Over the weekend I went to New Jersey to visit my distant family who has just arrived from India. I was talking to one my cousin who is attending Edison High School, NJ about her experience in the high school. I was really surprised to find to that she actually skipped school after going there for two days. My cousin is in the twelfth grade and she is semi proficient in English. She was enrolled in the English medium speaking school and she lived in Bombay which is one of the biggest city in India. In Bombay, predominantly of the people are bilingual and are exposed to many of the western traditions. She told me that after the first day she got lost in the school system. There was no one there to show her around and she kept on arriving late to classes. She said that she got frustrated and angry that she wasn’t able to locate her classes that she just bailed out of school. I asked her “why didn’t you ask for help?” She said that after the bell all the teachers had closed their door. She said she couldn’t find anyone to help her and I am sure that she must have felt really nervous about just wondering in the hallways. I told her that she shouldn’t skip classes anymore and that she could get into big trouble. In India the student’s were allowed to leave school in High School without severe consequences. She didn’t know that she could get in trouble if she left school. I thought this was very absurd and weird that the school didn’t provide adequate help and support to a foreign student who has just arrived to this country. This raises lot of questions in my mind. What are the support systems of incoming EL Learner? Who is responsible for helping the EL learner to adjust to the new environment? Who checks up on the progress of the EL learner? Does this occur in all school or just in urban schools? Who is responsible for familiarizing the students to the high school environment and rules? We have read a lot about the challenging facing teaching the EL learner but we have never shed a light on the support system. Most of these students arrive to the high school with very little background and language skills. How can we just leave them stranded? How can we expect EL learner to make progress in the classroom if we can’t adequately support and accommodate them to the transition of American school system?
I agree with the article “What’s language got to do with it?....” that there is a didactic tension that exist between teaching students and how student perform science in the classroom. This problem is reoccurring theme not just in EL learner but non EL learner as well. During my student teaching I realized that it is very hard to find a good science lab which incorporates the content as well as student surroundings. Most of the experiments are old and come from lab manuals which were written in the 80’s. Most of the labs have very little incorporation of technology and student’s surrounding. The labs are very boring and irrelevant to the students. We need to incorporate and design more labs which assimilate student’s culture and the science content. It is very hard to develop labs that meet these criteria because most of the labs don’t take into account culture diversity emerging in the school system. I definitely agree with the authors when they state that students comprehend more when they are given opportunity to perform science. But I wonder do the currents labs take in to account student diversity and its relationship to the content? I believe that most of the labs need to be revised and refined so that they meet the student culture and content. Students learn the most when they are motivated to do solve a problem which forces them to think critically. We need to throw way labs which focuses on following set of procedure without taking consideration into students everyday life.
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Thanks for sharing your cousin's experiences- it really helped learn about what school is really like for an ELL student. It's interesting that you mentioned that she is semi-proficient in English. In my high school physics class there was a girl from India, and I remember her explaining that yes she can speak English, but she learned British English in India which is a little bit different than English spoken in the U.S. I'm wondering if teachers/counselors assumed your cousin would be OK and adapt well because she already knows some English as opposed to an ELL student that does not know even one word of English. There should have been support systems for her. Schools should have protocols for supporting ELL students, just like there are other protocols, like dealing with bullying. I wonder also because it was a high school where there are many more students than an elementary school, that it is much easier for a student to sort of "get lost in the crowd" and not held accountable for. I really hope that your cousin will go back to school and find a place where she feels comfortable. Definitely keep encouraging her!
Your cousin's experiences really shed a light on the experiences of ELL students in the US. I definitely think that schools should have a system for helping these students adapt to the school so they don't just get lost in the shuffle and frustrated, like you cousin. This situation could even be difficult for a new student from another school in the US and schools need to provide support systems for students new to the school. In the elementary school in East Hartford that I am interning at, new students arrive at the school often. It is not as hard for them because they have one teacher all day, but finding that teacher in the morning is difficult. On Thursday, I encountered a child entering the school for the first time from Bolivia. She was looking for her fourth grade classroom, but didn't know her teachers name or how to ask for help. One of the teachers noticed her discomfort and managed to discover what she needed and took her down to the fourth grade classrooms. Even this school should have a protocol for helping students find their classrooms so they don't wander around the school, confused and anxious. As Kim said, keep encouraging your cousin and I hope things improve for her!
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