Wednesday, March 7, 2012

ESL 101

Lately the topic of older adopted children learning English has come up in several discussions. Since I've taught English as a Second Language for the past ten years, I thought I'd put in my two cents. Here are my top recommendations for people adopting older children:
  • Talking before literacy. Initially your goal should be to build oral vocabulary. Your kid should know what a cat is before learning that c-a-t spells cat. Starting literacy too soon, especially for kids who are not literate in their first language, sends the dangerous message that reading is making noises in response to symbols on a page. Reading is about communicating thoughts - let your kids learn to communicate their thoughts in oral English first, and then apply the skill to reading.
  • Watch what you say. Literally. Videotape yourself talking and watch how many false starts, sentence fragments and idiomatic expressions you use. We all do it. You can train yourself to speak in simple, complete sentences. Initially you will be your child's primary source of English input - your goal is to make that input as understandable as possible.
  • You probably do this naturally, but use gestures and visual aids to show what you are talking about, and repeat yourself a lot. Narrate what you and your child are doing: "I am getting the juice from the refrigerator, we are going to have juice, here is your juice, here is my juice, enjoy your juice!"
  • "Build schema" i.e. go do stuff before you read about it. Go to the park before you read a book about parks. Go to a museum before reading about dinosaurs. Give your kid an experience to which s/he can connect the book. 
  • Use what your child already knows to make connections to new learning. Books about Ethiopia/rural Africa/farms/cars etc will make it easier for your child to learn English. Not to mention it shows respect for her/his previous experiences before coming to you. 
  •  When you begin teaching your child to read, start with phonetically regular words that name concrete objects and verbs. Start with dog and run, not the and of.
  • Know your BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills) and CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency). BICS are what your child need to talk to family and friends and to get needs met. CALP is what your child needs to succeed in school. CALP requires more specialized vocabulary, more complex sentence structure and higher-order thinking skills. English language learners exposed to English only at school need 6 months to two years to acquire BICS and 5-7 years to acquire CALP. I haven't seen studies of adopted children, but I assume the process is faster. 
  • Teach function words as well as content words. Content words are nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Any language has an ever-growing number of them. The easiest to learn will be nouns and verbs because they refer to more obvious objects and actions. Watch out for the huge number of homonyms in English. Function words are a closed class, meaning no new ones ever get added to the language. Interesting, huh? There are and will continue to be only a couple of hundred function words in English. They include prepositions and conjunctions and can be very difficult to learn. The best way to teach them is to point them out as they come up and discuss how they affect the meaning of the sentence. Don't bother drilling them - almost no one can learn them this way.
  •  Don't assume younger children always learn the language faster. The rate at which your child will acquire English depends on many factors, including their feelings about being in the U.S. The single most reliable predictor of success in learning a second language is success in the first language. If your child did well in school in their native language, they will probably do well in English. The only area where younger (pre-adolescent) children are much more successful is in their accent, and that can be a double-edged sword because people often mistake an American accent for English fluency. 
  • Advocate for your child at school. Many teachers do not know much about second language learning. Your child should not be getting work designed for younger native English speakers.
  • Read to your child. You knew that.

17 comments:

  1. Great reminders! Thank you. I am shocked by how quickly M is learning the BICs =) He went to school for a bit in Sidama/Hawassa (so...how old is my kid? I digress...) and lived at HH for 4 months where it seems he really absorbed Amharic. Surprisingly, his birth mom speaks both Sidama and Amharic -- we were told this was unusual for a rural woman. In any case, maybe he has a knack for languages b/c I am continually impressed by his ability to use proper verb tense and pronouns already. He is even taking spanish at preschool and loving it. We'll see how CALP develops as he enters kindergarten next year; it could be a whole new ball game... How about you? How is your daughter doing?

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    1. Uh... what daughter? Who have you mixed me up with? :)

      I assume that adopted kids learn much faster than immigrant children or children of immigrants, both because they are immersed in English all the time and because there is a lot of emotional compartmentalization that affects the shift to a new language.

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    2. Oh my. that's embarrassing. I have no idea. Just no idea. =)

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  2. How interesting. I didn't know you were an ESL teacher. Thank you for the tips.

    MB LOVES sitting on my lap and looking at photo books of Ethiopia. We have several really great coffee table-type books, and we talk about everything we see, both in Amharic and English. It's not only good for language development, but it's also good for bonding.

    Gestures and visual aids. This one had me laughing because my husband was just reenacting tonight how to put the toilet seat down for kaka, up for shint. Maybe that was one of those 'had to be there' moments, but it was hilarious!

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    1. Yes, I assume all parents of little boys go through that one many times!

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  3. Kyra, Thanks for posting this. Little Miss E LOVES language (she is fascinated with all things related to letters and words) and took off with English right from the beginning. Now, though, after a year home we're recognizing she's plateauing, especially compared to her brother who has been home the same amount of time but is on his third language (Sidaminga, then Amharic, now English) and really having a hard time with the CALPs and seems to get hung up on the meaning of words and reading comprehension. She has a medical condition that is highly correlated with language processing disorders so we're working with her school to evaluate this but its pretty hard to sort out from ESL stuff. This post was pretty insightful and makes me wonder if some of her struggles are really just a stage in the ESL process rather than a language processing disorder. I guess time will tell. Luckily she's a smarty-pants and seems to compensate really well for any difficulties she has.

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    1. Dakota, one thing to remember is that it doesn't have to be ESL OR language processing, it can be ESL AND language processing. I think that gets lost a lot in the school system. In my experience (admittedly, I've grown cynical over the years), once a child qualifies for special education services, teachers assume that all academic problems are caused by a disability and not because of learning a second (or third or more) language. I would hesitate to do a formal evaluation right now. Also, be very mindful of what receiving services would mean for E. It could be helpful, but it could also mean a disruption of her classroom learning. Special education teachers are notoriously overstretched and tend to pull kids out of class when they can fit it in their schedules, which may cause kids to miss important learning that they could do in their classroom. For example, she may get pulled out of math for a reading intervention and never get math instruction. I know I sound so negative - this is why I am quitting teaching this year. Hopefully your school is nothing like this - maybe all the teachers really do meet and work together to plan and carry out a coherent, child-centered course of instruction. I just know my school doesn't.

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  4. Yes, thanks Kyra. I was an English teacher and it's a different story than esl. Anyway, we are right in the thick of this with Eyerusalem, and she's doing great. We use lots of gestures around here, and facial expressions. And, she watches my mouth when she isn't pronouncing a word correctly to see how my mouth moves. It helps her a lot.

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    1. Hi Kim, yes, it's very helpful to show kids what to do with their lips and tongue, especially for sounds that don't exist in their language. You can also try using a mirror or camera, so after she watches you she can see herself making the same shape with her mouth.

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  5. Oh, so many thoughts in response! I have to tell teachers that T never heard a word of English until he was four -- which was just two years ago. He had an accent on only one word ever - ze-beh-rrrah. (zebra). But even though the teachers know he is an ESL kid, they don't cut him any slack -- probably because he does do so well. Pre-K first report card he got dinged for not knowing all his sounds yet. Um, he's been in the country for ONE year! I would have thought the comment might have been, "for a child who has been speaking English for less than a year (because he didn't truly start speaking until about six months home) T is making great progress with his letter sounds. He still struggles with these letters; keep working on them with him at home." (which actually those "work on xyz at home" comments always bugs the crap out of me -- WHY DO YOU THINK HE'S DOING AS WELL AS HE IS????) Then, this year he tested at where he should be at the end of the year for letter sounds but he's still learning vocabulary. So there's a rhyming assignment they had -- circle the items that rhyme. Well, there was a snail and there was a .... bucket. That's what we call it. Snail and bucket don't rhyme. He was right. She marked it wrong. Pissed me off. She could have sat with him and asked him "what is this called?"(regarding the bucket) And he would have said "bucket." And she could have said, "Is there another name for it?" And he would have said, "I don't know." And then she could have said, "there is another name...pail. Now, do snail and pail rhyme?" And he would have said "yes." How do I know? Because I did this when I saw the paper at home. GRRRRR.

    I also remember S asking me back in the early days how long we were going to do caveman speak. And I can't even remember what I would say, but I would be trying to make my sentences as simple as possible. S was convinced the child would be saying "Me eat now!" when he was 18.

    T was tested for ELL services at the beginning of the year and the teacher said he was fine. I worry about the cognitive aspect though, plus, as you said, the homonyms. Just today we had yet another discussion of sun vs. son. BUT now he knows how to spell s-u-n. So that allowed me to explain that a boy child is s-O-n. I could see the gears turning on that one. One reason I kept him in kindergarten instead of moving him straight into first grade was to give him an extra year for language acquisition, even though no one who interacts with him thinks it's at all an issue. To hear him talk, he sounds like his kindergarten colleagues -- they all use regular forms of past tense for verbs where it should be irregular. "I sitted down when I put on my sneakers." "Mommy putted my toy away." (again examples from this morning) I repeat what he said, but model the irregular (same with his pronoun confusion). Sometimes he repeats and uses the correct form. Sometimes lately, he catches himself after he's said the wrong word and uses the correct pronoun or verb form. We praise him for that.

    I do have a question: do we try to work on everything at once (pronouns, correct use of irregular past tense, sounds within words -- T says "wit" instead of "with", "bof" instead of "both" and "lub" instead of "love," etc. Or do we choose one thing to focus on and let the rest ride until the one thing has corrected itself? (he used to lithp too, but that's gone). I just feel like if we correct him every time he opens his mouth, he's going to be reluctant to talk at all. And right now he's quite the happy little story teller, and it won't help for him to stop talking and lose the opportunity to practice.

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    1. One more thought, I never could find refrigerator letter magnets, but I got an alphabet set for the tub. Once he was getting good at letter sounds and beginning to learn some sight words, I would take two letters and form a sound. For instance, "AT" Then I would pick out all the other letters that if you put in front of "AT" would make a word. Then I would line them up and say, "Which one would make the word 'CAT?' Which one would make the word "FAT?'" etc. We'd go all the way through until all the individual letters were used up. He seemed to enjoy that game. He did better at that than me forming the word "BAT" and asking him what that word was. But if the sound "AT" was there and I asked which one of the letters I had lined up would make the word "BAT", he picked the right one every time. Now he's getting really good at sounding out words. But it's taken a good year from when we started that. They have to be ready. And once he's ready, it clicks, and he's off to the races.

      Oh one more thing. He loves to read his homework assignments -- he gets a reading book and sight word book each week. But when it's a reading for fun book with mommy -- he does NOT want to try to read to me. That is most clearly my time to read to him, even if the book is easy enough that he could read it to me. I don't try to force it -- I just go ahead and do the reading. I think fun reading shouldn't be work, if that makes sense. It's his time to kick back, so I let him.

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    2. Hi Karen,

      It can be dangerous when kids sound like everyone else in the class - teachers assume no accent = fluent with the language. That's annoying about the bucket/pail - it sounds like the teacher wasn't clear on what she was assessing - was it understanding rhymes or vocabulary knowledge?

      About the ESL testing, where the teacher said he was "fine" - the main reason I am leaving teaching is that EVERYTHING now boils down to a score on a test. It used to be we assigned ESL services to students based on multiple factors - teacher recommendation, grades and testing. Now it's all about the score on a single test. Now a score on a 15-minute test at the beginning of kindergarten can literally determine whether a student will EVER qualify for ESL services. It is ridiculous.

      I would work on several goals at a time, but keep it low-key. The t/th confusion is very normal. Teach him to stick his tongue out at you when he says "th." He will love the chance to stick his tongue out at you and not get in trouble! The b/v is also normal - most Spanish-speakers have this problem. Challenge him to hold the "v" sound until he can make his lower lip tickle. As far as correcting pronouns and irregular past tense, corrections aren't usually very effective and like you said, can make him not want to talk. Instead when you notice him using the pronouns/past tense correctly, point it out to him and praise him. That tends to be much more effective. But definitely jump around between your goals - some things developmentally won't happen for a while, and if you wait for them to be mastered before moving to the next goal, you'll be waiting a long time. Example - the final third-person s (she runS) is usually the last morpheme to be mastered.

      I agree with you that reading for fun should be just that - fun - and if that means that you're reading to him right now, it's fine. You can let him gradually take over, like you read all but the last word on a page, and he reads the last word, then work up to him reading phrases, or doing a "reader's theater" activity, where he reads the voice of one character.

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  6. Hi Kyra,
    Are you planning on introducing Greek right away or waiting? I haven't quite figured out how to go about this particular adventure. I grew up bilingual but my parents took a language each so it was an easier way to compartmentalize. With me as a single parent and the child having to go to school/preschool/daycare pretty much right away I hesitate to commit to Greek at home and English everywhere else.

    Eirini

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    1. Ha! I have wondered about introducing Greek and Spanish while at the same time trying to maintain Amharic. I think we'll do English/Amharic initially, and try to have a smattering of the others later. Honestly the Spanish will be easier, because I hardly ever speak Greek anymore. Though we have thought about traveling via Greece on return trips to Ethiopia. Well, thanks for giving me something to think about!

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    2. I'll be interested to see if you can swing it. I think the last I looked it would be rather lengthy to travel via Athens but hopefully that'll change. I'd love to incorporate a quick stop-over for the GR family to meet the child, though much of that depends on the particulars of the situation, I guess. I'm a way off from having to consider it but I'm always thinking!

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    3. It would have to be a longer trip. At least a week or so in Greece before getting on a plane again to fly on to Ethiopia (via Cairo, I think). Hopefully when the kids are a little older. Not during their upcoming trip to the U.S. - I wouldn't want to have to worry about getting visas for Greece for their Ethiopian passports.

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  7. These are awesome tips. Think I'll print out this post to for later use. :-)

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