[1]  Sheltered English instruction is an instructional approach that engages second language learners in developing grade-level content-area knowledge, academic skills, and English language proficiency. In sheltered English classes, teachers use strategies that provide comprehensible input and make strong connections to learners’ lives.
 

FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE TEXT ENGAGEMENT FOR ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS

A salient finding in the research on content area literacy instruction is the role of schema in comprehension and engagement with text. In fact, in a review of learning from text, Alexander and Jetton (2000) report that, “Of all the factors, none exerts more influence on what students understand and remember than the knowledge they possess” (p. 291). When students are familiar with a topic, or are able to connect the topic to events or situations in their own lives, comprehension is increased and motivation enhanced. In order to engage older English language learners, teachers must find commonalities between the text selected for instruction and the learners’ lives. Developing this ‘goodness of fit” can be challenging to mainstream teachers of English language learners for a variety of reasons.  First, more secondary level English language learners are entering academic settings with a lack of prior formal education. It has been found that as many as 20% of all high school level and 12% of all middle school level English language learners have missed two or more years of formal education since the age of six (Ruiz de Velasco & Fix, 2000). In addition, more than one third of new English language learners from Latino backgrounds are placed below grade level in school (Jamieson, Curry & Martinez, 2001). These students often lack native language literacy skills and academic skills, which have been shown to be important factors in the acquisition of second language literacy and academic skills (Auerbach1996; Cummins, 1979, 1984; Edelsky, 1986; Williams & Snipper 1990).

Secondly, research has shown that an important factor in successful acquisition of English as a second language is students’ access to comprehensible input in English (Krashen, 1985). This means that teachers must be able to not only teach the subject matter, but they must do so in a way that makes the concepts and content comprehensible to second language learners of English in their classrooms. Mainstream content area teachers need to have a repertoire of strategies that will make input comprehensible for their English language learners. Hence, teachers must implement strategies that are aligned with the content goals of the subject area and meet the needs of diverse learners through the use of differentiated instruction.

Thirdly, the language of a given academic subject, as well as the content itself, can create situations where English language learners are unable to acquire the necessary skills needed for success. Academic language and skills are cognitively demanding, and often the material at the secondary level is context reduced (tasks where learners only have the written or spoken word with which to work). The amount of time needed for English language learners to acquire the Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) (Cummins, 1984) necessary for success can be from five to seven years.  Moreover, recent research has shown that students with no prior formal education may take seven to ten years to acquire the necessary academic language and skills to be considered ‘on grade level’ (Thomas & Collier, 1995). This is far too long a wait for most students who arrive in the U.S.A at the age of fourteen or fifteen and who have had interrupted formal education in their native countries. Expectations for students in the higher grades are great, and when English language learners are acquiring academic language, skills, and concepts concurrently with Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) (Cummins, 1984), they can quickly fall even further behind in their academic classes.

Finally, the role of cultural background plays a part in students’ understanding of material and the ability to situate learning within a boarder social context. Concepts that educators and peers may take for granted as ‘common knowledge’ may be completely unknown to students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Knowledge learned from enculturation by native-born students, but unknown to second language learners, can be a source of difficulty in the comprehension of concepts and new knowledge, since students acquire new concepts by integrating new ideas into existing schema. Unfamiliarity with a topic often results in obstacles to comprehension for English language learners. When students are reading material that is cognitively demanding, "If the topic... is outside of their experience or base of knowledge, they are adrift on an unknown sea" (Aebersold & Field 1997, p.41). 

Given that the research suggests that cultural knowledge is an important component of second language text comprehension, secondary school educators need to be aware of how to effectively make connections to learners’ lives and build schema so that comprehension can be increased. This is not an easy task considering the diversity that exists among English language learners in schools in the United States in terms of language, culture, socio-economic status, religious background, past experiences with formal education and levels of literacy in both the first and second language. However daunting, making connections with text can be accomplished as a consequence of thoughtful planning. The example which follows is an illustration of how to make those important connections.

EXAMPLE FROM PRACTICE: CONNECTING LEARNERS LIVES TO 19^TH CENTURY EMIGRANT WOMEN

When I was planning for my secondary level ESL students who were enrolled in a Content Based ESL program, it was important to develop unit plans with broad themes which would have direct application to the content areas of math, science, social studies and English. One thematic unit that I developed that had this direct application to content was westward expansion of the U.S. A book that I had read in the past came to mind as an authentic, non-fiction material that would enhance this unit: Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (Schlissel, 1982; 1992). Then reality struck. My students were adolescents between the ages of 16 and 19 years old. All of my students were Latino and all had interrupted formal education.  The average reading level[1] in the students’ native language was about a 3^rd grade equivalent (GE) and in English, the average GE was 2.0. Making the content accessible to these students was challenging, but making connections between their lives and these 19^th century women’s lives seemed highly remote. However, as I began to think about making connections, the task seemed less daunting.  When I re-read this wonderful non-fiction work that contains excerpts from the diaries of everyday women who traveled the trail westward, the connections that I could make began to emerge. My students had traveled to the United States for reasons that were not necessarily their own. They, as children, were brought to the United States by parents or sent by parents for a variety of reasons, but the salient fact was that they, like many of the women in the text, did not make the decision to leave their homes and everything they knew.  Rather, the decision was made for them. The themes of what to bring and what had to be left behind, the feelings surrounding the decision to leave one’s home for a new and strange place, and the inability to really comprehend the life that awaited them in their new home began to emerge. I was able to create a series of learning experiences connected to each of these topics, feelings, and experiences.

The first thing that needed to occur for these students was for them to create their own connections to the text using constructivist and inquiry- based methodologies, an approach that was pivotal to my teaching. When using constructivist principles teachers must focus on ‘big ideas’ and essential questions. Rather than focus on discrete skills, teachers need to provide opportunities for meaningful learning to occur in (Kaufman & Grennon Brooks, 1996). When combining constructivist principles with an inquiry based model, students themselves co-construct the big ideas and essential questions with guidance from their teacher.  They then work collaboratively and cooperatively to answer the questions posed and develop understandings of curricular concepts that are completely situated within the contexts of their lives and classrooms.

 In order to accomplish the above goals, I began the unit by engaging in a guided discussion about the factors that led my students’ families to move to the United States. We created a classroom graph that documented the reasons that families chose to immigrate to the United States. We discussed how reasons differed depending on specific family needs, but there were some universal themes that emerged. Once we had established common themes regarding relocating to a new country, I asked students to represent either in writing (for those whose skills were strong enough) or pictorially, items that were left behind. These included stories and visual representations of friends and family members, as well as objects and beloved pets.  As a group, the students created questions and engaged in constructivist, inquiry based learning in their analysis of why, even when leaving loved ones and beloved possessions behind, did families decide to immigrate. We also began to explore what awaited them in their new land. Although there was sadness associated with leaving home for many of these students, there was also excitement about having a chance to begin again. Once we were able to as a class establish a set of issues surrounding the leaving of a home and country and the immigration to a new place, we were able to move onto the text, which contained many of the themes and issues that my students identified as salient to their own immigration experience.

Each day, I opened our lessons with a read aloud from the text. I selected diary entries that dealt with the topics we would be exploring that day. These ranged from content area issues of geography, social climate of the time (the text spans the years 1841 through 1867), historical context ( the  U.S.- Mexican War of 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; the Gold Rush ), health and safety ( clean drinking water, access to medical care, nutrition) mathematics (in terms of distances traveled, weight of wagons) and physics (wagons traveling up and down hillsides and mountains using pulleys), to the more abstract yet compelling issues of moving, leaving ones’ family, friends and belongings, loss, and joy. My students were engaged in the readings and would ask, “Miss, when are you going to read more to us?” All students had a copy of the book, so that they were able to explore the text on their own and share it with others in their lives. The text incorporates many photos, so students had a good deal of contextual support while exploring the book. All in all, not only were connections made to their lives, but the interdisciplinary connections to the topic made this unit very rich.

In terms of writing, the genre that we focused on as a class was the Diary .We explored the notion of a diary, used Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey as a model for entries ( as the teacher I knew that this genre would be revisited while we read the Diary of Anne Frank) and my students created a diary to document segments of their own journey to the United States.  In addition, my students responded to individual women whose stories were represented in the text. We created a Semantic Feature Analysis chart (Anders & Bos, 1986; Johnson & Pearson, 1984) to facilitate students’ understanding of the women whose stories are represented in the text and focused on how they were similar and how they differed in terms of their lives, experiences, and the journey west.  The students were then asked to select one of the featured women in the book as a “pen pal”. The students engaged in a letter writing activity which asked them to either:(1) tell their pen pal how their journey west paved the way for the expansion of the United States; (2) to tell their pen pal about how the journey could be made today, or finally (3) to tell their pan pal about their own journey and how it was similar to theirs, over 150 years later. Students who were emergent writers were able to dictate their letters and I used a Language Experience Approach (McCormick, 1988), where I acted as a scribe and transcribed what they dictated to me.  These student generated texts were then used with the emergent readers and writers to help them make connections between their spoken words and the written word. My students also created Venn Diagrams comparing and contrasting their immigration experience to that of the women in the text.

Students engaged in mapping activities where they reproduced the various trails west that emigrants traveled on during the westward expansion as well as mapping the path that their own journeys took in reaching the U.S.A. In addition, I created a problem requiring critical thinking (problematic perspective) (Vacca & Vacca, 1999) for students to work through collaboratively as a culminating activity for the unit:

The year is 1852. You are a farmer who has decided to travel west from Pennsylvania to the Oregon Territory. You have a basic farm wagon that can carry up to 2000 pounds of goods, 6 oxen, two horses and a milk cow. You have a wife and three children ages 2 years, 4 years and 7 years old. You must decide how to fill your wagon. You will need supplies to see you and your family through the journey, and you will need to decide what to bring with you and what you must leave behind. You must not overload the wagon!

Students worked in groups and were given a block of wood that represented the scale size of a basic farm wagon, as well as blocks that represented the weight and size of necessary objects for the journey and common household objects. Students were required to use the knowledge they had acquired about the westward journey to make decisions and load their wagon so their party would have a good chance of survival.

By establishing a problem for students to solve, a variety of instructional goals are met. First, ESL students are given the opportunity to engage in authentic discussion, incorporating the academic vocabulary that forms the basis of any content area study. Second, they are able to work cooperatively and collaboratively to create questions, answer questions and draw on their knowledge to solve the problem posed. Finally, such an activity establishes a role and purpose for students as they continue to engage with the text.