What Your ESL Certification Didn't Teach You (It's A Lot)

I May Be Certified, But Do I Feel Qualified?

If you’re like us, you took your ESL certification test for one inspiring reason  -  your district mandated it. And despite the rigorous preparation provided by taking that test, we still felt unprepared for the actual reality of beginner and intermediate English learners in our classrooms. This year close to a million Texas students are classified as English Language Learners or ELLs, according to PEIMS data released by TEA. Teaching English Language Learners is certainly one of the biggest obstacles we encounter as high school teachers.

Districts throughout Texas have been, with varying levels of speed and enthusiasm, accepting this new reality. More and more of our students are actively engaged in the process of learning the English language - even though that may be not be what we are actively engaged in teaching them. The bald fact is that nowhere in the high school standards does it call for us to teach phonics, verb conjugation or the thousands of high-frequency words that make up the structure - if not the content - of our subjects.

This month we spoke with educational stakeholders at every level of ESL education - teachers, parents, and students - and we discovered a surprising truth. The secret to preparing your English Language Learners for success lies in …

The accommodation sheet you get at the beginning of the year.

Wait...Really?

Accommodations, of course, are not our favorite thing. And we deal with them literally every single day with virtually every single student. Yet after speaking with our three podcast guests - listen to a teacher/parent here, a student here, and an ESL specialist here - one thing was clear. It is the accomodations - but it’s not about what you do but why you do them.

Accommodations are not there to make the content “easier”.

Let’s break down the most common, most helpful accommodations, and how we should be using them.

Shortened Assignments/Extra time:

How We Use It:

On multiple choice tests, we strike out one answer. Instead of 20 vocabulary words, we assign 10. If an essay requires three examples, now they only need two. We give an extra day for reading the chapter.

Why It’s There:

You know that feeling you get every Friday of every week, where you think, “If I have to listen to one more ridiculous excuse for not turning in their work, I will move to Hawaii and never look back!” That deep soul tired that sends you, yet again, to the drive through line for dinner because that is just all the advanced planning you can take.

Brain fatigue is an actual neurological issue that results in forgetfulness, uncontrollable falling asleep, difficulty retaining information, and emotional turmoil. That is the feeling our ELs are getting every time they do work in English. Kids who are working hard to learn a language must read an English text, mentally translate the words, string them into ideas in their native language, and then process their reactions back into English. This fatigue is exacerbated by background noise and side conversations (otherwise called high school classes). The cognitive work required to filter and process all the different sensory inputs drains the brain quicker than a last generation iPhone the week after release date.

Your ELLs are using multiple brain “apps” to read, and they frankly can’t sustain it for very long. Their language centers have just not become background system processes yet. In the second part of our English Language Learner series, Ali - a brilliant refugee student who came to our schools speaking very limited English and graduated in two years - spoke candidly about the struggle of sustaining the mental energy needed for a five-hour English End of Course test. If you listened to Ali in that episode, you know that if he can hardly do it - it’s way too much.

How We Should Be Using It:

We certainly never connected the shortening of assignments accommodation to this reality of brain fatigue. Don’t shorten assignments to make them “easier”. Instead “chunk” them.

English Language Learners need just as many repetitions and opportunities to interact with content as we all do. So if you have twenty necessary vocabulary words, then you have twenty necessary vocabulary words. Don’t shorten the assignment by removing those words. But chunk them together. Are some of the words related to each other by theme? Are they part of a word family? Can they be chunked together and studied as a group? Can you use a word bank on your tests, or sentence stems for writing assignments that will take some of the burden off of their minds?

Another way to shorten assignments is actually to allow talking about it beforehand. Just giving your students talking time to process can help an ESL student feel more confident and comfortable with an assignment. And the repetition is a key variable in good learning practice.

Reducing the Reading/Difficulty Level:

How We Use It:

We take advantage of Lexile-leveled texts when available. Difficult reading passages are not assigned. We show movies or use summaries of difficult texts. Instead of assigning passages with “big words”, we simplify the vocabulary using descriptive language.

Why It’s There:

You would be surprised at how many words an ESL student will try to translate in their readings. We once watched a kid meticulously go through a paragraph assigned by a teacher, translating roughly 70% of the words she encountered. Can you imagine the brain fatigue this creates? The toll on comprehension? According to research, students must know 98% of the words they read in order to have a shot at understanding a text, let alone analyze that text.

How We Should Be Using It:

When you’re reducing the reading level of text, what, exactly, are you reducing?

Research shows that BICS develop quickly with ESL students. These are the basic 500 or so words that every kid knows in order to get their basic needs met. But CALP, the rigorous academic vocabulary needed to succeed in academic settings, comes much slower. When we reduce reading level, if we’re not very targeted, we end up sacrificing the necessary academic language - the CALPs - in our quest to remove the stumbling block BICS.

Simpler reading assignments run the risk of shortening or abridging academic vocabulary. The fact is that it is not helping your students to expose them to less vocabulary. All three of our guests used one word repeatedly - vocabulary.

Taking vocabulary shortcuts, like calling the numerator and denominator “top and bottom” number, may help students in the moment, but all you’ve actually done is push the necessary learning off to another point of time. A poor application of the “reading level” accommodation leads to that common complaint - “Well my students really KNOW the content, they just can’t transfer that to the test.” Often they can’t transfer their knowledge to a test because they learned the content but not the language. Don’t shortchange one goal to meet another.

If you’re reading a long, complex text - chunk it. What are the “must haves” in that reading? Assign those and provide vocabulary-rich summaries for the rest.

Texts are more comprehensible when they include shorter sentences, with fewer clauses, and a lot of context clues. As teachers, we can and should write up our lessons and lectures using grammatically simpler language and sentence structures, while utilizing academic vocabulary and context clues and pictures. Creating our own expository texts can be a great way to make sure the kids practice reading, follow up on the information you gave them, and have a study sheet for vocabulary in context.

Individual/Small Group Instruction:

How We Use It:

“Sheltered” classes with ESL students working together on specialized curriculum that is accommodated and modified. Pairing an ESL students with a classroom mentor student.

Why It’s There:

Sheltered instruction is more of a mindset than a class - a set of guiding instructional principles that ensure ELLs have access to lessons with explicit language support and academic task instruction. We teach students what to learn, how to understand it, and how to retain it. By its very nature, it requires a flexible and individualized approach to student learning and a pacing that is both academically challenging and that adapts to their burgeoning proficiencies.

How We Should Be Using It:

There is a significant difference between language competency and cognition. Just because two students are at the same English language proficiency level, does not mean they are going to experience equal levels of frustration or success in a class. A very bright student who would excel in a Pre AP class if they were just linguistically capable needs to have the accommodations that will enable him or her to learn the more universal content language as quickly and completely as a regular student.

Rather than using sheltered classes as an opportunity to slow down the pace of curriculum and instruction, these classes should be providing instruction at an accelerated pace and focus on the must have standards in the foreground, while keeping the nice to know standards to enhance or deepen understanding and skill in the background as needed.

Many teachers say they cannot differentiate for so many variables, but you don’t always have to. Your gifted ESL students have burning questions and curiosities that they want to know more about. Give them an opportunity to create their own learning goals.  Some kids need a coach rather than a teacher, and adopting a sheltered individualized plan to address content goals can be done with conferences and and action plans can be the key to quickening student progress in content and language goals.

Linguistic Accommodations:

How We Use It

Kids get a Longman’s dictionary from the shelf as needed, or we allow them to use Google translate on their phones. If they raise their hand and ask, we come over and re-word directions for them. We make sure we use gestures, and we put pictures in our powerpoint slides.

Why It’s There:

According to research, it takes four to ten years to be able to own a new language. A high school freshman who started speaking English in elementary school is still well within that gap.

How We Should Be Using It:

Language acquisition is overwhelming. Students by necessity will make inferences and draw conclusions about the meaning of individual words in order to make it through complex texts without looking every single word up in the dictionary. In Love’s Labor Lost, Shakespeare said, “They have been at a great feast of languages, and stol’n the scraps.” Unfortunately these scraps oftentimes lead to erroneous, or less than ideal, conclusions that can dilute or completely destroy the meaning of the content.

All ESL students (and most intervention students generally!) should be directly taught high frequency academic vocabulary that will assist them in any content in addition to your contents’ vocabulary. For linguistic accommodations, providing an easily accessible copy of your content’s high frequency words that they can use with their assignments is much more relevant and user-friendly than simply providing a dictionary. For a place to start here’s Jim Burke’s list.

While Google Translate is undeniably great, don’t underestimate the power of the human voice - specifically your human voice. Then need to hear you pronounce words and use inflection that varies based on word context. (Are you entering a CONtest, or do you conTEST the police officer’s ticket?)

What it all comes down to is...

It’s not what you’re doing - it’s why you are doing it.

Accommodations can be frustrating at the high school level, where you’re overwhelmed with the sheer number of them, and they often feel like they are not actually doing anything at all. But with just a slight shift in perspective of how you view these accommodations you will suddenly find them making a huge impact in your students’ success.