Observation of an ESL class

A little over a year ago, I had the opportunity to sit in and observe an ESL class, and discuss my observations. The following is a copy of my report.

College life is stressful enough in one language, let alone in two. Academia has a language all its own that a student must learn in order to succeed – a daunting prospect if the student is already in the process of learning English. Fortunately, ESL programs exist across the country at every academic level, from kindergarten all the way to higher education. Recently, I had the opportunity to observe an ESL class at a local university.

This university's ESL program services approximately 250 students each semester. The majority of these students (about 45% total) are Hispanic, coming from areas of the Caribbean, Central and South America. The second largest group is Middle Eastern, mostly from Egypt. The Indian subcontinent is also well represented in the ESL program. According to a representative of the ESL program, many of these students have already earned degrees or nearly so in colleges in their home countries, and come to this university to continue their education.

The ESL program at this university is a part-time program which runs alongside the college's English curriculum. It need not be taken for credit, although about three-quarters of the students in the program are matriculated. The rest take the courses as part of their own continuing education. While the program contains ten courses in total, only two – ESL 101 and ESL 102 – are necessary to fulfill the University's ESL requirement. The other courses are either electives for those who wish to continue their ESL education, or prerequisites recommended based on the entrance examination.

The entrance examination is in three parts: a standardized grammar test, a written composition, and an oral interview. Exiting the program is a matter of completing ESL 102: English Composition II – ESL. It was this class that I observed on Thursday, April 8, taught by “Dr. Carson.”

The ESL class I observed contained 15 students, approximately 60% female, of varying backgrounds: Hispanic, Arabic, and African American. The mood was congenial for the most part, but as the class went on (the class was three hours long), I could hear the complaints and grumbles of students getting restless. But on the whole, the students were attentive, cooperative, and eager to learn.

Because this class was the final class in the ESL program, most of the students I observed were quite proficient and nearly fluent in English – I estimate they were about levels 4-5 on the WIDA scale of proficiency. From the chatter among themselves and their banter with Dr. Carson, it sounded to me like their conversational English skills were at near-native levels. My earlier interview with Dr. Carson seemed to indicate that the focus of the class would be the students' academic language. My observation of the actual class supported this.

During my pre-observation interview with Professor Carson, he explained to me his personal theory of language learning. According to his theory, academic language has two components: syntax (grammar), and preformulated structures. The words of any language can be combined in literally an infinite number of ways, however, certain combinations, or preformulations, usually representing idiomatic expressions, turn up more often and are, according to Dr. Carson, not given enough attention by language teachers.

Some examples of preformulations particular to academic language are phrases such as “_________ has to do with _________,” “There is a sense of _________ in _________,” or “If it hadn't been for _________, _________ would have _________.” Dr. Carson believes in teaching his students a series of structures like these from the first day of class, so that they may become familiar with them and use them in their own academic essays, plugging them in where needed , like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He referred to is as, “learning English from the inside out.”

I will admit at this point that I had some reservations about his theory at this point, probably because learning “from the inside out,” sounds too much like learning “from the bottom up.” While this approach was popular in the earlier days of language teaching, various ESL philosophies have long since come to the conclusion that language cannot be learned in pieces – it is best learned holistically (Richard-Amato, 2010). On the surface, this part of Dr. Carson's theory seems to be a step backwards in language teaching, but I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to a man who has quite literally written the book (several books, from the look of his office) on the topic.

One of Dr. Carson's other classroom practices that we discussed during the pre-observation interview was how he had his students keep “metacognitive journals” in which they would write about some aspect of language or grammar usage that they had recently studied or learned. A sample topic might be the importance of organizing your ideas before an essay, or what makes a good introduction. The idea was to get the students into the habit of examining not only what a given rule was, but why that rule existed. Forcing the students to examine and understand the why of a given rule or good study habit reinforced the lesson in the students' minds. I found that to be a very useful practice and plan to incorporate it into my own future classes – ESL or not.

Dr. Carson's emphasis on metacognition, as well as a combination of grammar and useful academic language production led me to assume that he was practicing a cognitive-code approach, as explained by Patricia Richard-Amato: “Cognitive code refers to any attempt to rely consciously on a syllabus based on grammar but at the same time allows for the practice and use of language in meaningful ways” (Righard-Amato, 2001). By comparing Dr. Carson's ideas with our own readings and discussions, I was even able to narrow down which of the linguistic theorists studied in class most closely matched Dr. Carson's approach: Lev Vygotsky.

“Vygotsky and Piaget were both constructionists, meaning that they believed that knowledge itself is structured and developed from within the individual through active learning” (Richard-Amato, 2010). Certainly, Dr. Carson's emphasis on the structure of learning, and encouraging his students to introspectively examine that structure through metacognitive journaling, would put him somewhere in the area of the Cognitives – either Vygotsky or Piaget. But what puts Dr. Carson firmly in the Vygotsky camp is their agreement on the role of society in cognitive development, as well as their work in scaffolding. Through Vygotsky, Wells stressed the notion of “scaffolding” language, bringing each learner up from the level they are at towards the next step in their cognitive development. (Richard-Amato, 2010) I could see how practice with Dr. Carson's preformulations – unfamiliar at first, but eventually becoming a habit – would lead students forward in their academics. Dr. Carson's preformulations are a type of instructional scaffolding that Echevarria, Vogt, and Short identified as one of three types that can be used. Preformulations can be used to enhance student learning like a graphic organizer Echevarria et al used as an example of instructional scaffolding (2008).

Vygotsky, like Dr. Carson, believed that society determined a person's stages of development. During my discussion with Dr. Carson, he noted that there were two types of ESL students in his classes – those who came directly from a foreign country, and those raised in America by non-English speaking parents. His opinion was that students in the latter group – native-born but still not English natives, had a more difficult time learning English than those who came from a fully-developed, yet foreign, cultural experience. As he explained, those students coming from a hybrid foreign-American culture don't have as solid a foundation as those who were already established in their homeland.

As most language arts teachers know, the language experience starts with “me,” and gradually moves outward towards “family,” “friends,” peers,” and so forth. But my opinion is that a person's culture is such an integral part of a person's identity that if it is not well defined, then neither is a person's sense of self. How can language begin with “me” when there is some question as to who “me” even is? These were just a few of the heady issues I had in front of me as I prepared to observe Dr. Carson at work.

The first thing I noticed about the layout of the classroom was how unremarkable it was. While group work is practically a mantra in ESL education, I was surprised to see the students seated in rows similar to any mainstream class. Students never separated into groups and had absolutely no interaction with anyone except Dr. Carson himself. I surmise that because this class is the final step before the students are mainstreamed, and that, as previously mentioned, their conversational English is already nearly fluent, Dr. Carson's goal was to operate the class as closely to a mainstream English class as possible, so that the students could easily adjust next semester.

While I see the value of Dr. Carson's approach, I have to disagree with its execution. Students, even advanced ESL students, should be given opportunities to interact and produce language. “Organizing students into smaller groups for instructional purposes provides a context that whole-group, teacher-dominated instruction doesn't offer” (Echevarria et al., 2008). And ESL or not, three hours is a long time to listen to one man. Experience has taught me that some sort of group activity is needed to break the monotony and dispel some of the restless grumbling I began to hear during the second hour.

After Dr. Carson listed his objectives for the day on the board, the class began with a quiz on the short story that the students were to have read for that day. This was a regular feature of the class which Dr. Carson had described (to the students as well as to myself) as a “Yellow Dog” quiz. As he put it, “If a story has a yellow dog in it, and I ask a question about a black dog, then I'll know who read and who didn't.” My initial impression was that this quiz, consisting of ten true-or-false questions, was merely a formality to insure that the students had actually done the reading. But I did notice that Dr. Carson had added something extra: not only did the students have to answer true or false, they had to write a short explanation of their answer. I found this to be useful not only to gauge the students' grasp of the content, but to compel them to produce language, even on something as mundane as a “Yellow Dog” quiz.

With the quiz completed and the answers reviewed and discussed, Dr. Carson moved on to the main part of the day's activity: a group reading and discussion of the short story in question. Dr. Carson invited students – sometimes volunteers, but often chosen by him – to read from the short story, while he would occasionally interrupt to draw attention to a vocabulary word or figure of speech, and ask the class if they knew what it was or what it meant. When the story mentioned hemlock, he would stop the reading and ask the students if they understood what hemlock was. The a student answered that it was a poisonous plant, he was satisfied with that answer and then proceeded to ask why it was mentioned. Did the students understand that hemlock was being used here as a symbol for something? Could they recognize what that symbol was for?

As the reading of the story continued from beginning to end, Dr. Carson's discussion of symbols and metaphors led into the most important part of the class discussion: the theme of the story. Could the students identify major themes in the story? Yes, they could, and they did. Could they relate the theme of this story to those of stories read earlier in the semester? Yes they could, and they did. It was in this activity where I saw students operating on multiple levels of thinking, as categorized by Benjamin Bloom (Bastos, 2003). Students were interpreting similarities between this story and previous ones, analyzing the story in question, realizing that there was an important theme to be found, synthesizing a theme from the actions depicted in the story, and evaluating the quality of the theme's presentation, both on its own merits and compared to previous stories. The whole time they were developing cognitive skills, they were producing the necessary language to express their ideas through dialogues with Dr. Carson.

But it was here that I noticed Dr. Carson falling into a common mistake: When a student was struggling for the right words to express his idea, Dr. Carson attempted to help the student by completing their idea for them. In and of itself, I saw this as counterproductive for language development, because the student is no longer producing language, the teacher is. Worse, occasionally Dr. Carson would continue his extension of the student's idea far beyond completing a sentence. Dr. Carson would finish what he assumed a student's idea was, or perhaps what he wanted it to be, and used it to direct the class discussion from that point, without ever asking the student if that was the idea he or she was trying to get across.

Dr. Carson was no longer just assisting the students with language, but actually feeding them content – perhaps not the content the student was originally trying to express. A student attempting to express one idea only to have it misinterpreted into something completely different might be discouraged from participating if it becomes a habit. I do not believe that Dr. Carson was doing this deliberately, but only as a result of his enthusiasm for the class discussion. Nevertheless, it is a habit that Dr. Carson should look to avoid. Help the students express their ideas, but make sure it really is their ideas being expressed.

Following the discussion of the story, the class took a 20 minute break, which Dr. Carson used to hand back papers and give students individual comments on their work. Not wanting to cross the line between observation and eavesdropping, I excused myself and took advantage of the opportunity to stretch my legs. When class resumed, Dr. Carson had a new exercise for the class, the purpose of which wasn't entirely clear: A “Character Profile Generator.”

As near as I could tell, the students were expected to compose an original short story at some point in the future – possibly the end of the semester. The character profile generator, as the name suggests, was a device which assisted students in creating random characters for their stories. Students would fill in a series of blanks with random letters or numbers, and then consult a series of charts to see what effect their choice had on their character. For example, if a student selected letter “E” for the second blank, then their character was between the ages of 20 to 25 years old. If the student selected number “5” for the tenth blank, then the character came from a large family, and so forth.

The potential for speech production were very limited in this activity, as students were expected to complete it on their own, and only occasionally raised their hands to ask for the definition of certain words, particularly ones involving personality types, for example, “pessimistic.” Furthermore, Dr. Carson never made it clear whether the characters created in this activity were required to be in the students' stories, or whether or not this was just a tool to be used should the students develop writer's block. My professional opinion is that an activity with the kind of depth and involvement as the character profile generator needs more explanation, particularly about its use, or else it just seems like so much filler. While I did like the activity in and of itself, and plan to use something similar in my future creative writing classes, it just seemed out of place in this ESL class.

Dr. Carson had two more activities scheduled for that day: exercises in preformulated structures and a discussion on finding a thesis for the students' research papers, but by that point, time had run out. Dr. Carson wished the class a good day and dismissed them. All told, I found Dr. Carson's class to be an enlightening and enjoyable experience, and was intrigued by just how much of it seemed, at first glance, to run against what I had come to expect from an ESL class. If I hadn't been specifically looking for the telltale signs of ESL teaching, I might have easily assumed it to be a mainstream English Composition class. Perhaps that was the whole point.

References

Bastos, G. (2003). Multiple Intelligences, Howard Gardner and New Methods in Teaching. Jersey City: Bastos Publications.

Echevarria, J., Vogt, M., & Short, D. (2008). Making Content Comprehensible for English Learners: The SIOP Model. Boston: Pearson.

Richard-Amato, P. (2010). Making it Happen: From Interactive to Participatory Language Teaching: Fourth Edition. White Plains: Pearson.