English Language Learners and the New Standards. Margaret Heritage
have more English.” Yet, imagine if the pace and excitement of work in Ms. Warren’s class were the norm. ELL students might exit the ELL category more rapidly and better tooled!
A number of the same teachers also worry that Ms. Warren does not correct her students’ English. What they have yet to realize is that when students are needlessly corrected, they are not only discouraged from developing their ability to participate in academic practices, they are also delegitimized and belittled in their efforts to contribute, as the following example poignantly demonstrates.
In her book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, an ethnography of the tragic consequences arising from miscommunication between a California Central Valley medical community and immigrant Hmong refugees, Ann Fadiman relates an incident in a middle school. The teacher had given her class an assignment that required students to describe an autobiographical event. May, a Hmong ELL, wrote an essay about the harrowing experience of her family escaping their home village, walking with small children and babies through territories impacted by a vicious war. May’s essay powerfully conveys well-sequenced events, including the abandonment of valuable property the family had started their journey carrying, and sadness and appreciation for the sacrifice made. May’s writing is reproduced here exactly as she wrote it:
My parents had to carried me and two of my younger sisters, True and Yer. My mom could only carried me, and my dad could only my sister. True with many other things which they have to carry such as, rices (food), clothing, and blankets for overnight. My parents pay one of the relative to carry Yer. One of my sister who died in Thailand was so tire of walking saying that she can’t go on any longer. But she dragged along and made it to Thailand.
There was gun shot going on and soldier were close to every where. If there was a gun shot, we were to look for a place to hide. On our trip to Thailand, there were many gun shots and instead of looking for a place to hide, my parents would dragged our hands or put us on their back and run for their lifes. When it gets too heavy, my parents would tossed some of their stuff away. Some of the things they had throw away are valuable to them, but our lives were more important to them than the stuffs.14
May has used the resources she had developed so far to communicate this tragic and admirable experience. She understands the assignment as an invitation to engage in action and narrate a powerful personal experience. From a communicative point of view, she succeeds. The teacher, however, responds to May’s assignment with these comments:
“You have had an exciting life!” wrote her teacher at the end of the essay. “Please watch verbs in the past tense.”15
A more appropriate response would have been for the teacher to have expressed her respect and sympathy for May’s effort to relate such a painful incident, acknowledging her action. She also errs pedagogically by focusing first on formal aspects of the language, the correct use of the past tense. In fact, one could argue that May has developed an understanding of the rule for the past tense in English (add ed to the verb), but her knowledge of the rule is incomplete, so she overgeneralizes it to verbs that do not follow the pattern. Later on, at some point in the lesson, the teacher could have said: “By the way, I see you have detected a pattern in the formation of past tense of verbs in English, that is wonderful. But languages are complicated, and as well as having rules, languages also have exceptions that make learning them difficult. Let us take a look at some instances of exceptions to the rule in your paper . . .”
From May’s teacher’s actions, we might conclude that she does not have a deep understanding of how the English language works; she fails to see in May’s writing the beginning of her development and control of the linguistic system. To ensure May’s committed future participation in class and her resulting growth, the teacher would do better to make efforts to recognize her strengths in communicating and to work on building her confidence. Every time teachers engage first in meaning making with students, they develop their interest in communicating and their willingness later on to review their oral and written productions to improve them.
In Tanya Warren’s class, we see quite a different response to her students’ communicative efforts as she redirects students’ performance as it relates to the important elements of the science practices they are learning. For example, when a student draws an inference from his observation of the simulation about electrons, he says, “Why the electron is so smaller and so faster?” Although the teacher’s instructions have been to observe and ask questions, Ms. Warren responds, “How do you know it is an electron?” When the student replies, “Because the electron is smaller, I know this,” she redirects him: “But we just had to observe the simulation, it did not say ‘electron’ in the simulation, right? What did you see?” leading the student to respond, “little circles.” Ms. Warren’s objective is to apprentice her students in the scientific practices of keen observation and of asking questions about the observations. She also wants her students to develop conceptual understandings related to the subatomic particles. In future lessons, they will continue developing their understanding as well as the concomitant language uses.
While we have stressed the language in action approach and the benefits of engaging students in language use in worthwhile disciplinary contexts, occasionally and strategically, teachers can leverage a “language moment,” calling attention to a salient feature of language and explaining how it works. Immediately after, the teacher continues work on substantive aspects of ideas and analytical practices for which that specific language is used. In employing this language moment, the teacher is somewhat akin to an orchestra conductor, who may need to isolate the violins to focus on a few bars, and when satisfied that the desired level of playing has been reached, immediately returns the violins to continue playing the symphony with the full orchestra, making the music the composer intended.
Language use spirals in sophistication, depth, and eventually correctness, based on the opportunities students have to use it to express important ideas, and it always develops simultaneously with conceptual understanding and analytical disciplinary practices.
From . . . Emphasizing discrete structural features of language
To . . . Showing how language is purposeful and patterned
All languages are patterned. There is regularity in the way linguistic elements are used to indicate the types of actions speakers or writers want to accomplish, for example, in convincing somebody to use a particular type of product or to leave a bathroom clean after it is used. To illustrate this further, we’ll consider the use of persuasion in advertising.
There is a continuum in the degree of force that a persuasive text conveys depending on its use of modal verbs. An advertisement can convey different suggestive pressures depending on which of these statements is used: You could have multiple admirers if only . . . or Be popular . . . or You ought to look nicer this summer . . . ELLs need to understand these differences in order to recognize the impact that language can have on others.16
Likewise, texts of a certain type or genre follow similar organization, and use similar expressions. When we hear a colleague say, “Oh boy, what a class I had during my fifth period today . . . ,” we expect this to be the beginning of a narrative to give us information, or to entertain us or make a point. We know our friend’s story will unpack an event that made the day special for her in one way or another! We also expect that specific events will be linked by words such as then, after that, suddenly. This understanding of the social function of texts, their organization, and typical language enables speakers or readers to orient themselves to the act of communicating. For example, whenever students hear “How are you?” from somebody they do not know well, they should recognize that the other person is being friendly and greeting them. They should also know that only certain responses, such as “Fine, how are you?” or “I’m doing well, thank you” are appropriate. They should know that saying “Today is Monday” or “I am feeling terrible, I have a bad headache and I didn’t sleep very well last night,” while grammatical and even factual, are inappropriate responses to the question asked.
The same is true of written texts. For example, short stories and essays are very different types of texts, and in each of these genres their purposes