies of each particular situation. In the two case examples that follow, we discuss how two mainstream teachers attempted to teach their ELL students in light of these principles in two very different contexts.
A Grade 7 World History Class
Ms. Brent (pseudonym) has taught social studies at the middle school level for over 10 years; she has a strong reputation as a competent and caring teacher. Currently, she teaches in a suburban school, Highland Middle School (HMS), in a US Midwestern city, located in a middleclass neighborhood. Because of the presence of a Japanese automobile plant nearby, schools in this district, including HMS, have a high proportion of Japanese ELLs, together with a substantial number of Mexican ELLs and ELLs of other origins. With the steady increase in the ELL population in her school (10% of the total student body), Ms. Brent became aware that ELLs, particularly beginners, were getting lost in her mainstream world history classes. In 2005, with her principal’s approval, she created a grade 7 world history class designed for ELLs, in which efforts were made to make gradelevel academic content more accessible through various sheltered strategies, including the use of visual aids, slower articulated speech, giving information both in speech and writing, and repeating informationin multiple ways (Echevarria, Vogt, & Short, 2007).
The vignette of Ms. Brent’s class herein presented is based on an ethnographic study by the first author (Haneda, 2009). The class was comprised of ELLs of all levels of English proficiency and varied ethnicity, including Japanese, Mexican, Indian, and Kurdish students. At the teacher’s request, some Japanese and Mexican ELLs volunteered to translate classroom instruction for those of their compatriots with minimal English proficiency. This vignette focuses on how the ELLs developed understanding of the notion of social hierarchy in a unit on Ancient Egypt; it discusses how the principles proposed above were enacted in this class.
At the beginning of the unit, Ms. Brent explained the social hierarchy of ancient Egypt through a minilecture, using a transparency to depict the hierarchy pictorially in a pyramid. She explained such terms as pharaoh, priests, artisans, scribes, and slaves. The students were
Example 1. |
then asked to take a stance with respect to the necessity of hierarchy as a societal system and to explain their positionsin writing.Buildingon this writing task, the teacher led a whole-class discussion on this issue. She had her students raise their hands according to the positionsthey adopted and then she nominated individual students to justify their respective positions. Next, she distributed handouts with a blank diagram of a hierarchy and asked the students to identify each level in the hierarchy as practiced in their own school. As the students conferred with their friends during this activity, the classroom was filled with excited voices in Japanese, Spanish, and English. In the following whole-class discussion, Ms. Brent elicited their answers, completing the diagram. She then posed the students a series of questions: whether the principal or staff or teachers had absolute power and how similar or different these two hierarchies were and why.
Throughout this activity, there was a constant exchange of opinions in small groups and the whole class, as the students discovered the notion of hierarchy was highly applicable to their own lives. She then asked whether the rights of people occupying the bottom level were different in the Egyptian and school hierarchies. The following excerpt captures part of the ensuing discussion (Example 1).
Emi’s explanation, given in turn 2, was reiterated by Iman and Chul in turns 4 and 6. In turn 7, the teacher synthesized these responses. However, in turn 8, Nina played devil’s advocate by suggesting an alternative explanation in that slaves simply lacked courage to organize themselves to go on strike. Responding to this challenge, Ms. Brent attempted to push the students to think about the conditions under which slaves worked. She did this by giving them a hypothetical scenario: Had she been a slave in Egypt, she would not have had the individual freedom that is now taken for granted because her family’s life would have depended on the whim of those whom she served (turns 11, 13). Nina had proposed an action that would be considered appropriate in contemporary society, but it was not a viable option for slaves in ancient Egypt. In this way, Ms. Brent pushed the students to consider historical agents’ actions in relation to their socio-historical context.
Instead of just reading about the Egyptian hierarchy and engaging in display-of-knowledge practices (i.e., answering known-answer questions), the students in Ms. Brent’s class came to recognize that some elements of ancient practices (i.e., hierarchy) were still part of their everyday lives. They were also developing their understanding of historical contextualization: understanding historical agents’ actions in the light of the socio-historical context in which they lived (Barton & Levstik, 2004).
In terms of the four principles, as exemplified in the excerpt, the students had many opportunities to use language in relation to curricular topics. Because Ms. Brent ensured that the abstract construct that they were learning was connected to their lives, the students’ engagement in classroom activities and their interest in the topic remained high. In terms of an improvable object, whereas in her mainstream world history class her students engaged in projects that required research and write-up, she did not include that in her sheltered class, because she thought that her ELLs did not have enough English competence to produce high-quality written products. Even though Ms. Brent did not feel her students were able to work on a project with an improvable object as its outcome, she did incorporate other activities, such as role play and readers’ theater, which served rather similar purposes.
A Grade 4 Mainstream Class
Three years before the unit to be described in the following, the second author had met Buzz, a grade 4 teacher in a school in centralcoast California. They had started a collaborative action research project to discover whether creating and attempting to improve model cars so that they would travel as far as possible when released down a ramp would engage the students in productive dialogue about the forces that affected the performance of their cars. The result was so positive that it was decided to repeat the project in succeeding years (Ball & Wells, 2009).
When this project started, Buzz’s Grade 4 class contained only a small number of ELLs, and, as evidenced in the video-recordings that were made, they were able to participate effectively in both small group and whole class discussions. However, 4 years later, as the result of a reorganization of the city’s schools, about half the students in Buzz’s class spoke English as an additional language, and many of them were designated as limited English proficiency. Under these circumstances, Buzz decided he needed to introduce some changes to ensure that his ELLs would be able to fully engage in the project. Three changes, in particular, proved to be very successful. First, after the class had experimented by running balls of different sizes and different consistencies down the ramp, Buzz started the second class by reading Newton’s first law of motion and inviting students’ thoughts about what might be involved. Then, after several minutes of discussion, he handed out copies of a journal entry written by Cynthia, a (fictitious) undergraduate, who had been intrigued by watching skateboarders do their tricks in a skateboard park that was quite close to the school and, as Buzz had guessed, familiar to most of the students. Cynthia had posed a number of questions arising from her observations of skateboarders going down ramps and, taking them one by one, Buzz invited the students to offer their conjectures in answer to them.
The third innovation followed from the second. Having accepted Cynthia’s existence and the relevance of her questions to their project with cars, the students willingly took up Buzz’s suggestion that they should share their ideas by writing to her. Cynthia obligingly replied and her responses were read aloud and discussed with enthusiasm. As a result, the students used both
Example 2. |
spoken and written language to report on, to conjecture about, and, finally, to explain which of the modifications they had made to their cars caused them to travel further, and why. Over the following lessons, they tested the effect of fitting different sized wheels, adding weight, and comparing different floor surfaces. By the end, they were able to draw some conclusions.
Here is a brief segment from the final whole class discussion (Example 2).
As can be seen, the students had much to contribute to this final discussion and it is clear that they had developed some understanding of the utility of the concepts of gravity, friction, and momentum in explaining their results. Particularly notable was the way in which, here and throughout the unit, the students’ experiences outside school were welcomed and taken seriously as contributions to the collaborative sense making. Clearly, experimenting to improve their cars had thoroughly engaged the students and, over the weeks, much discussion had taken place in their working groups, allowing them to try out their ideas and to gain the confidence to contribute their findings to the whole class discussions. Thus, in this final discussion, they were keen to report their results and to offer tentative explanations as to why the changes they had made had or had not proved successful; and, as can be seen, the fact that some of the students were still not fully proficient in English did not impede them from taking a full part in the collaborative knowledge building. Furthermore, not only did the project facilitate their language development but, from a curricular perspective, this project also enabled the students to blend together their own experiences, Newton’s laws, and Cynthia’s journal entries, and to succeed in making sense together of the results of their firsthand experimentation. In this process, by making use of the conceptual tools provided by more expert others, they were beginning to make those tools their own.
Conclusion
Although the two vignettes differ in the degree of the enactment of the four principles for learning outlined in the first section, it is reasonable to say that even when ELLs are not Englishproficient, they can engage in an intellectually challenging task in a worthwhile way. The characteristics shared by these two classrooms are to be found in the links that the teachers were able to make between the curriculum content and students’ lives, the high engagement among students, and many interactive opportunities for language use. Supporting these practices was the caring and collaborative community created by both teachers in which all were enabled to do their best. However, what distinguished the two classrooms was the extent to which the students worked on an improvable object. Material improvable objects occur readily in subjects that involve practical work, such as science, but are less easy to incorporate in a subject such as history. On the other hand, dramatic reenactments and various forms of written composition can also serve as objects that students are keen to improve. In Ms. Brent’s class, however, the students did not yet have sufficient proficiency in English to engage in written activities about the academic content; nevertheless they did participate enthusiastically in vicarious enactments of historical situations in the oral mode.
In conclusion, what we wish to emphasize is that, in both classrooms, students were enabled to plan and direct their own activity and to contribute to the creation of an environment in which all members, rather than competing with each other, took up opportunities to provide assistance to each other in what Vygotsky (1978, p. 86) called “the zone of proximal development.” In this way, all participants—teacher as well as students—were able to go beyond themselves, achieving with help what they were not yet able to manage on their own.
Notes
- The “Developing Inquiring Communities in Education Project” was funded by the Spencer Foundation, 1991–2000.
- In the following transcripts, TB is Buzz and TG isthe second author.
- See Haneda and Wells (2010) for students’ learningin this class.
References
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Haneda, M. (2009). Learning about the past and preparing for the future: A longitudinal investigation of a grade 7 “sheltered” social studies class. Language and Education, 23, 335–352.
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Haneda, M., & Wells, G. (2010). Learning science through dialogic inquiry: Is it beneficial for English-as-additional-language students? International Journal of Educational Research, 49, 10–21.
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