Teaching English as a Second Language: Role of the ESL Teacher - Essay Example

Teaching English as a Second Language: Role of the ESL Teacher Introduction: The growing number of migrants, refugees and international in nations such as the United States, United Kingdom and Australia has increased the scope and significance of ESL teaching programs. The learning needs of the large number of ESL students who are from language backgrounds other than English and who learn English as a second language has resulted in a number of studies, researches and surveys on teaching English as a second language. The ultimate aim of the ESL programs is to improve the English language proficiency of the identified ESL learners and to make them competent enough to communicate with their peers and their teachers, participate in the classroom activities and to achieve learning outcomes as the first language learners. This paper seeks to explore the various ESL programs with special reference to the different roles played by the ESL teacher, the modes of delivery of the ESL programs, the diversity of ESL learners, the key theories and ideas about second language acquisition, the planning and programming of ESL lesson sequencing and the various ESL teaching strategies employed by ESL teachers. The roles of the ESL teacher: As ESL teaching is a complex process that demands professional competence, dedication and a sound knowledge of the various strategies and practices associated with second language teaching, ESL teachers have a pivotal role in the teaching learning process of English as a second language. One of the great challenges of the ESL teacher is to provide targeted, curriculum-based English language instruction to meet the linguistic learning needs of the students. The roles of the ESL teachers include identifying , assessing the English language competence of ESL learners and prioritizing their need for English learning support; determining appropriate modes of delivery for the school’s ESL program; planning and teaching ESL programs; “assessing, monitoring and reporting on their ESL students’ English learning progress in tune with the ESL Scales; working collaboratively with class teachers; assisting in the completion of the school’s ESL Annual Survey and ESL New Arrivals surveys; and “providing advice and professional support to school executive and other teachers on appropriate teaching programs and practices for ESL students” (NSW Department of Education and Training, 2004, p. 2). It is the duty of the ESL supervisors to support, lead and supervise the ESL teachers and to facilitate collaborative teaching among ESL and other teachers. Sharpe (2004) makes a number of distinctions between a mainstream teacher and an ESL teacher. For the author, “ESL teacher’s knowledge about the process of acquiring a second language” is an added advantage and the ESL teacher’s primary role is to develop language competence in the learners “to use language appropriately according to the audience, purpose and context (pragmatic competence)” (Sharpe, 2004, p. 1). For this, the ESL teachers should be aware of the importance of the learning environment, should scaffold on the previous learning experiences of the learner, identify the specific learning needs of the learners, make sequence of activities and modification of learning activities in tune with the language proficiency of the students, build on principles of Second Language Acquisition, and constantly plan, assess and evaluate the progress made by the learners (Sharpe, 2004, p. 2-3). Thus, for the author, an “ESL teacher then is not a remedial teacher or a literacy teacher or an extra pair of hands in the classroom. They are teachers with specialist knowledge, understanding and training that equips them to support students for whom English is a second language” (Sharpe, 2004, p.2-3). Modes of delivery for ESL programs: There are mainly three modes of delivery for ESL programs that are categorized into direct ESL teaching modes, collaborative ESL teaching modes, and resource ESL teaching modes. The Direct ESL teaching modes offer “instruction to groups of ESL students separately from their class or grade peers”, in the Collaborative ESL teaching modes the ESL teachers and class or KLA teachers share the responsibility of teaching through joint or team teaching programs and group teaching programs, and in the Resource ESL teaching modes ESL teachers’ expertise is used as “a professional development resource for individual teachers or the whole school staff” (NSW Department of Education and Training, 2004, p. 10). All these three modes can be either used separately or each of these modes can be used to complement other modes of ESL delivery. The direct teaching modes include tutorial or withdrawal model, elective model or the parallel model; the collaborative ESL teaching modes make use of either the joint teaching/team teaching model or the group teaching model; and the Resource ESL teaching modes are comprised of the teacher development model and the school development model aimed at supporting class teachers and the ESL students respectively. The implementation of the appropriate modes of ESL program delivery need to take into account factors such as the number of ESL students and their levels of English proficiency in each year, the number of ESL teacher allocation, the total number of newly arrived students, the numbers of ESL students choosing particular electives (high schools), numbers of students anticipated to transfer from IECs/IEHS (high schools), subject teaching expertise of ESL teachers (high schools), and the numbers of newly arrived students anticipated to enroll during the year (NSW Department of Education and Training, 2004, p. 12). The diversity of ESL learners and the ESL phases: The diversity of the ESL learners poses a major challenge to the ESL teachers. The ESL teacher should always bear in mind that the students “have a diverse range of backgrounds and English language learning needs” and therefore the ESL programs need to be able to cater for the diverse range of English language learning needs of all ESL students” (NSW Department of Education and Training, 2004, p. 5). In Australia, the diversity of ESL learners vary from students who are born in Australia, or those who have arrived as permanent or temporary migrants, refugees or international students. Their levels of prior education, literacy skills and knowledge of English vary considerably and therefore the ESL teachers have to be extremely adaptable and innovative while designing ESL lesson sequencing and strategies for this diverse group of ESL learners. ESL Learner phases: Based on the differing levels of English Language competence, the ESL programs are arranged into three phases-first, second, or third phase of ESL. As ESL learner is promoted from the first phase to the second and third based on factors such as “the student’s previous educational experience, literacy skills in the first language and previous learning of English” (NSW Department of Education and Training, 2004, p. 5). The first phase of the ESL is aimed at learners who have limited fluency in English to communicate themselves in social and educational situations and during the 9 months of the first phase of the ESL these students are expected to develop various levels of literacy in English. The second phase of ESL learners include those students who have acquired basic communications skills in English and the goal of the second phase is to develop the oral English language skills of students so that they develop the confidence to actively participate in classroom activities, formal and informal situations in and outside the classroom. The third phase of the ESL learning aims at developing the English proficiency of the learners to ‘a level approaching that of first language speakers’(NSW Department of Education and Training, 2004, p. 6). Key theories and ideas about second language acquisition those underpin ESL teaching and learning: The theoretical background for ESL teaching methods can be traced back o Vygotsky’s social learning theory. Scaffolding, the underlying principle behind the ESL training, is an offshoot of Vygotsky’s social learning theory. For Vygotsky, the most effective learning always occurs within the ZPD (zone of proximal development) and for him “it is only when support is required that new learning will take place, since the learner is then likely to be working within the ZPD. It is this task-specific support, designed to help the learner independently to complete the same or similar tasks later in new contexts, which we understood to be scaffolding” (social learning theory) (Hammond & Gibbons, 2005, p. 8). The primary objective of scaffolding is to make the ESL students independent learners. The students should be able to transfer their skills and understandings to new learning contexts. As Rose & Acevedo make it clear “the scaffolding interaction cycle describes precisely how this social learning takes place over time, emphasizing both the preparation and elaboration steps, in which teachers provide the scaffolding support” (Rose & Acevedo 2006, p. 36). The ESL teacher should always bear in mind that ‘guided reading’ that does not involve the preparatory stage and the practice of giving students different levels of tasks separate students into ‘ability groups’ and enhance learning gap as less successful students fail to catch up with their more successful peers. Therefore, ESL teaching strategies should be aimed at enhancing various language skills rather than focusing on the innate ‘abilities’ of the learners which will narrow the learning gap between various learners. Halliday’s systemic functional model of language, on the other hand, view “language as a social semiotic, and is a functional theory in the sense that it is concerned with the ways in which language functions to make meanings in various cultural, social and vocational contexts” (Hammond & Gibbons, 2005, p. 9). The theory advocates teaching language through language, and teaching about language explicitly and deliberately in and through classroom interactions. Halliday’s systemic functional model of language also offers fresh insights into the scaffolding model as the theory emphasizes on opportunities in participating in a wide level of learning contexts where the teachers need to offer them as much as support or scaffolding as needed by various learners. Drawing conclusions from Vygotsky’s and Halliday’s models, Hammond & Gibbons (2005) made a more comprehensive and enriched model of scaffolding which they termed as Scaffolding at the Macro ‘designed-in’ level. The authors put forward the concept of scaffolding at the macro ‘designed-in’ level which takes into account such factors as students’ prior knowledge and experience, selection of tasks, sequencing of tasks, participant structures, semiotic systems, mediational texts, and meta-linguistic and meta-cognitive awareness (Hammond & Gibbons, 2005, p. 13). The authors argue that scaffolding at the macro level should be supplemented with Scaffolding at the Micro level: Interactional Scaffolding. For them, Interactional scaffolding involve linking to prior experience of the learner and pointing forward in terms of broader conceptual frameworks of the curriculum, recapping or summing up the major points of the interaction at the end of each session, appropriating contributions from the students and recasting them into more appropriate discourses, gathering cued elicitation and increasing prospectiveness from the part of the learner (Hammond & Gibbons, 2005, p. 20-24). Programming and planning: NSW Department of Education and Training (2004) offers a number of guidelines for schools in teaching English as a Second Language. The ESL support is offered mainly through two specific purpose programs: the ESL Targeted Support Program and the ESL New Arrivals Program. The ESL Targeted Support Program is offered to the sufficient number of identified ESL students by specialist ESL teachers whereas the ESL New Arrivals Program aim at offering ESL support to the eligible newly-arrived students (NSW Department of Education and Training, 2004, p. 1). The ESL teaching programs need to be integrated into the curriculum so that students can learn the specific language associated with various subject and curriculum areas. The ultimate aim of all ESL programs should be at offering scaffolded support for ESL learners. Similarly, there should be collaborative or team teaching programs where the classroom teachers need to assist the ESL teachers in the delivery of ESL programs. The ESL programming and planning are done in tune with the language learning needs of ESL students as identified from the ESL Scales outcomes. ESL Curriculum Framework K-6 for learners focus on six main language areas: “describing, recounting, responding, instructing, explaining and persuading” whereas “the English 7-10 Syllabus includes outcomes from the ESL Scales which have been mapped against the syllabus content to show a pathway from ESL students’ current levels of English to the level of language needed to achieve the English syllabus outcomes” (NSW Department of Education and Training, 2004, p. 9). The ESL learners who have been studying learning English for more than five years can opt for the Higher School Certificate English (ESL) course too. Rose & Acevedo (2006) purport that one of the major challenges before an ESL teacher is to close the gap and accelerate learning in the middle years of learning through the innovative Learning to Read: Reading to Learn program (LRRL). The LRRL program offers two sets of skills for accelerating learning and closing the ‘ability’ gap in the classroom (Rose & Acevedo 2006, p. 36). Drawing conclusions from the IRRL approach, the ESL Teacher can follow the scaffolding interaction cycle that involves the three stages of preparing the students for learning tasks, successful completion of the actual learning task and finally the elaboration stage whereby the students internalize what they have learned or understood from the task (Rose & Acevedo 2006, p. 36). Assessment of ESL learners and the ESL Scales: Making use of the ESL scales, the ESL learners at the various phases are evaluated in terms of their proficiency (learning achievement) in oral interaction, reading and responding, and writing. In fact, the ESL scales work as a guide to understand the required level of learner skills at each phase of the ESL learning process. The performance assessment of the ESL learners are done through a number of assessment programs which include “the Basic Skills Test and the Primary Writing Assessment in Years 3 and 5, the Computer Skills Assessment in Year 6, the English Language and Literacy Assessment in Years 7 and 8 and the Secondary Numeracy Assessment Program in Years 7 and 8” (NSW Department of Education and Training, 2004, p. 8). The data gained from theses assessment programs ‘assist schools in identifying literacy and numeracy needs of ESL learners’. ESL teaching strategies: There is no doubt that learners who are exposed to reading at home are more likely to perform at written tasks at schools. Keeping this fact in mind, the LRRL program uses a six stage curriculum at the completion of which the student is expected to be an independent writer. These six stages include preparation before reading (which includes background information, loud reading, elaboration and general comprehension), detailed reading (which include defining, explaining, and discussing the meaning of each phrase as it is read), preparing for writing, Joint Rewriting, Individual Rewriting, and Independent Writing (Rose & Acevedo 2006, 36-39). Similarly, the LRRL program follows a language model which holds that there are three levels of language that an ESL teacher should inculcate in his/her learners while reading and writing-“patterns within the text, patterns within the sentence, and patterns within the word” (Rose & Acevedo 2006, p. 41). The Reading to Learn program is an intensive approach to scaffolding student literacy and is based on three core principles. They are: reading is the fundamental mode of learning and therefore it needs to be integrated with the curriculum of primary and secondary schooling; all students should be taught the same level of skills in reading and writing without any sort of ‘ability’ gaps; and, teachers need to support students to succeed at the same high level (Rose & Acevedo, 2007, p. 1). Reading, to be effective, the learning tasks should assist students to recognize patterns of language at three distinct levels-at the level of the text, the sentence and the word. The same principles are applied to the process of writing too; reading and writing are interrelated and without knowledge of these three elements one cannot become good at writing. Besides, one should also bear in mind that the complexity of language patterns varies from one text to another and one subject area to another. Modeling and scaffolding are key strategies to be employed in the development of listening and speaking skills among the ESL learners. The teacher models each activity and the learners watch, listen and practice each task until they do them correctly and “by these means we learn most of the tasks that are part of everyday life, as well as many of the specialized tasks for making a living” (Rose, Lui-Chivizhe, McKnight & Smith, 2004, p. 42). Similarly, through “the use of scaffolding strategies a teacher can support learners to read and write far more complex texts than they normally could on their own” (Rose, Lui-Chivizhe, McKnight & Smith, 2004, 42). In this respect, the scaffolding strategies used at the Koori Centre deserve attention: the starting point of the scaffolding started with the reading process and then moved to the writing skills. The various steps included in these processes are preparing for reading, detailed reading, elaborating meanings, drawing attention to text patterns, and making notes and writing. Similarly, they moved from ‘more familiar kinds of texts to more complex and abstract ones’; they moved from simple biographies to new texts with education as the topic (Rose, Lui-Chivizhe, McKnight & Smith, 2004, p. 47). Reviewing Gibbon’s book, Cynthia Rosenberger (2003) exhorts the ESL teachers to view ESL learners as “full members of a school community who need linguistically and culturally rich learning environments and teachers who provide an array of scaffolding, not remedial phonic programs and reduced curriculum” (Rosenberger, 2003, p. 310). For him, interaction is the key to ESL teaching –learning process: he offers “a rich array of alternative interactions to the initiation/response/feedback (IRF) pattern of interaction, including questions and openings that encourage students to produce long sketches of discourse; group work that requires talk rather than simply encourages talk; explicit teaching about what and how language is used in specific learning tasks; adequate wait time; and multiple chances to respond” (Rosenberger, 2003, p. 310). Conclusions: It can thus be concluded that the ESL the ESL program, to be effective, “should operate as an integral part of the whole school curriculum, with ESL teachers working in cooperation with class teachers and other specialist teachers to support ESL students” (NSW Department of Education and Training, 2004, p.2). It is not the sole responsibility of the ESL teachers to improve the linguistic capacity of the learners in the school; the ESL teachers need to ensure the cooperation and collaborative efforts of all other teachers. However, the ESL programs call for professionally qualified teachers who are well aware of the various strategies, methodologies and approaches of teaching English as a second language. References Rosenberger, C. (2003). Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning: Teaching Second Language Learners in the Mainstream Classroom. Language Arts, 80(4), 310. Hammond, J & Gibbons, P (April 2005) ‘Putting scaffolding to work: The contribution of scaffolding in articulating ESL education’ in Prospect. An Australian Journal of TESOL, 2005 20 (1), ed. Lynda Yates, AMEP Research Centre. NSW Department of Education and Training, Multicultural programs Unit (2004) English as a Second Language Guidelines for Schools, NSW Department of Education and Training State Literacy Strategy policies and support materials. Rose, D. & Acevedo, C. (2006). Closing the gap and accelerating learning in the Middle Years of Schooling. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 14 (2). Rose, D. & Acevedo, C. (2007). Reading (and writing) to learn in the middle years of schooling. Pen 157. Sydney: Primary English Teaching Association, 1-8. Rose, D., Lui-Chivizhe, L., McKnight, A. & Smith, A. (2004). Scaffolding Academic Reading and Writing at the Koori Centre. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 30th Anniversary Edition, 41-9. Sharpe, T. (July, 2004). So what is ‘special’ about an ESL teacher? In ATESOL Newsletter, 3(2). Read More