Why Do My Kids Make Leaps?

[Editor's note: Ms. Flecha is a third-year ESL teacher in an elementary school in Queens. She blogs at My Life Untranslated where this post first appeared.]

My professor who is advising me on my Master’s thesis recently asked me why I think my ELL students do so well, often making more than a year and a half’s worth of progress in reading. My initial response was that I think it’s because I teach them to be aware of the language they’re learning and train them to think about unknown words rather than just try to sound them out or get frustrated and skip them. But I can’t say for sure that they all really do that. I do witness a great many doing that, especially the ones who do so well. I also do what I can to limit the role of the affective filter so that they feel comfortable as language learners. But I think I was wrong. I don’t think these are really what’s at the heart of what’s going on in my class (I also don’t know how easy it’d be to compare me to other similar classes since kids are different, not just teachers).

To be honest, I feel it’s the norm, and whether it is or not I tend not to think about why they do well. I look at why they aren’t doing better, which teachers need to, but that’s not the whole picture.

I’m also realizing more consciously that the reason I don’t do certain things — like using the rubrics I’m given to assess them as writers, for example, is not because I just can’t get my act together, but because I don’t believe in it and haven’t discovered or created a suitable alternative. So, I am conscious more now of how I have been opposing certain school policies subconsciously.

So, yesterday, I was thinking about what my professor asked and, I’m still really unsure but I actually think it’s maybe because I don’t hold them back and I give them greater latitude in the levels I let them practice. I don’t believe in limiting the language they get exposed to. Since they are in 5th grade, I know cognitively they are ready for on-level texts, and unless I think there are major hurdles like not knowing a vast majority of letter sounds, or I suspect a difference in reading ability (basically issues unrelated to language), I typically don’t stop them from practicing several levels ahead of where I’ve tested them. They key for me is if they want to read those other levels. I am a firm believer that self-motivation is a huge key to some of the advances ELLs and probably most people make (barring serious problems, like I said).

If I have a kid who has a lot of difficulty reading aloud to me during a running record at level L, and misses some of the more subtle aspects of the text (which includes irony and idioms, for example), but they get the gist, I let them move to that level. How will they learn the language at those higher levels if they aren’t ever exposed to it? How would they ever get ready? A lot of the readiness in a second language is determined by their exposure to and use of oral language, but a teacher with a multi-level class, with beginner to advanced ELLs can’t possibly explicitly teach all the language they each need at the varying levels. You can’t teach all idioms or even all verb tenses to all levels at the same time. There are idioms I don’t get sometimes when I’m reading, even when I read in other languages, but that doesn’t determine my ability to read those books independently.

I guess I feel there are the needs of how to be a good independent reader in a second language, and then there are the kinds of instruction and skills ELLs need to read dense academic text, and my focus ought to more be there.

As I become confident in my ability as a teacher, and as I grow in my understanding of my own specialty within it, the more I realize how much I disagree with my administration (citywide more so than in my own school), and, honestly, the less I want to be a teacher. I feel my place is more in the realm of trying to affect policy through research and teacher-training. But that’s yet to be decided.

Tagged: elementary school, ELL, ESL, Queens

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