Unit One: Who are ESL students?

Learning Objectives

Instructor will be able to identify ESL learners from mainstream speakers regarding their levels of education, learning styles, and cultural background.

Mini-Lecture

The first question we have to get across is who are ESL students. This mini-lecture aims to help you identify the types of ESL students via the levels of their education, different learning styles, and the possible anxiety caused by their different cultural background.

(1) Levels of education

ESL students differ from one another in the levels of education they already have and how long they have studied English. Variations in educational level and the manner in which students learned English can manifest themselves in differing levels of proficiency in the four skills: reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

Some students are bi- and tri-lingual and may exhibit nearly native-like spoken English because they were born in the U.S. or came to this country when very young and learned English in American public school systems. These students are fluent in spoken English but often weak in writing and reading.

Other ESL students are adults who finished secondary school and/or college in their native countries and either learned English as a foreign language or picked up some English while living in the U.S. These ESL students may be graduate students who plan to return to their native countries after college. The written skills of these ESL students may be better than their listening comprehension and speaking skills. Adult ESL students often have entrenched pronunciation problems which are difficult to correct. Still other ESL students may have been educated in their native countries but did not learn English before coming to the U.S. These students have great difficulty with both written and spoken English.

The most problematic ESL students are those who are semi-illiterate in their first language because they came to the U.S. as children or were unable to obtain schooling in their native countries. Lacking knowledge of the linguistic structures of their native languages, they generally have the most difficult time learning English.

Investigation 1: Now let’s do our first investigation. For your first class during the semester, find out the level of your ESL students in your classroom by having each of them fill out a card on which is indicated: country of origin, number of years in the U.S., highest grade completed in country of origin, highest grade completed in U.S., number of years studying English, and language spoken in the home. Collect those information during your first class. They will be used within our discussion part in this unit.

(2) Different learning style

ESL students may differ in terms of their learning styles. They may be either analytical or global learners. Analytical learners are more interested in detail and rule learning and often shy away from unstructured activities. They like listening to lectures and taking notes. Global learners prefer more loosely structured communicative activities. They are more interested in communicating their main ideas than in grammar and structure.

ESL students also vary in learning styles regarding their sensory preferences. Asian students tend to be more visually oriented, whereas Latinos tend to be more auditory oriented. Visual learners who are more oriented to reading than speaking often have weaker oral/communication skills. Many ESL students are hands-on learners.

ESL students also have different listening styles. For example, there are differences in listening styles between global and analytical learners. In listening, global learners tend to focus on the main idea and the rhythm and music of the language, whereas analytical learners focus on the structure and logic of the message. Global listeners may have difficulty focusing on the details of grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary. These differing listening styles suggest that instructors should try to include both auditory and visual input in their presentations.

Investigation 2: now it’s do another investigation. For your next class, find out what type of learners you have in the classroom by conducting a Learning Styles Inventory downloaded from this website: http://www.personal.psu.edu/bxb11/LSI/LSI.htm. Ask your students to report each one of their learning style according to the survey at the end of the class. Make sure you take down the results. This result will be used in our discussion part as well.

(3) Cultural shock and anxiety

If speaking in front of an audience produces anxiety for native speakers, it is doubly so for ESL students who lack essential skills in English. ESL students who are visual learners are especially troubled by formal speaking assignments. In its acute form, this anxiety may be a manifestation of the culture shock that occurs when individuals fear they are losing themselves in the mainstream American culture. It may be characterized by extreme anxiety, panic, emotional withdrawal, and depression. While instructors should be on the lookout for students suffering from culture shock, the majority of ESL students will be experiencing simple performance anxiety.

Communication anxiety manifests itself differently depending on the individual and his or her culture. Just as with mainstream students, the symptoms of anxiety for ESL students can include poor class participation, lateness, absence, talking in class, puzzled or angry expressions, acting silly, and the inability or unwillingness to respond to questions. In general, anxiety results in lowered student motivation, inhibition, and unwillingness to take any kind of risk.

Investigation 3: This is the last investigation for this unit. Please take teaching notes for the first two weeks of your public speaking course. Pay close attention to how the ESL students present themselves and react in class. Do they look anxiety, panic, emotional withdrawal, depressed, or not at all? How do you know it from your observation? Please take detailed field notes because they will be used and shared during discussion.

Please finish collecting data for the three investigations during the first week of your course. Make sure you come back to take part in the discussion in the Learning Activities during the weekend.

Learning Activities

Congratulations that you survived the first week. Moreover, you have already collected three different types of data during the first week of your course. Now it’s the time to share what you have collected with the other instructors in this course via Discussion Forum. Please post your thread before Saturday night so that you all have enough time to read each other’s posts on Sunday and give feedbacks to at least three participants.

In your thread, please answer the following questions:

(1) From your students’ introductory cards, please identify the number of real ESL students in your class and then place them within the table as follows.

Bilingual; educated in U.S. Students' names:__________	Bilingual; educated abroad/college Students' names:_____________	No knowledge of English; educated abroad Students' names:___________	Bilingual;semi-literate in native language and in English 'Students' names:____________'
Native-like fluency in English Students' names:__________	English as a foreign language Students' names:__________	political refugees who did not learn English before coming to U.S. Students' names:__________	Little education Students' names:__________
Weak skills in Writing and reading Students' names:__________	Problem with listening comprehension and fluency; fossilized pronunciation errors Students' names:__________	Poor written and spoken English skills Students' names:__________	Poor skills, most different time learning English Students' names:__________

(2) From the Learning Style Inventory that you used in class, please collect the number of each learning types. Then check to see if there is a visible difference between mainstream students and ESL students.

(3) From the field notes you have taken within the first week, reflect upon what stand out as concern/problem to you so far. Please describe one miscommunication or frustration that you have come across relating to their multi-cultural backgrounds.

(4) At last, pick one cultural ethnicity of your ESL students, and search online to find out 2 interesting culture facts about one ethnicity. Please post your findings on a shared google docs file. In this way, we help each instructor here know ESL students better.

Conclusion

After reading the mini-lecture, we all understand that there could be big differences between ESL students and mainstream students in terms of the levels of education, learning styles, and cultural background. I am sure that those differences have been shown more or less from the three situated investigations that you have done upon your students. Thanks for sharing ideas and leaving comments for each other so that we now have a better knowledge of who ESL students are in our Public Speaking class.

For next unit, we will explore the methods to diagnose and evaluate ESL students’ speeches. Please come back one week after which is about the time for you to guide your students to do their first speech.

Click here to go to Unit Two: How to diagnose and constructively evaluate ESL students’ speeches?

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References

Bixler, B. (n.d.). Learning style inventory. Retrieved from: http://www.personal.psu.edu/bxb11/LSI/LSI.htm

ESL Teaching guide for public speaking. Retrieved from: http://college.cengage.com/communication/resources/shared/downloads/esl_guide.pdf

Horowitz, E., and D. J. Young. Language Anxiety. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1990.

Robinson, N., Keogh, B., and Kusuma-Powell. (n.d.). Chapter 6: Who are ESL students? Retrieved from: http://www.state.gov/m/a/os/44038.htm