Benefits of ESL Programs
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Marianne Johnson
- Posts: 2
- Joined: Tue Aug 24, 2004 6:46 pm
- Location: Alabama
Benefits of ESL Programs
I am completing a masters program and am required to interview an elementary ESL teacher. Unfortunately, these teachers are few and far between in the districts near me! If you teach ESL in an elementary setting, I would greatly appreciate your opinions about the benefits of the program for students. Thanks for the input!
Depends on the program....
Good morning, Marianne.
I would say it depends on the program, before I would say that it has benefits. Anyway, I'll give you a brief description of the one I'm involved in for your research efforts:
In Spain, where I teach, kids will be learning a second language, probably English, from three years old in the public system. That is by law (recently under change because of a change in government, from a "Sunday School class grades will count towards university entrance" to "Moral issues should be taught but not necessarily graded" -- simplifying a centre-right attitude changing into a centre-left one). The teachers will be non-natives who may or may not have a good hold on English, and who may or may not have a firm concept of language teaching. Most of those kids will end up in one English Academy or other (where I work, for example).
Our Academy began a new program last year. We have sent two elementary teachers with pretty good notions of English to pre-schools to warm up the 3 and 4 year-olds with games, vocabulary etc, for entrance in our academy. There are 15 to 20 little ones in these classes. The objective is not so much to teach them English as to include English as another subject in their studies, to equate it with reading writing arithmetic, to make sure that it is not considered a difficult thing to learn as many parents assume from their own experiences of having started at level one so many times without success.
Once enrolled in the academy, at five years old, these kids go through the usual elementary learning, books with lots of fun activities, colours, parts of the body, days of the week, emotions, family, etc....I get most of these classes, because I also teach basic classroom matters that include discipline, respect, etc, things that must be lacking in the regular schools if I find myself teaching them to all age groups before getting down to the ESL thing. These kids will be with us through the Cambridge Exams, some even getting to PET, KET, Proficiency, First Certificate.
The main benefit from our program in particular can be seen by contrasting the work of adolecents without such a background with those who have begun their study from an early age. The former consider ESL as a foreign activity and often have great difficulty in grasping the language. The latter consider ESL a fun and interesting activity and have less attitude about its difficulty. Generalizing there, in both groups there are those who should be studying nuclear physics over language, but there are as yet no programs in advanced calculating at the elementary level....
Hope that information contributes to your thoughts on the subject.
peace,
revel.
I would say it depends on the program, before I would say that it has benefits. Anyway, I'll give you a brief description of the one I'm involved in for your research efforts:
In Spain, where I teach, kids will be learning a second language, probably English, from three years old in the public system. That is by law (recently under change because of a change in government, from a "Sunday School class grades will count towards university entrance" to "Moral issues should be taught but not necessarily graded" -- simplifying a centre-right attitude changing into a centre-left one). The teachers will be non-natives who may or may not have a good hold on English, and who may or may not have a firm concept of language teaching. Most of those kids will end up in one English Academy or other (where I work, for example).
Our Academy began a new program last year. We have sent two elementary teachers with pretty good notions of English to pre-schools to warm up the 3 and 4 year-olds with games, vocabulary etc, for entrance in our academy. There are 15 to 20 little ones in these classes. The objective is not so much to teach them English as to include English as another subject in their studies, to equate it with reading writing arithmetic, to make sure that it is not considered a difficult thing to learn as many parents assume from their own experiences of having started at level one so many times without success.
Once enrolled in the academy, at five years old, these kids go through the usual elementary learning, books with lots of fun activities, colours, parts of the body, days of the week, emotions, family, etc....I get most of these classes, because I also teach basic classroom matters that include discipline, respect, etc, things that must be lacking in the regular schools if I find myself teaching them to all age groups before getting down to the ESL thing. These kids will be with us through the Cambridge Exams, some even getting to PET, KET, Proficiency, First Certificate.
The main benefit from our program in particular can be seen by contrasting the work of adolecents without such a background with those who have begun their study from an early age. The former consider ESL as a foreign activity and often have great difficulty in grasping the language. The latter consider ESL a fun and interesting activity and have less attitude about its difficulty. Generalizing there, in both groups there are those who should be studying nuclear physics over language, but there are as yet no programs in advanced calculating at the elementary level....
Hope that information contributes to your thoughts on the subject.
peace,
revel.
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Marianne Johnson
- Posts: 2
- Joined: Tue Aug 24, 2004 6:46 pm
- Location: Alabama
ESL
Thanks so much for your input! You provided me with exactly the type of information I need. I wish the public schools here had the same approach to teaching a second language, but we are still working on convincing the lawmakers that preschool itself is desirable and necessary for school success. I hope you are having a good year--Marianne