The lesson plans and attached worksheet clearly demonstrate the importance of both modification of plans and materials for ENL learners and the importance of adhering to the same content objectives. They also show how I could not have taught the class without the collaboration of my co-teacher, Fran Guber, in these 4th grade ELA/ENL lessons. I was a “push-in” teacher in the this class although I tried to be a “co-teacher.” There is an important difference and it reflects the struggle that many ENL teachers have. They are going into the classrooms of teachers who are in control of the location and students for the rest of the day. It is difficult to be a “co-teacher” but necessary. What prevented me from surmounting the difficulties was coordinating with five different teachers across different grade levels and trying to keep up with their lesson plans. In this particular class I was able to do my best because of the cooperation and positive attitude of my co-teacher, who planned alongside me and provided me with detailed lesson plans and worksheets that she was using.
Part of the challenge of being an ENL teacher is dealing with a wide variety of students, both in terms of background and ability. I was lucky in this particular class that students only ranged from transitional to expanding, and I was able to adjust the material accordingly. Working with ENL students requires both that students get more material and less. More material because students may need additional background. For example, this lesson was based on the book “Mr Lincoln’s Way” whose central theme focused around a racist student and his interactions with an African-American principal. While we may falsely and optimistically assume that racism is internationally recognized as wrong, this is a complicated cultural issue to unpack for students who may either come from a place where people are largely all of the same ethnic background, or racism is viewed differently. It is certainly part of the cultural knowledge that students acquire at schools in the United States, but we cannot expect students from other countries to always have that knowledge.
While the whole class discussed the central theme, I had to devote extra time to the ENL learners to make sure that they “got it,” restating the concepts in different and simpler terms and recasting the question so they would have multiple points to access the knowledge. At the same, students cannot be expected to do the same amount of work in the same amount of time. They need extra time to listen, respond, and to write. For this reason I gave my students extra gaps of time in the conversation, as long as they were focused. On top of that, as in the worksheets, I reduced the amount of synonyms that they had to learn. Not all students were going to learn all the synonyms anyway, but I could ensure that the ENL students learned some of them well rather than devoting time to every word and not devoting enough time for them to comprehend and remember the word by repeatedly activating their knowledge of it.
Preparation is integral in this endeavor. From reducing the size of the worksheets, to figuring out which parts of the book to focus on, to figuring out which vocabulary has to be explained, preparation is key to all teaching but especially for ENL students who must deal with the challenges of both content and language learning. The most difficult part of this finding out from the co-teacher what will be taught in the class so that ENL students are learning the same topic as other students. In this particular case it worked out well. Because I knew what was being taught, I was able to preteach essential vocabulary, plan questions to ask to ensure comprehension of the stories, and — most importantly and the most necessary to be timed right — write starter sentences so students can focus on completing the content task instead of the language production taking up all of their time.
Cognates are another aspect requiring preparation. Part of addressing students diverse backgrounds involves figuring out useful cognates for these students. I knew that my students were largely Spanish-speakers, so I thought about which words were cognates between English and Spanish and also which English words the students might know in Spanish. I know Spanish but this doesn’t help me with students who speak Haitian-Creole, the other large cohort of students, or the one girl from West Africa who speaks French. In order to still make those students feel included, I asked them how to say certain things in their home languages and asked those students to discuss it between themselves. We also wrote one word on the board that we recognized as a shared cognate with French and we all repeated it.
