Despite uninterrupted years of schooling, protracted English Language Learners have salient gaps in English vocabulary, syntax, and grammar. They are challenged throughout the school day by the academic discourse demands of textbooks and literature, essay assignments, lectures, and formal class discussions. Moreover, they lack the academic language competence they need to move on to a community college or university and successfully navigate the post-secondary curriculum in reading and writing."
— Kate Kinsella, Ed.D., teacher educator, San Francisco State University
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Dingle & Dangle & ESL:
How Do They Relate to NCLB
and Considerate Text?
by Jerry Stemach MS, CCC-SLP
I doubt you’ve seen the words dingle and dangle used together before, so let me help you understand why I have put them together here. I want to tell you what the Dingle Peninsula and a dangling modifier have to do with an English Language Learner’s gaps in English vocabulary, syntax, and grammar.
The Dingle Peninsula
If you’re unfamiliar with the Dingle Peninsula, some background knowledge is in order. The Dingle Peninsula juts into the Atlantic Ocean as the westernmost point of mainland Ireland. It’s a rocky, barren landscape where sheep outnumber humans, and stone walls crisscross the landscape. An occasional farmhouse reassures you that you’re not entirely alone.
So, what are hundreds of teenagers doing along these isolated roads? Judging from their attire, they’re not on litter patrol or engaged in roadwork.
They’re here to learn Ireland’s first "official" language — Gaelic or "Irish." The Dingle Peninsula is the place to go for Gaelic language immersion because, for many families who live here, Gaelic is their native language. Since nearly everyone in the rest of the country speaks English — Ireland’s second language — most of these students are struggling to learn Gaelic the way foreign-born students struggle to learn English as teenagers in our schools.
In 2005, the government of Ireland removed English place names from the signposts on the Dingle Peninsula. Driving to the town of Dingle meant following signs to An Daingean. (Recently, the town voted to change the name to a bilingual hybrid to support struggling tourists.)
Can you read An Daingean like a native speaker? Why not? It’s because learning any language naturally happens along four developmental stages:
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- as infants, babies babble and listen;
- as toddlers, they listen and speak;
- as young children, they begin to read;
- then, after they have enough experience with print text, they write.
Listen, Speak, Read, Write
It’s what native speakers learn to do, in that order. Many of us think of reading and writing as two of the three "Rs," not as intermediate and advanced levels of language learning. The sequence of instructional strategies for English Language Learners should mimic the natural progression of language learning. Thus, The English Language Learners’ Program Guide from the Oregon Department of Education identifies five stages of second language learning beginning with
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- Stage I: "receptive" (silent/listening)
- Stage II: "early production" (beginning to speak).
No Child Left Behind Wants it Both Ways
NCLB wants ELL students to learn English while learning the curriculum, then, after one year, pass the test. Some states are crying "Foul!" recognizing that it can take as long as seven years to achieve academic proficiency in a new language.
Reminds me of a dangling modifier: While driving through Ireland, a blind dog ran into a tree. Who’s driving these decisions, anyway?
The Brain and Language Learning
It amazed me to travel to Tokyo and hear a child speaking perfect Japanese, or to London and hearing a toddler say "Mum" in perfect British dialect.
In Speech 101, I learned that infants babble, practicing nearly all the sounds or phonemes of every language on Earth. American English has approximately 44 phonemes. A native English-learning baby hears these sounds in the speech of his parents, then practices them to the exclusion of all those other sounds that would have served him well had he been born to Japanese or British parents.
Children pass through critical learning stages, after which they are no longer "brain-ready" to learn the lessons of that stage naturally and easily. If a child isn’t speaking words by age 30 months, a speech therapist wants to know why.
Learning a language is priority one for the infant brain and the developing brain. After childhood and early adolescence, the brain is less pliable, making it harder to learn a language. You can hear that lack of pliability in the speech of second language adults: their articulators — tongue, teeth, lips — make the sounds of their native language perfectly, but must force the phonemes of English through mouth shapes that only approximate a native English speaker. The result? An accent.
ELL Students Merit Consideration
Students learning English as adolescents in our schools merit consideration as they struggle to master the language and the curriculum at the same time. When you learn another language as an adolescent or adult, you do it differently: you study and memorize vocabulary, rules of grammar, even the rule about dangling modifiers.
As ELL students learn to speak, they begin to read narrative text that contains the kind of informal language they hear spoken around them. But this is not the language of literature or the language of textbooks. ELL students may know enough vocabulary to carry on a simple conversation, but they have not learned the thousands more words or complex grammatical constructions and idioms they need to be successful in school. Moreover, they may lack background knowledge that comes from extensive reading. Because of these gaps in their language knowledge, these students may not be able to read and understand the textbooks their classmates use. What should they read?
Hi-Lo Books
Many teachers use so-called "hi-lo" books because the language seems simple and easy: short sentences with one or two-syllable words yielding a low reading grade equivalency. But let me suggest the opposite: the text is often reduced so much that the connections between ideas are edited out, and students must infer the connections themselves. Thus "hi-lo" text can be hard to comprehend.
In the next LeaderLink, Gail Portnuff-Venable, MS, CCC-SLP and I will discuss ‘considerate text’ and why it is the text of choice for students who are English language learners.
This article was introduced in the December 2006 LeaderLink eNewsletter.
