Needed Conversation

I was listening to a language podcast. Sometimes the speaker on the podcast would skip his Japanese class to talk to Japanese foreign exchange students because he found that more useful. Of course, my response to that is that you could do both of those: (1) go to class and (2) when you don’t’ have class, you can talk to those Japanese foreign language students.

But the point of this writing is that it is important when studying a language to talk to native speakers to make it more real for you. It is also important to get to know other people who speak your target language. Those personal conversations make the language much more real, and then you escape your bubble and develop more of an appreciation for learning the target language. I think for an ESL class it would be interesting to coordinate with a Spanish class. We could agree to share students for language exchange. That’s a good way for them to get to know other students at school that they otherwise would not get the chance to get to know.

Another option is to have conversations between ELs and native English speakers in collab classes. I know this is a best practice for collab classes - encouraging interaction and dialogue among students. This is more easily implemented in classrooms with ELs who have higher levels, so particular attention needs to be placed on creating comprehensible and achievable conversations between the low-level ELs and students who do not speak the ELs’ language.

Granted, I recognize that it can be difficult finding time for these conversations because so much time is needed for ELs to understand classroom content with scaffolds, extended time, and other supports. But I think that implementing these conversations sometimes is time well spent. There may also be some roadblocks on you implementing this idea in your collab class. I get that. But you might want to try coordinating with your school Spanish teacher for your ESL pull-out/resource class occasionally.

I have students who speak different languages in my ESL 1 class, but my high school just has a Spanish foreign language class. So the Spanish class would just need some of my students for language exchange. I think I could still work around this. I could line up desks in a row. The ELs would practice together and then at the final desks are the native English speakers (maybe 3). I can pair my higher level ELs with the lower ELs. Each pair can practice and the higher level EL can help the lower level EL. When the pair reach the native English speaker, the higher level EL can go first to model the exchange and then the lower level EL can go. Once they finish, they can work on an assignment. I’ll ask the Spanish teacher for her highest level Spanish speakers. We could then first have a conversation in Spanish and then my ELs can have the same conversation in English. I could then send my Spanish speakers down to the Spanish classroom, and the Spanish teacher could implement a similar activity and then all of her students would be able to have a similar conversation as the one I had in my classroom. While my Spanish speakers are out of the classroom, I could just review material with the non-Spanish speakers.