ESL program has successful results for kids
Nichole Bryson has been working since November with a third grader who couldn’t read when the school year started.
Falling behind grade level in school is one of the problems English-as-a-second-language students confront. Bryson, an ESL teacher at Woodruff Elementary School, works with other teachers at the school to get children caught up. She worked with the third grader, her teacher and teachers in the resource program and said seeing her now succeed in the classroom has been one of her most rewarding experiences as an ESL teacher.
“She’s starting to read. She’s understanding what she’s reading and she’s excited to read,” Bryson said.
Of close to 600 students at the elementary school, Bryson said about 65 are in the ESL program. The bulk of the students speak Spanish at home, though there are a few whose parents are from non-Spanish-speaking countries including: Tonga, Ethiopia, Cambodia and Vietnam. Bryson said most of the children were born in the United States.
According to www.census.gov, 14.5 percent of Logan residents older than age 5 speak a language other than English at home. Nationally, 17 percent of the population speaks a primary language other than English. The number of ESL students in classrooms in Logan and across the country makes finding the best way to help those students a top priority for teachers.
Bryson said in addition to falling behind in class work, not understanding what’s going on in the classroom and making friends are the main challenges for ESL students.
ESL students at Woodruff from kindergarten through third grade spend 45 minutes every day with ESL instructors like Bryson.
They work on reading comprehension, fluency and language manipulation. Fourth and fifth graders work with ESL instructors in their own classroom for an hour each day.
She said the students’ responses give a good indication of whether they are or are not understanding what they’re learning.
The ESL students miss regular class time to attend ESL sessions, but Bryson said the times coincide with the same activities the rest of the class is doing.
“I think it doesn’t really mess with things too much because it’s during their guided reading anyway,” she said.
Bryson said she stresses “survival language” at the beginning of the program – making sure students understand where things are located at the school and how to ask for them – but the ESL program at Woodruff is pretty fluid.
“We’ve had to change things a lot,” she said.
Bryson said she appreciates teachers who are willing to try new things to help students who aren’t native English speakers. The team at Woodruff, she said, is big on collaborating. The ESL teachers work with the regular teachers so the curriculums coincide. They also talk about test scores and activities so the ESL time can be used to give students a head start on their regular class activities.
There isn’t a set ESL curriculum, she said, so figuring out the best way to help the students is often a challenge.
“You’re kind of making things up as you go along,” she said.
One thing the ESL program simply isn’t designed to address, though, is the students’ abilities to read and write in their native language. Though Bryson speaks both English and Spanish, most teachers speak only one language.
“They come in and they’re learning English, but they don’t know their own language,” Bryson said.
She taught English in Taiwan last year at a Chinese-English school. The students were taught half the day in Chinese and half the day in English, so they grow up to be bilingual.
Bryson said she thinks such a dual-language program would be ideal in Logan, too.
Lisa Pray, the coordinator for Utah State University’s ESL teaching program, agreed dual-language programs are the best way for students to learn English.
In Logan elementary schools, the language of instruction is English. Pray said ESL teaching students must complete theoretical courses, methods courses, and cultural courses to receive an ESL endorsement, but USU doesn’t provide endorsements for bilingual education.
“We wish we would. It’s a wonderful way to support English learners,” Pray said.
The best of the bilingual programs, she said, is the dual-language program. Ideally, such a program starts when students are in kindergarten. Half the students in a dual-language program classroom are native English speakers and half are, for example, native Spanish speakers. The class content is taught half in English and half in Spanish, eventually resulting in a class of bilingual students.
“They get complete academic instruction in both languages,” Pray said.
Students in dual-language programs, whatever their native tongue, out-perform their native English-speaking peers on standardized tests by the fifth or sixth grade, she said. Bilingual education improves the ability of students to analyze and synthesize information.
“You have two languages to draw from,” she said. “Dual-language programs by far are the most successful programs.”
Pray said educators are working to develop dual-language programs in Logan elementary schools, but realization of this goal may be distant.
Money and test scores, Pray said, are the two biggest barriers to creating better language programs in Cache Valley.
Pray said the push to make sure students perform well on standardized tests is an obstacle to dual-language programs. Though students in the program easily earn top test scores by the fifth and sixth grades after several years in the program, there may be a drop in their test scores in the younger grades toward the beginning of the program.
In addition to testing challenges, funding a new program is a problem.
The startup funds for a dual-language program are expensive. Besides paying for teacher training, all new course materials in two languages must be purchased.
Still, Pray said she is hopeful dual-language programs will be available in Logan in the near future. There are already programs in the Salt Lake and Jordan school districts and she said the more people learn about the benefits, the more supportive they become.
Bryson knows the cost of dual-language education is often cited as a reason for not starting a program, but she said the benefits outweigh the initial financial output.
“I would be in favor of a dual-language program,” she said. “What about the cost of kids that are falling through the cracks?”
-katrich@cc.usu.edu