In the last three years, I have had the honor of spending my time as an educator to ESL students - those learning English as a second language. ESL students are typically tracked into the ESL program when they come from a different country and have been in the U.S. for two years or less. For many of these students, they are learning English as their second language but sometimes it is actually their third or fourth language! As beautiful as it is to be multilingual, being an English-learning student in today’s climate has brought on specific challenges. Let’s take a closer look at what this looks like and some strategies that have helped.
At the high school level, my colleagues and I work with ESL students who are between 14 and 18 years old, meaning they have had roughly 10 years of education in another language and country -- at best. That’s not including our SIFE students, or Students with Interrupted Formal Education. SIFE students often have only attended formal schooling up to elementary or middle school and sometimes that could mean full or half days of one-room schooling. By the time they come to the U.S. and must attend high school, there are gaps in their education.
Many SIFE students do not know how to read or write in their native language. As you may have guessed, this adds additional barriers to overcome for our students attending an English-speaking school in the States. There are challenges for ESL students at all grade levels, however, in high school, so much depends on passing standardized tests, like the Texas STAAR, which then grants them a diploma and access to further opportunities in life (that’s a whole other story). Assuming that they join high school as a ninth grader, they have four years to learn a new language, possibly learn how to read and write in any language at all, and learn a new culture -- all while being a teenager!
Let’s take a closer look at what a typical ESL student has to learn at school. In our current school year, students have a total of 10 class periods on a block schedule. Each subject has their own language, so to speak. In biology we talk about homozygotes, heterozygotes, monohybrid punnett squares, gametes, allelic frequencies, and more. I think it’s safe to say this is a new language even for English speakers, and this is just one subject.
So how can we make the material accessible and relevant to our ESL students? In textbook ESL instruction, indicators of growth are measured in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. As an educator, I strive to check off each of those boxes in each lesson. However, through experience I’ve realized it’s the nuances in the delivery of these strategies that really drive it home. Adding gestures, emotions, and culturally relevant connections are all examples of this. From the way that I slow the speed of my voice to a lethargic tone to describe a chemical reaction with no catalyst to increasing the speed of my voice with higher energy and higher pitch to signify that catalysts increase the rate of a chemical reaction -- it’s the little things that count. For the past couple of years, this strategy has worked well. It was smooth sailing from then on...or so I thought.
Now let’s take a seat in my classroom today. You can choose to see the lesson behind a computer at home in your bed, or masked-up in a seat six feet away from your peers in a divided-off classroom full of plexiglass. It has been almost a year since COVID shut down schools and transformed how we approach education. A lot of the strategies I have relied on are now futile. The clear enunciation and visual movement of the mouth that is needed in language acquisition is now physically covered and muffled by a mask and spotty WiFi over Zoom classes. The tangible manipulatives and scientific labs that allow our mostly kinesthetic learners an avenue to access academic material are now unsafe. Students’ highlighting, drawing, and use of a physical dictionary must now be translated to online formats. So here we have yet another “language” -- the language of the virtual world.
Students must now be able to navigate the virtual world with a proficiency that they were not ready for when we abruptly went virtual in the spring of last year. They must log into Zoom classes and have multiple applications running on one screen, or they may even have to split their screens to look at multiple windows simultaneously -- and this is on a good day. On any other given day, the internet may not be reliable at home or at school, their computer may have broken and they are working from their phone, their charger may have fried, insert any technological difficulties here _____.
Here we are: COVID serves as yet another barrier - another beast that must be conquered in order to advance in the world. In a sense, the COVID experience is another language for our ESL students to learn. Add it to the growing list of “languages” an English learner is expected to master.
English as a second language. Biology as a second language. COVID as a second language.
What now?
I could tell you about the applications I’ve used and found successful:
Nearpod - Contains an immersive reader that helps with breaking up large text
Peardeck - An interactive platform that allows for scaffolding and multiple modes of response
Flipgrid - Fun recordings that also have the immersive reader feature and allow students to interact with peers in supportive ways
Ultimately, you could probably find this list anywhere on the internet so I’d like to put our focus elsewhere. This year, most educators have heard something along the lines of “Give your students grace.” But don’t forget to give yourself grace. Celebrate small victories. Make connections with your students.
I’ll end this by saying I am no expert at ESL education. I am still learning and searching for the best ways to teach our students. I owe much of my knowledge and practices to the incredibly talented ESL educators who came before me. My hope is to simply share my experience and learnings. I don’t have the key to successfully teach ESL students in this virtual world. However, I will always center on this: create a learning environment that is warm, welcoming, and allows students to take healthy risks. That is a language they can understand.
Vanessa Somchith currently teaches science at Thomas Jefferson High School in DISD. She graduated with a B.A. in Health and Human Biology from Brown University and a M.Ed. from Southern Methodist University with a concentration in secondary STEM education. She is the proud daughter of Laotian refugee parents and a first generation college student. In her free time, she enjoys caring for her plants and decorating/redesigning her home, classroom, and friends’ office spaces.