help!

[me59]

I teach an adult ESL community class. This upcoming term I will be teaching a combination of low and high intermediate students as well as some advanced students. I am intimidated by this task because I have never taught a class of such diverse levels. I will be using two different books ( ) as a guide, but I don't even know where to start. If any of you have taught students of such varying levels before, please let me know how you managed to reach their levels. How can I utilize the more advanced students in teaching the lower advanced students? Where can I turn for resources? I would appreciate any input and ideas that you could give me.

[Norm Ryder]

I don't think I can give you much help myself, me59, but I think you might get more responses from others if you could let us know a bit more about your learners.

Are they older or younger people?
What range of communication do they have with the English-speaking community?
Do they all have a similar purpose in learning English - for example, will they be doing similar types of work? Or are some of them just entering the community?
Also, how many classes per week are you teaching; and for how many hours.
Are you working for an organisation that has given you a set program and objectives etc?

With such information you have a better chance of catching the eye of someone with specific experience of your problem.

Good luck then.
Norm.

[me59]

Thank you for your response.

The ages of my students range from about 18-40. Several of my students are housewives who want to help their children with their homework and want to be able to communicate with their teachers. Other students are laborers, etc. seeking better employment and wanting to obtain their high school diplomas. They are of Hispanic origin and most of them have lived in the U.S. for about five years.

Our class meets three times a week for two hour blocks. I am given a book to use as a guideline but the curriculum is pretty much left up to me.

I am seeking some direction because these students are at such varying levels of English. I don't want the lesser advanced students to become frustrated and leave the class, and at the same time I want to challenge the more advanced students.

I realize that it is difficult to meet everyone's needs, but I would like some help on managing a mixed level class. If you know of websites or books or if you have had personal experiences with this, please let me know!

Thanks!

[LarryLatham]

What about you, me59? What kind of English teaching background do you have to draw on for these classes? Knowing something about where you stand will give us a little better idea about how we might be able to offer suggestions.

Larry Latham

[HillaryF]

Check out the book Teaching Multilevel Classes in ESL by Jill Bell (Dominie Press, ISBN 1-56270-032-4). I also teach a multilevel class and this book has been very helpful -- I hope it is for you too!

Take care,
Hillary

[Sally Olsen]

You are lucky if they are all of one language community. There is a terrific paper written on a Hispanic community in Toronto, Canada and how the teacher coped. I am sorry I don't know the authors name but if you have more resources than I do here you might be able to find it under the literacy field. I think you might have a literacy class rather than an ESL class and that makes a difference to the materials that you use. There is a wealth of literacy materials and in Canada, at least, in the libraries. They have specific books for specific jobs and the materials are well written and easy to use. I would recommend again, volunteers. There are many little old ladies out there and often some retired gentlemen or housewives with an hour to spare. It is a hidden resource and one that is invaluable. Get some old computers from the school boards or the local high tech companies and all the basic education programs they have including typing programs. Hook up with the librarian and send your advanced students off to him/her for research projects on their future jobs. Of course you can use the advanced students for tutors. Call on the local church and get volunteers. Get speakers in from the community, especially the school principal or VP and get them to explain the school system. Tape all the talks so you can go over them with the students afterwards. Find as many stories as you can about successful Hispanic people. Have a lot of warm fuzzies for people - coffee, tea, hot chocolate, muffins - every day and get the students to bake these if you have a kitchen. If there are no funds for this you can visit the local food bank and make a deal of the class volunteering there for some time in exchange for the coffee or approach local super markets to sponsor your program. Celebrate everything and build your community! Have the kids in after school for educational games with their parents once a month. Volunteer as a group to do something in the community. Help them write their resumes. Build a portfolio of their work to show administrators and future employers and make it professional - Ontario Canada has a lot of materials ready on this and you might want to contact their Ministry of Education. Team them up with mentors in their field of work - they can go out for one day a week with the best cleaning company in town, the best truck driver, the best carpenter. Get them to bring in all the reading material that comes to them - junk mail, notes from school, church notices and so on but also everything that they read in Spanish. If they don't read and write in Spanish get the advanced students to teach them that first before they tackle the English. Build networks, write everything down so you know who you have talked to before and who will help with which problem and leave it for the next teacher so he/she won't be in´this position of reinventing the wheel. Join the literacy community of teachers and find out what the rest are doing. Take a course in literacy issues from your university. It is an amazing field and so closely tied to ESL.

[LarryLatham]

Sally,

With every post of yours I read, I am more and more amazed. What manner of superwoman is this? You must have two heads to generate all the good ideas you have, and you must be taking steroids to give you all that energy. If I could just follow you around for a couple of weeks, perhaps I could learn to be a better teacher. You come up with good stuff too often here in this forum for it to be just a fluke. You must actually do this stuff you're talking about in your own classes. You have my genuine admiration, and I also expect that of many, many others.

Larry Latham

[Sally Olsen]

I told you I am old and have been doing this for 46 years. I haven't even mentioned the mobile home that I drove around in the rural communities. That was an adventure!
I always have such a hearty belly laugh when you say things like this though Larry. I sure wish you had been my boss. Here I am crying in my spilt milk because I just had my first oral exam with 14 students and half passed with flying colours and half failed by one mark, one got the lowest mark possible and one the highest. I didn't make much difference for the lowest or the highest as she would have gotten that mark at the beginning of the year and feel that I failed half the class. Those boys never talked to me all year and didn't at the exam either. The statistics are no better than former teachers so it doesn't seem to have made a difference to have a native speaking English teacher. Boo-hoo.
That said, I had a great year and had a whole year in Ilulissat, Greenland. You couldn't wish for a more beautiful place and I might never have made it here on tourist money and certainly wouldn't have the friends and experiences that I have had.
But I wish the statistics had supported my stay here. I may do all these extra things but I don't really think that in the end my teaching of English is all that successful. It just keeps me busy and out of some trouble and happy.

[LarryLatham]

...I didn't make much difference for the lowest or the highest as she would have gotten that mark at the beginning of the year and feel that I failed half the class. Those boys never talked to me all year and didn't at the exam either. The statistics are no better than former teachers so it doesn't seem to have made a difference to have a native speaking English teacher. Boo-hoo.
That said, I had a great year and had a whole year in Ilulissat, Greenland. You couldn't wish for a more beautiful place and I might never have made it here on tourist money and certainly wouldn't have the friends and experiences that I have had.
But I wish the statistics had supported my stay here. I may do all these extra things but I don't really think that in the end my teaching of English is all that successful. It just keeps me busy and out of some trouble and happy.

Ahh, but you see, Sally, this is just why I like you. It's your attitude. I don't see how you could be better. You've been around long enough to know, viscerally, that the statistics do not tell the whole story, and sometimes not even part of the story truthfully. They are collected by people with an agenda to support, and somehow they always support the agenda, no matter what it is.

No, Sally, you are one of the brightest lights in the harbor, and readers here will do themselves and their careers a lot of good to pay attention to what you have said. I sincerely hope you will continue to post messages here. For another thing, it makes for some of the most interesting reading hereabouts.

Larry Latham

[Sally Olsen]

Of course I agree with all you say, Larry, and my gut is feeling good or as they said in Brittany, "Ca gaz!" (The c should have that curly thing on the bottom but I can't find it on the Danish keyboard.) It meant that if your stomach was OK then whole world was OK because your wife was in the kitchen cooking up those famous Brittany dishes and your farm was producing good food. Which does bring us back to farmers. School is for farmers and the ones that failed were hunters. Some of the good ones are hunters too but are willing to be farmers for the time in school. The hunters just want to be hunters and definetely don't want to be farmers. The people of Greenland are trying to change the school system here to accomodate the hunters and I think have some pretty good ideas. It is called "The Good School Rules".
It is nice to justify myself and say that I know they learned more than what they showed on the tests and I know that they did. But what other measures can farmers use to order their world? In China it is the band 4 and 6 English tests. In many countries it is the English tests that qualify students for the best universities on the way to the best jobs. Is there another way to do this? By height? By lottery? A good engineer if often terrible at English (not always!) so you are excluding potentially good engineers if they have to pass the English test. Are we just sorting people? Isn't there another way to do this?

[LarryLatham]

You raise some good questions, Sally. And you are right to point out that, much as we teachers might detest them, standardized tests are likely the most efficient way we have yet discovered of sorting out our young people. And we must sort them out somehow. As you ask, how else can we do it? It makes even less sense to do it by some physical characteristic, or by chance. Status is a deeply embedded instinctual need for individuals and also for our societies as a whole. We somehow must determine who among our young charges qualify for the biggest prizes, since it cannot be that all the prizes are the same. Some measure of merit seems the most sensible procedure, and that leaves us, for the moment, with standardized tests.

In principle, these ought to be fair and straightforward. They ought to measure what they purport to measure. What miffs most of us, however, is the thinly disguised corruption that has crept into the process, while all the while we wink and look the other way. How else can we explain how it is that these tests always seem to show, in aggregation, what the authorities who administer the tests want to show? Our students, taken as a whole, always manage to improve their performance on the tests even when we teachers know deep in our hearts that the students may not be well-served by the mandated study programs that our administrators come up with. Every new adjustment to the curriculum magically and mysteriously is an "improvement" as shown by the tests. But students, again, taken in the aggregate, may not be able to hold even the most elemental of conversations with a native speaker, yet, according to the tests given at the end of each academic session, they are getting better and better...just as the lawmakers who hold the pursestrings want to see (but, of course, they never really look into the details since it's so much easier--not to mention politically safer--to coo comfortably at the carefully prepared statistical presentations of the test results).

Do I seem angry? Yes, I am. But I am also frustrated because I don't have a viable alternative. I'm not that clever, I'm afraid.

Larry Latham

[Sally Olsen]

Anoother day with the oral exams. I am sure glad that they aren't standarized exams in the sense that not everyone gets the same topic. I give them a tape with a 5 minute story and a text with approximately 1500 letters on the same general topic that we have studied in class - love, sports, fashion, good and bad, etc. They take the tape and story to a room and listen to the tape and read the story as many times as they can or want to do in 40 minutes. They can make notes, use their dictionaries, and look at their past work. They then come in the examination room and are supposed to talk for twenty minutes. They tell what is on the tape and what is in the text without actually reading it. Then they can talk about things they studied during the year with a related theme and then about anything in their lives - family, future plans, favourite music, sport, after school activity and so on. The censor is in the room and the teacher. They are supposed to talk to the teacher but if they allow it, the censor can ask questions or comment and they can ask the censor questions. The best did all of those. The worst panicked and froze and couldn't remember any of their English. One student ran away after we put him in the room by himself as he knew he couldn't handle it. It is a delightful process for those students who really know their stuff and you find out all about them, easily hear what they know and what they don't. With the poorer students it is like pulling teeth and you are fishing to find out what they do know and trying to find some area they in which they can shine.

[LarryLatham]

Anoother day with the oral exams. I am sure glad that they aren't standarized exams in the sense that not everyone gets the same topic. I give them a tape with a 5 minute story and a text with approximately 1500 letters on the same general topic that we have studied in class - love, sports, fashion, good and bad, etc. They take the tape and story to a room and listen to the tape and read the story as many times as they can or want to do in 40 minutes. They can make notes, use their dictionaries, look at their past work. They then come in the examination room and suppose to talk for twenty minutes. They tell what is on the tape and what is in the text without actually reading it. Then they can talk about things they studied during the year with a relate theme and then about anything in lives - family, future plans, favourite music, sport, after school activity and so on. The censor is in the room and the teacher. They are supposed to talk to the teacher but if they allow it, the censor can ask questions or comment and they can ask the censor questions. The best did all of those. The worst panicked and froze and couldn't remember any of their English. One student ran away after we put him in the room by himself as he knew he couldn't handle it. It is a delightful process for those students who really know their stuff and you find out all about them and easily hear what they know and what they don't. With the poorer students it is like pulling teeth and you are fishing to find out what they do know and trying to find some area they in which they can shine.

All in all, it sounds like a better alternative than the kind of standardized tests I am used to. But quite an investment in time, isn't it? Twenty minutes for each student? Whew!

Larry Latham

[Sally Olsen]

Yes, not only twenty minutes with each student but there are two teachers present. One comes from Denmark and his/her fare is paid here, all their expenses for staying including meals. I had to have a substitute for the classes I missed while spending the whole day in the exams. I had 5 classes to do but only of 14 students each. I am exhausted as you can tell from my spelling in the last post. But it is a kind of rewarding experience. You get to say goodbye individually to the students and can ask them their opinions of the course. You can zero in on their abilities for the censor because you know them well and so they shine for 20 minutes. It is quite easy to tell their level. The hard part are the ones that fail of course, and the ones that are good but freeze in this situation but even they seem glad to have it done and it will good practice when they do it again in the future. It gives the students a chance to tell about their English learning over the five years and you can certainly tell about the effectiveness or not of the teaching. To do well, they have to leave behind their quiet and contemplative Greenlandic ways and become more assertive and openly proud of their accomplishments and some just don't want to do this. I guess that is the agenda of this test - to make them into independent, critical thinkers whereas their community values people who can fit in the group and support tradition.

[LarryLatham]

It sounds like a great system for use in East Asia (China, in particular).

I'm glad you're through with it now, Sally. Will you be working in Greenland again next academic session?

Larry Latham