Over my past couple of blog posts,
it has been clear that there is not enough research and publicity on the struggles
of elementary students whose native language is Chinese. Popular media
consistently created a mental picture in the American populations mind that is
the ESL program- a group of Spanish-speaking students talking in a corner looking
confused with what is going on in class. Even the scholars, who study and
research ESL programs, tend to focus in on Spanish natives.
In the
Huffington Post’s article from one of my earlier posts, “New Model for English
Language Learners Needed in U.S. Schools,” the popular online site expressed
its concerned for creating a more engaging environment so that ELLs are more
likely to care about school instead of giving up and eventually dropping out
due to lack of interest as well as discomfort in the classroom. Blogger Jane
Smith explains, “Since economic achievement is
directly connected to educational attainment, a national commitment to ELLs
will result in more high school and college graduates, which in turn will
create higher employment levels, higher income levels…” Basically, Smith is
saying that keeping entire classrooms engaged in learning will ultimately help
our country as a whole. So wouldn’t you think that more scholars would set
focus on ALL types of ELL students so that this goal of an incoming, highly
educated generation will be attainable? Even some scholars that do focus on Chinese
ELLs centralize the difference between English and Chinese language learning to
be strongly based on how the large differences in the two languages affect the transition
to English learning. That is, Chinese speakers are used to speaking in their
language that typically uses symbols to mean different concepts rather than
just letters to spell out a word and then a sentence. “Syntactic Skills in
Sentence Reading Comprehension Among Chinese Elementary School Children,” studied
the differences between the ELL students versus the native English speakers. What
was concluded was that the English language demands more phonemic awareness
than the Chinese. This makes it difficult for the Chinese ELLs to understand
the English language more so because they have no development of how a single
symbol or letter can represent a sound. In Ding’s scholarly article, “Rapid
Automatized Naming and Immediate Memory Functions in Chinese Mandarin-Speaking
Elementary Readers” it was expressed that Chinese ELLs comprehend reading for
efficiently with verbal cues. This would be an important technique to have
known to the public so that teachers who have these types of learners in their
classroom can accommodate properly. But, because the research and studies are
less prevalent for Chinese natives than Spanish natives, teachers are less
prepared to have these ELLs in their class.
The only
fairly ‘popular’ site that focused precisely on Chinese native speakers, also
mentioned in my previous blog posts, was found on colorincolorado.org. Xiao-lin
Yin-Croft, author of “From the Classroom: Working with Chinese ELLs” speaks
from first hand experience with Chinese ELLs who have gone through the American
education system for multiple years. Because the blog site that this article
was not half as popular as sites such as the Huffington Post who centralize their
ELLs to be Spanish speakers, the mass population forgets that there is any
other population of ELLs. If only the popular press would set focus on these
other populations. Then perhaps the public eye would care more about these
learners, which would in turn influence scholars to research and come up with
solutions for this educational issue.
Picture courtesy of larryferlazzo.edublogs.org
Signifies that all language learners must remain fully committed to learning the language.
The same goes for the language teachers.
