English Language Learners

It’s been an interesting time all year, trying to figure out my students’ abilities in English. (90% are English language learners, or ELLs, meaning English is not their first language.) In many ways, they’re quite advanced. The books I teach are the same level, often the same books, as what I read as an honors student. Most Logos classes are taught around the level of an honors class in America. Graduates now in US colleges, or those who move to the US, find the classes easier than Logos. Logos is generally regarded as the toughest school in Cambodia. (Although, with about 6 international schools extending to twelfth grade, that’s not saying as much as it might. High-caliber education is a very recent development in Cambodia.)

On the other hand, students have to put in tremendous effort to meet our standards. You might think that after eight or ten years of attending school taught by native English speakers, my students would have the same English language ability as a typical native speaker. But a language is such an enormously complicated system of information. It’s more and more amazing to me that anybody is ever fluent in a language, let alone that God created children’s minds to acquire their native language without really trying. My students have three major disadvantages: they didn’t learn English from infancy (even though several have now forgotten Khmer and use English exclusively), most things outside of Logos are not in English, and they learn from many models of incorrect English: namely, each other.

Take grammar, for instance. My students still struggle with when to put “the” or “a” in front of nouns and when to add “-s” or “-ed” to verbs. Some mistakes are deeply engrained, like “few days later” instead of “a few.” They still write truly mangled sentences from time to time (especially newer arrivals), as well as many that just don’t quite work. This is something I expected, but I’m still working on what to do with it. How often do I correct students’ mistakes in essays and projects? Should I ever correct them verbally? Which grammar activities help, and which are too isolated from their real-life experiences? One history teacher has remarked several times that it’s hard to decipher student papers, and I wonder what to do to help them write legibly.

And vocab! Students study the words on vocab lists, but are missing many common words that don’t show up often in the classroom. So they’re mostly comfortable with academic or Biblical words like “punctuation” and “perseverance” and “predestination,” but might have no idea about words like “pacifier” or “pitcher” or “pioneers.” They also tend to know fewer synonyms and thus feel more comfortable using boring word choice in papers, like “said” and “went” instead of “retorted” or “dashed.” A few at the opposite end go thesaurus-crazy, with a tendency to put in obscure or inappropriate words. A recent example: “He searched for poetic sources from the everyday happenings. From that careful double-check, he derived into a conclusion.” Lessons on word choice can easily lead to a sense of frustration and inadequacy if I’m not careful.

Interpretation is a huge one. Students are often insecure about what they’ve read, making them more hesitant to rely on context clues to figure out new words. Critical thinking is also not a value emphasized in Khmer culture, which instead values rote memorization. Some adoptive parents told me their teens have no idea how to put together jigsaw puzzles. A few of my students have amazing memories for detail: they can describe a scene and recall characters much better than I can after several readings, but they honestly don’t know how to infer things about it. Thankfully, this is certainly not the case for all my students, and critical thinking is something they’ve worked hard to learn. Even in upper levels, though, it’s sometimes quite difficult for them to draw connections that seem obvious to me.

I love my ELLs, and overall I’m amazed at how well they do. Not only can they define “perseverance,” but most of them live it out, fighting to understand each new reading and to express ideas clearly. Learning is such a messy process, particularly developing abstract skills like those involved in a Language Arts class. I’m trying to remember to be patient with myself as I guide their development: I’m neither their first English teacher, nor their last.