Parent questions about helping language learners

This page has answers to questions from parents about specific issues facing their children in learning English and learning school subjects through English.

The information and advice given here is based on my long experience as an ESL teacher in an international school. It is also based on my understanding of current research into second language learning.

Nevertheless, you may wish to seek the corroboration of other professionals in this field before following any of the suggestions I make here.

Although I am now retired, I am happy to continue to respond to similar requests for information and advice. Send your question or comments via the Contact page.

Note: If you click the Expand All button top right, you can view all the answers at once without having to click the questions one-by-one.

I use the term ESL student here to refer to non-native English children who are learning school subjects in English. ESL students have extra English instruction called ESL lessons.

A mainstream teacher is a teacher of one of the other school subjects such as science or drama. In other words, the term mainstream teacher refers to all teachers who are not ESL teachers.

There has been a debate in recent years as to the appropriateness of these terms. Several alternatives have been suggested for students learning in a language other than their mother tongue.

For a discussion of the issue and why I continue to use the term ESL, see The terminology of English language learning.

Note: This question comes from a parent whose daughter, while almost fully fluent in speaking English, has great difficulty spelling accurately. The parent wondered whether it would be helpful to teach her daughter the phonetic script.

It is a pity if the quality of your daughter's writing in terms of its grammatical accuracy and the clear expression of her ideas is compromised by poor spelling. The question is how to address this problem.

It seems to me that there are many different approaches which, if combined and practised regularly, will ultimately lead to an improvement. In the long term, extensive reading in English will help your daughter to imprint the patterns of common words in her mind so that when she writes a particular word she will have a strong mental image of its correct form to compare with her own rendition.

Of course, this approach will achieve more rapid success if your daughter focuses some of her attention while reading on the spelling of the words she encounters. By this I mean that when, for example, she sees words like "friend" or "tomorrow", which cause her problems, she makes a brief mental note: "Ah! That's how you spell it!"

Another approach is to use a computer spelling program. My website, for example, contains some quizzes and games to help students learn the spellings of words that commonly cause difficulties. You can find these in the Writing → Spelling drop-down menu on the Language skills index.

Alternatively there are a number of commercially available spelling programs aimed at younger native speakers which reinforce some of the common word patterns. You could do a search for these in Amazon.

In addition, you could require your daughter to write down several times the correct forms of, say, 5 misspelled words in any passage of writing she does. As a result she will have about 20-30 words a week on which she can be tested.

A further method would be for your daughter to learn by heart some of the most useful spelling 'rules', and to practice applying the rules to the spelling of common words. For example, that the rule that the consonant at the end of words ending consonant-vowel-consonant is doubled on inflection: hot→hotter, stop→stopped. Again you could run a search for such books on Amazon.

Doing longer written assignments on the computer and using the spellcheck is another useful way of becoming a better speller. It has the immediate advantage of helping the writer to correct the mistakes in the piece of work in question. But it can also help to impress the correct spelling in the user's mind if sufficient attention is paid to the correct form. This advice is similar to that above about focusing attention on the spelling of words when reading.

A critical factor in the success of the above suggestions is your daughter's own attitude to her spelling problem. She will be more likely to make the sustained and regular effort that the above approaches demand if she can be understands that frequent spellings may interfere with the teacher's assessment of the knowledge she is trying to demonstrate or his appreciation of the thoughts and ideas she is expressing.

As far as the other issues you raised in your e-mail are concerned, it is certainly a little surprising that your daughter was not able to tell you the English vowels. But I don't believe this has very much to do with her poor spelling.

Some students have a good metalanguage (explicit knowledge about language and its terminology) without necessarily being the most competent users of it. Others may not know the names for the parts of speech or verb forms or be able to recite the spelling rules, but are able to express themselves effectively and accurately.

I'm not sure that there would be any benefit in your daughter learning one of the phonetic scripts. This would require a considerable effort and commitment on her part, and would, in my opinion, have little effect on her ability to spell more accurately.

Indeed, it would be requiring her to learn another language system on top of the one which she is already having problems with. If you are committed to this approach, however, there are a number of web sites that may be of assistance.

It would be difficult to find any international school where your child is the only speaker of her language. And in such a school she may well feel isolated and unhappy. In fact, there are important advantages for having students in your daughter's classes who speak the same language as her.

Firstly, concentrating on English for up to 2 hours at a time in lessons is a hard and stressful task. Your daughter will be more able to do so if she has same-language friends to talk to and relax at break and lunch times.

Secondly, if your daughter fails to understand something in class, particularly if she is a beginner, someone with the same language will be able to explain it to her. Or maybe she will be the one who can explain to someone whose English is not as good as hers. In this case, by explaining, she will be deepening her own understanding of the topic and practising how to talk about it in her own language.

Thirdly, if your daughter has understood something in her own language because of a friend's explanation, she will be able to understand more of what the teacher says or of what she has to read in English. And so, in fact, her English may well get better more quickly if there are other students of the same nationality in her classes.

It is not uncommon for students to speak English as fluently and accurately as a native speaker, but to struggle with the reading and writing assignments of their subject classes.The reason why this may happen is that there are, according to current theories*, two different kinds of language proficiency.

Firstly, there are the basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS) of listening and speaking, which are typically acquired quickly by many students. This is particularly true for students with language backgrounds similar to English who spend a lot of their time interacting with native speakers. Researchers have found that it can take as little as two years to develop native speaker fluency in the target language.

Secondly, we have what is known as cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP). As the name suggests, this is the basis for a child’s ability to cope with the academic demands placed upon her in the various school subjects. It can take between 5-7 years for a child to be working at the same level as native speaking peers as far as academic English is concerned. An important reason why it takes so long is that a large general and specific academic vocabulary must be acquired.

While it is relatively easy to learn the words used in everyday communication, the type of vocabulary needed to understand the more difficult academic language of the classroom is much harder to acquire. For example, everyday words such as lesson, homework, vacation, meet, cafeteria are more easily learned than abstract general academic ones such as rate, democracy, separate, doubt, evaluate, etc.

This means that it is quite normal for an ESL student who sounds like a native speaker to still be a long way from having the academic language proficiency she needs for the classroom.

* For a good summary of the research, see The Acquisition of English as a Second Language, Cummins J (1994) In: Reading Instruction for ESL Students Spangenberg-Urbschat, K and Pritchard, R, International Reading Association.

Note: A parent wrote that her son was a reluctant reader in both his mother tongue, German, and in English. She wondered if this would have a negative impact on his ultimate success in school.

The short answer is that good readers tend to be academically successful. Here is an extract from a research article entitled "What they can't read will hurt them: Reading and academic achievement" (Pretorius, E):

"Research findings in applied linguistics and reading research consistently show a strong correlation between reading proficiency and academic success at all ages, from the primary school right through to university level: students who read a lot and who understand what they read usually attain good grades. In fact, the relationship between reading and learning begins even earlier in the pre-primary school years - children who are exposed to storybook reading before they go to school tend to have larger vocabularies, greater general knowledge and better conceptual development than their peers, and in addition,  they learn to read and write more easily and quickly... . The correlation between reading proficiency and academic performance obtains for both those who study through their first language (L1 students) and for those who do not (L2 students). In fact, several teachers and researchers argue that reading is probably the most important skill for L2 students in academic or learning contexts... ."

http://www.library.unp.ac.za/innovation/id46.htm

So, clearly there is a correlation between reading proficiency and academic success. But it is not necessary that he is an avid reader of fiction, as some students are. If he is interested in factual information and regularly reads texts on the internet or in magazines about computers or science, for example, then he is automatically acquiring exactly the kind of reading proficiency that is associated with academic success.

Of course, if he spends most of his time on the internet chatting or playing games, then time online will not result in the development of a strong academic reading proficiency.

Whatever is the case, you may wish to talk with your son's English teacher to determine whether his disinterest in reading means that he has reading comprehension problems or writes poorly. You could also talk to the school librarian, who may have good suggestions about reading materials that could enthuse your son.

There are more questions and answers about helping ESL students in school on this page for teachers.

And here is a question and answer page for parents on the topic of language learning in general.