ESL-New Mentor

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Hello Everyone,I'm not sure if this is the correct list for me to be on but if so, I'm lost.I was just invited to help mentor Spanish speaking adults in order to learn English.I just came from my first class. The overwhelming majority of the students are illiterate in Spanish and have less that a third grade education.This is a volunteer position and funding is limited. I will have to bring paper and pencils to my next class on Monday for the students to use.I have just started to surf the net for resources and help. After several hours of trying to find help I continue to encounter sites with great resources for teachers with students that are at a much higher educational level than I have. My students do not have books. The book that the program has provided me with is horrible.I would love to find some guidance on how to approach this new teaching challenge. I am fully committed to staying with this project. Ideally I would like to communicate with any ESL instructors who have also taught adults that do not have any formal education. I don't know where to begin. I don't know if I should focus on phonics or something else? I really need a viable teaching plan and at the moment I don't have one.Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you

Usenet · Accepted Answer

Your first priority should be to understand why the students are trying to learn English. Are they being forced to (by an employer, for example)? Do they want to take up a particular type of employment?

Don't get too hung up on reading/writing. We all learned to speak our native language before we could write it. Focus on giving them phrases they can quickly apply in their new language.

The book that the programme provided you with may be horrible, but think how you can adapt it. For example, if it has pictures in, use them as the basis for learning new vocabulary, or for inspiring free communication, rather than in the way that the text book writer(s) dictate.

I'd also suggest that you post more detailed information about your own background (for example, do you have a teaching qualification) and that of your students here so that the willing can provide more focused feedback.

Usenet · Answer

If you need to teach them to read English, you should probably teach them first to read Spanish.

One method for literacy that I like was used by Paolo Freire. It is described in "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed" as used in Brazil, but he also worked with Spanish in Chile.

If speaking and hearing is sufficient, then you might consider that not having to cope with English's absurd writing system could be considered a blessing.

Use pictures instead of written translations-- help them learn to think "That's a ship!" instead of,

"mmm, es un barco, y un barco es ... un 'ship'!"

Have them practice English vowels by minimal pairs: Show pictures of 'ship' and 'sheep' -- say one word and let them practice pointing to the right picture. Similarly for as many other things you can think of.

Let them get used to the sounds that way before pushing them to reproduce the sounds.

Ignore (for the most part) mistakes that do not interfere with comprehension.

Perhaps another approach is a variant of Community Language Learning: Have them act out scenes they are likely to encounter. Each participant can say what he wants/needs to say in his native language, someone tells him/her the equivalent in English, and they imitate it. No need to study it--eventually the more common constructs are repeated often enough that they will remember them. But it should be their sayings, not a script.

If you think this method is too slow (you might be surprised), an optional enhancement is to record the conversations, play them back, and discuss whatever peculiarities of English they happen to notice.

This is a very effective method for learning to communicate. It's not widely known or popular because it doesn't fit well with the desire of academia to have predetermined clearly defined bits of knowledge that one will master. But it's great for this situation, because they learn how to say the things they need or want to say.

CLL is fairly concisely described in the chapters by Charles A. Curran in Innovative Approaches to Language Teaching (Robert W. Blair, editor).

Longer, more detailed descriptions are in Curran's books.

Disclaimer: I am an amateur. No doubt teachers with more training will chime in and explain why my suggestions are all wet. I welcome this, because I will learn from it as well.

I have a friend working with a successful program in Canada. I will ask if she has any suggestions and pass them on. But I am not sure whether students in her program are illiterate.

I reviewed a grade school Spanish program called Power-Glide which was partially based on some of the ideas in the above-mentioned book. I thought it was excellent. The same company, http://www.power-glide.com/ has an ESL product which I have not seen. It may not work as well with folks who don't read, but a good teacher could probably make adaptations and adjustments.

-- Wes Groleau -- Daily Hoax: http://www.snopes2.com/cgi-bin/random/random.asp

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]Community Language Learning: Have them act out[/nq]
More on this. I am not necessarily endorsing these, in fact at least one of them gets some details incorrect in the sense that some of the methodological details are not as Curran stated them. OTOH, perhaps the writer was improving on the method..

http://members.fortunecity.com/nadabs/communitylearn.html http://iteslj.org/Articles/Koba-CLL.html http://brj.asu.edu/content/vol26_no3/pdf/art13.pdf http://www.eral.ucsb.edu/master_list/index.php?review=32 http://www.nknu.edu.tw/~eng/etweb/meth-cll-1.htm http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Square/9089/index15.htm http://teacher.wtuc.edu.tw/wucm/Introduction%20to%20Teaching%20Methodologies/Community%20Language%20Learning.htm http://www.abacom.com/~nathan/designer.htm http://www.englishraven.com/method_community.html

This last one has a Nav bar with links to similar summaries of other methods. I particularly suggest reading the summaries of the Silent Way and Suggestopedia. These are VERY different from CLL, but without necessarily adopting them, you might gain some interesting insights from the hypotheses about learning that they are based on.
[nq:1]Disclaimer: I am an amateur. No doubt teachers with more training will chime in and explain why my suggestions are all wet. I welcome this, because I will learn from it as well.[/nq]
-- Wes Groleau

Is it an on-line compliment to call someone a Net Wit ?

Usenet · Answer

My Canadian friend seemd to agree with me, but added some excellent additional ideas:

--- quote --- Seems to me you've answered well. I have no real personal experience with literacy work although I did train as a Laubach tutor a couple of years ago. Laubach materials are designed for first language speakers, but they've been used for L2 literacy as well-at least here in Canada. The materials take a bottom up approach (i.e. pre-determined systematic building of high frequency consonants, vowels, words, etc) in contrast to Freire's top down "reading the word means reading the world" approach. Although some might find that far too prescriptive and (depending on ideological position) inappropriate for some students, the materials do provide a thorough and proven approach to literacy. To use them one must train as a Laubach tutor, but the training is short (initial training is two Saturdays up here) and very inexpensive (cost CAD $20 two years ago) and I suspect would be helpful in giving this teacher a sense of how to start. Once a person has taken the preliminary training and is a member, it's possible to borrow materials from the library holdings of the local Laubach association. I did a Google search for Laubach in Texas and found this contact info:

Laubach Literacy Action/TX Margaret Eisenbeck, Training Coordinator Texas Adult Literacy Laubach -TALL 405 Westbrook Drive Austin, TX 78746 (512) 473-2421 Typing in "literacy" "ESL" and "Texas" also yielded a number of interesting links. Didn't have time to check them out, but here's one that looked like it might lead to something useful: http://www.cam-info.net/edu3.html

Your contact might also find it helpful to consult a document like the The Canadian Language Benchmarks 2000: ESL for Literacy Learners. This document "lays out the progression of reading, writing and numeracy skills for ESL adults who have little or no literacy skills in their first language. The ESL Literacy Benchmarks are designed to be used with the Listening and Speaking ESL for Adults Benchmarks." Both the literacy benchmarks and the standard ESL benchmarks document referred to in the last part of that blurb can be downloaded free from: http://www.language.ca/pub.html --- end quote ---

-- Wes Groleau

Guidelines for judging others:

1. Don't attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

2. Don't attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by ignorance.

3. Don't attribute to ignorance that which can be adequately explained by misunderstanding.

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