My experience with teaching ESOL is limited to one student with whom I 
am working now. A Puerto Rican who landed in Vermont, J-rod has very 
limited English and I have non-existent Spanish skills. I really 
appreciate this experience because it forces me to rethink most of my 
assumptions about learning, language, alphabetic principles, and basic 
reading instruction. We spend a lot of time discussing the similarities 
and differences of our two languages, and I think that has made us both 
more aware of the structural and mechanical components of English and 
Spanish.

J-rod and I meet daily when we read from the series titled Reading for 
Adults. This series has many small easy to read booklets, one page is a 
picture, the next page is a line or two of text. It is very repetitive 
and predictable. First I read a line, then he reads it. After we've read 
the entire book, we read it again in unison. Finally he reads it by 
himself. The series comes with work sheets for each book that address 
things like capitalization, identifying sounds in letter patterns, 
re-reading, and responding critically in some way. Along with this, we 
often stop midway through a book to discuss a something in an 
illustration or a related personal experience. We frequently list the 
names of things in one of a book's illustrations, or I ask J-rod to find 
items in the pictures. Often for homework, I'll ask J-rod to write lists 
of words, 50 words that have to do with basketball, for instance, or 25 
verbs, or 25 words that begin with the letter "P". Usually these kinds 
of assignments are in response to words J-rod may have difficulties 
pronouncing. Ancillary to the books, we practice the Dolch basic sight 
words. We start with a group of words and J-rod translates them into 
Spanish. He learns to read them, spell them, and use them in spoken and 
written English. The Reading for Adults series was written for adult 
emerging readers, not for ESOL students, but it is uncanny how the words 
J-rod has the most problems with are the very same words the worksheets 
use for practice.

Robin, I would reiterate the comments you make about phonological 
awareness. There is a theory of human development and language 
acquisition that says infants' brains are prewired to hear and 
distinguish among every different sound. The infant is emersed in his or 
her native language, and the ability to distinguish sounds not used in 
the native language is lost as a normal consequence of brain 
development. Use it or lose it is the way it was presented to me in my 
human development courses. If this theory is correct, it must have large 
implications for adults trying to learn a new language. I know for a 
fact that I cannot hear many of the sounds of J-rod's Spanish when he 
tries to get me to speak a word in his language. I have also witnessed 
the difficulty he has with such seemingly simple English sounds such as 
the 'di' in dig, dip, did, distance, different, and dim. J-rod always 
pronounces them as deeg, deep, deed, etc. and I wonder if he is acutally 
unable to hear the difference.

With my limited experience in ESOL teaching, I wonder if I should be 
less anal about pronouncing letter groups correctly. After all, he is 
consistent, it's understandable and functional among Anglophiles,  it's 
very closely related to the accent of Spanish speaking people. But 
something deep down is telling me this is important from a 
psycholinguistic, or phonological standpoint. If it is hard for an adult 
to hear the sounds of language, how will J-rod learn the sounds of 
English if I am not constantly bringing them to his attention? Maybe you 
would shed some light on this for me.

I have a final comment about the references to learning disabilities. 
I'm a special educator and reading teacher by training. I have grown 
rather cynical about the term, learning disability. It is a label thrown 
around by schools to explain why they can't teach certain students who 
don't fit neatly into the molds created by our education system. An 
equally valid way of looking at it would be to call it a teaching 
disability instead of a learning disability. Regarding the ramifications 
for ESOL students, I have to wonder, if we put the same effort into 
finding ways to connect to each individual student as we do in 
identifying, testing, screening, and labeling individuals as being 
learning disabled, we'd be way ahead of the game. If we go to a great 
length to identify a person with a learning disability, what does that 
really mean for instruction? Instead of assessment for identification, 
we should conduct assessment that is diagnostic to help teachers decide 
what and how to teach so it is beneficial to the student.

Tom Woods

robinschwarz1 at aol.com wrote:


> Dear FOB listers----While those six factors that impact adult ESOL 

> learners can sometimes be identified individually, more often they 

> overlap.   Take the case of very low or non-literate ESOL learners for 

> example.  They often fail to thrive, in my observations, because of a 

> number of these factors:

>  

> First we can look at how the lack of education impacts phonological 

> skills:  Persons with no literacy necessarily have undeveloped 

> phonological skills--those foundation skills needed for reading and 

> writing.  Because they have not learned how text represents speech, 

> they do not have a sense of sound chunks and the sequence of chunks. 

> The most advanced skill in detecting sound chunks is phonemic 

> awareness-- being able to identify and then manipulate individual 

> sounds in words.  This is a counterintuitive process since we do not 

> naturally hear all the individual sounds in words when someone speaks. 

> It is an awareness that develops as we learn to read and spell.

>

> Yet instruction in reading for these low level learners almost always 

> STARTS  with the alphabet, phonics and blending sounds-- which is 

> pretty much graduate school as phonological skills go! 

>

> Then we need to consider all the other things that the lack of 

> education means and how teaching practices may not take those factors 

> into account: 

>         **These learners very likely lack experience with pictures and 

> interpreting two-dimensional information; 

>         **they don't have the motor skills needed for holding a pencil 

> and writing in spaces or on lines (and they may not easily understand 

> the concept of writing "on" lines); 

>         **They don't understand about text and how it represents speech. 

>       

> Perhaps most important to remember is that these learners do not have 

> the concepts or language to talk about learning and language that 

> educated learners do.

>

> Let's think about what that implies for their learning in usual ESOL 

> settings:

> It is common in adult ESOL for learners to be placed on the basis of 

> oral skills only. This means "Beginning" ESOL" is a mixture of 

> learners with no education, some education and a lot of education.  

> What  then happens is that the teacher inevitably talks about 

> language:  "Can you make that negative?"  "Let's make a question from 

> this sentence,"   " No, you said "He" --so the verb has to agree-- it 

> has to be "goes' not 'go'. "      And the teacher writes these things 

> on the board.      The learner  with no education is now totally 

> confused and lost.  How can she or he relate to something  she or he 

> has never heard of and does not have words for in the home language?  

> (And don't forget that just because there ARE words, as in Spanish, 

> the learner does not have them, having never been to school.) 

>

> Gillespie* reported in her study of the feasibility of native language 

> literacy instruction that adult ESOL learners with low literacy often 

> report being overwhelmed and completely confused by proceedings in 

> ESOL classes.  It is easy to see why. 

>

> Solarzano,* in a wonderful study on adult ESOL learners in 

> Philadelphia noted that there seems to be some unwritten criterion 

> that a learner needs to have comfort with text to be in a beginning 

> ESOL conversation class- --it is NOT just about speaking and 

> listening.  There is a LOT of writing and text used.  He speculated 

> that this was a big cause of uneducated learners' dropping out--and I 

> agree.  

>

> Thus we see the role of inappropriate teaching-- using perfectly good 

> ESOL techniques that are aimed too high and are too full of 

> assumptions about metalinguistic knowledge, a mistake that happens 

> when the learners' educational level is not fully taken into account 

> in the design and delivery of instruction. 

>

> Tomorrow I will describe an adult ESOL class where virtually all of 

> the factors I have identified came into play.

>

> Robin

>

> *These reports are available from the National Center on Adult Literacy. 

>    

>

>

>          

>

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