Currents in Literacy

More Than Just English: The Role of the Effective ESL Teacher

By Nekita Lamour and Alice Wadden

Most people see the ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher's role as helping students from other countries acquire English through the use of second language acquisition materials and various assessments to measure their levels of English proficiency and other academic knowledge. However, as two Cambridge ESL teachers who have collaborated for over a decade, our involvement with English language learners makes us realize that our responsibilities have gone beyond merely teaching English. In this article, we will share with you some of those experiences.

Culture shock, language, family background, class, race, ethnic group, differences in physical appearance, or medical challenges are among many issues that can cause an ESL student to feel different in their new school setting. The social, cultural, and educational transitions the students are dealing with require attention to more than just reading and writing. ESL teachers - working individually or in small groups - can often listen to a child more attentively and deal with a problem in a more intimate context than the larger classroom can provide.

The philosophy of the Cambridge school system encourages access and equity. An important element in education is to involve all parents, including those in the ESL community, in children's learning. As ESL staff, we feel we have a special role in helping new students and parents feel welcome and accepted in the school environment. At the Harrington School, for instance, we invite parents to make presentations in the classrooms to their children's peers and teachers. We have also held Asian, Caribbean, and Latin American staff luncheons with the support of many parents who brought and served home-prepared food. The glass cases at the school's entrance have been used to display arts and craft items from around the globe that parents and staff have shared.

With several world-renowned universities in Cambridge, many of our ESL parents are international graduate students or visiting scholars with backgrounds in professions such as science, education, journalism, and more. We try to provide learning opportunities for the school community to take advantage of these resources. When families return to their home countries some parents want to continue a relationship with the school so their children can maintain or practice English via writing either electronically or by traditional mail.

But we have to balance these concerns with the needs of our local community, especially those who plan to stay in the United States. Some parents who may lack formal schooling can share their culture in different ways. Their oral tradition of storytelling may be brought into the monolingual and ESL classrooms. Another way is to have students interview their parents and/or extended family members for process writing, oral history, and research projects. These parents can also bring examples of their creative abilities such as weaving, crafts, and painting into the classrooms. These creative arts often represent the deepest traditional spirit of their communities. Because this type of learning is acquired from direct interaction with parents from various backgrounds and countries, it is very enriching. It is an experience that broadens the horizons not only of the ESL students, but of their monolingual classmates as well.

Staff members can use other strategies to help develop awareness that will enable them to understand their international students in practical ways. Training programs by independent resources such as Primary Source and VISIONS (Vigorous Interventions in Ongoing, Natural Settings) are very helpful. Primary Source is a non-profit center in Watertown, Massachusetts for multicultural and global education that offers professional development and curriculum resources to teachers and school committees that are culturally inclusive. VISIONS is a non-profit organization in Cambridge that provides technical assistance and ongoing consulting services to schools and organizations that want to create multicultural working environments. These organizations can help create new curriculum materials which promote multiple perspectives. Western educators should make an effort to learn about cultures that can challenge and contradict our understandings and world views.

As ESL teachers, we also conduct workshops in the school system and at conferences, and submit papers to educational journals. We produce a six to eight-page newsletter that goes to parents, staff, and the educational community. We collaborate with administrators and technology specialists to share what we do with the world via the Internet. We maintain a collegial relationship with local colleges and universities that provide interns and volunteers for our program.

Lesley University's Hood Children's Literacy Project has provided a substantial amount of materials to support the ESL curriculum at the Harrington School. Current trends in ESL education advocate an integrated content area curriculum which encourages monolingual teachers and ESL specialists to collaborate to provide meaningful instruction to the non-native speaker of English. Subjects such as mathematics, social studies, science, and literature have to be presented to the English learner as often and as rapidly as possible. Adapting, modifying, and finding appropriate materials to deliver a content area curriculum to these students is a pressing issue. The voluminous textbooks or the basals that are still used in many classrooms are not appropriate even for the monolingual speaker, not to mention the English language learner. Over the years, the items we have found more helpful for ESL students are materials and mini-booklets with more photos, drawings, and illustrations, and fewer or simpler words, as well as literature with auditory aids like cassettes.

Before purchasing the Hood supported ESL materials, we found the process of compiling, searching, calling bookstores and publishing companies, and consulting parents who speak other languages to be a meaningful learning experience. For instance, a Tibetan parent informed us that dictionaries or books published prior to l959, the date of the Chinese invasion of Tibet, are better than those published in the 1980s or 90s. The latter have influences of Indian, Nepali, and English languages because Tibetans settled in India and Nepal after the Chinese occupation. From a linguistic, political, and cultural perspective, we understand and respect the parent's viewpoint, but decided to order the most recent dictionaries because Tibetans who do migrate to the United States often use cognates from these languages when speaking Tibetan.

In addition to the parents' sociolinguistic concerns, the most important element as educators and learners was the dialogue, the rapport, and the learning that evolved between parents, international graduate students, and Hood Project staff during the ordering. We will begin documenting materials that facilitate learning English through content areas.

We have also been able to work with school partnerships that the Cambridge public schools have already established with the business community. For instance, funds were obtained from Sheldon Cohen, a Cambridge businessman, to support an Old Town Trolley tour for third and fourth grade students who had participated in a year-long unit on Cambridge. The Cambridge Partnership also granted some funding to do science and writing-related activities. ESL and monolingual children toured Cambridge's Fresh Pond in February, early spring, and twice in June with park ranger Jean Rogers. The students wrote about the changes they observed during the different seasons and they exchanged letters with monolingual pen pals from Leslie Kramer's class at the Haggerty School. Vocabulary is always an issue when dealing with ESL students' performance and Ranger Rogers introduced the students to numerous new words such as "erosion" as well as the names for many trees such as sycamore, ash, maple, and apple. Some students were also able to use the learning experience in other writing projects, for instance, a student who had to write about habitat used the experiences he had during the trips to Fresh Pond. The cultural exchange, the community involvement that occurred, and the exchange of letters between the Harrington and Haggerty School students made this grant very useful and very important to the school community.

Students from the Harrington and Haggerty schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts learn about the environment of the Fresh Pond area with Ranger Jean Rogers.

As ESL teachers, we are always trying to expand our own understanding of other cultures and our own professional development. We have found the most practical method of learning other cultures is to have "home stay" experiences when traveling outside the United States. Together or separately, we have stayed in people's homes in Haiti, in several countries in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and in several cities in Japan. Staying in people's homes brings closer relationships with families in the cultures we visit, and enables us to better understand the world and the students we work with.

Taking the time to write and apply for mini-grants and awards can provide financial resources for traveling and other educational opportunities. Though we have covered most of our travel expenses ourselves, Nekita was among the participants in a Children's Museum-Japanese Foundation program that provided a six-month training in Japanese history and culture and a three-week stay in Japan. Through a Hale-Bresky award, Nekita was also able to stay in people's homes in French-speaking countries in West Africa such as Benin, Togo, and Senegal.

On her trip to Africa, Nekita was able to photograph and videotape aspects of African life such as village scenes, people going about everyday business, city life, as well as an international chemistry conference in Benin. This documentation can be very useful in a classroom setting to give a more balanced view of Africa. Students can see the photos of clean modern cities with multi-story buildings and African scientists and realize that the continent is more than straw huts, jungles, and wild animals. Such trips give us as educators a chance to balance these negative images.

It has been an enriching and gratifying experience working with the Cambridge schools, its businesses, institutions of higher learning, and other segments of the community to help the ESL population continue to be a vibrant part of our community. The intent of a positive ESL program is not only for students to learn English, but also to learn the importance of their own cultures, and for all within the school community to value learning about others in this pluralistic society.

Nekita Lamour and Alice Wadden have been involved in many joint educational endeavors since 1987, recently as Co-Teachers-in-Charge for the ESL Center program in Cambridge. Alice Wadden retired last summer. Nekita Lamour is planning to spend less time in direct teaching this academic year to concentrate on writing.