ELL Students
My experience has been that even though an ESL student may have very strong English conversational skills, that does not translate necessarily to English reading skills. Furthermore, it appears to me that learning our technology is inhibited because they don't have the vocabulary base in their native language to relate it to.
Hey Don, I have had this problem many times in my radiology class. ESL students try to take English medical words and translate it back to Spanish and then apply it back to medical terminology in the radiology field. They do par on testing due to the lack of English vocab and association in their Spanish language. I teach in a rapid pace career school and there is not an entrance exam. If these ESL students pass the curriculum, they are not able to pass the state boards for certification. Heartbreaking.
Trena
Your curriculum may be different, but our environment is similar - I teach at a post-secondary technical school, in my case electronics. In a for-profit school, there is always the pressure to help keep kids in school, and I'm not one to believe that our students must perform academically the way traditional 4 year students, but it does raise ethical concerns, given the money being spent, the need to repay loans, etc. Hard to discern at times.
Don you took the words out of my mouth. I too work at a for-profit school. I teach computer courses and some of my foreign students do not understand what I am saying and they continue to fail classes due to lack of understanding the language.
We try to pair up an instructor with each ELL student that comes in. We stick with that student until they graduate and work with the other instructors to ensure understanding
Gwen,
Thanks for posting. I think your is a great idea. We are developing an ELL program. It has been in place for almost a year. Our ELL students, actually any students for that matter, who are not native speakers of the classroom language, will struggle when learning terminology. It takes many years to develop skills in a new language but many of our students understand that they may have to work much harder to learn material that is easy for native speakers. But if the mentor (teacher) has set up a relationship and teaches learning strategies, I believe that ELL can succeed.
I teach nursing and we are having an issue here. The program is accelerated and although they may have good conversational English they lack the reading ability needs for long reading assignments with lots of science. I try to work with them individually but am frustrated by my inability to help them conquer this issue.
