Lisa Pray

ESL TEACHER EDUCATION ABROAD AND AT HOME: A CAUTIONARY TALE

In this article, we compared teacher attitudes and beliefs about culturally appropriate language teaching resulting from an examination of two groups of preservice teachers. One group of preservice teachers enrolled in an English as a Second Language (ESL) study abroad program in Mexico; the other enrolled in a traditional on-campus ESL program. Our findings indicate that study abroad students gained a more empathetic understanding of language and cultural issues that affect language learners than their on-campus counterparts, but that they also developed some misconceptions about language learning based on their study abroad experience.

Living and learning in Mexico: developing empathy for English language learners through study abroad

This paper provides a qualitative examination of university student experiences with culture, language, and race in a short‐term study abroad program in Cuernavaca, Mexico. All participants were White teacher education students from the United States earning their English as a Second Language (ESL) teaching endorsement and hoped to teach English language learners (ELLs). During the three week program, students took ESL Methods and Spanish for Teachers classes, and lived with host families in Cuernavaca. In addition to academic goals, the study abroad program was designed to help students develop empathy for the challenges faced by ELLs in the US through immersion in Mexico. Given that most teachers in the US are monolingual, native English speaking Whites and the majority of ELLs are native Spanish speakers, this study abroad experience provided many opportunities to develop empathy for ELL schoolchildren that the students’ usual milieu in the US did not. Daily journal entries, instructors’ observations, and pre‐ and post‐experience questionnaires were examined. Through our analysis, we found that students struggled with the cultural, linguistic, and racial dimensions of their short‐term study abroad experience and that most channeled these frustrations into some measure of empathetic understanding for the challenges facing ELLs in the US.

Comparison of Oral Language Usage among English Language Learners Diagnosed with a Learning Disability and Those in General Education.

The investigator compared the linguistic characteristics of Spanish and English language samples taken from English language learners (ELLs) diagnosed with an academic learning disability (LD) and ELLs in general education to determine if the errors and characteristics of their language use differ. There was a statistically significant difference in the morphological error ratios of the English language samples when comparisons were made across groups. Comparisons within groups indicate a significant difference in the English morphological error ratios for students with an LD diagnosis. Although these findings were significant, all students, regardless of group membership, had generally mastered the fundamentals of English morphology and syntax and demonstrated the ability to learn and use English in the context of story retelling.

Functional Systems That Afford and Constrain Elementary Teachers' Adaptation of Instruction to Support Multilingual Students.

ABSTRACT As elementary teachers in U.S. public schools strive to adapt their instruction to support growing numbers of students learning English as an additional language, they must also navigate institutional constraints and affordances beyond their classroom-level interactions. Even as teachers plan and implement instruction within their own classrooms, their work is strongly influenced by the functional systems at the school and district levels. Despite this growing awareness, few studies have examined how these functional systems impact elementary teachers’ efforts to redesign and refine their instruction for multilingual students, often labeled as English language learners (ELLs). Through the use of qualitative methods, this article illuminates elementary teachers’ perspectives on the functional systems that afford and constrain their abilities to improve their instruction to support ELLs. As teacher educators of a graduate-level ELL endorsement program for in-service elementary teachers, we sought to investigate what impacts teachers’ instruction on a daily basis. This article centers on this research question: How do elementary teachers perceive and navigate functional systems within schools as they endeavor to support multilingual students?