English Language Learners
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During the last decade, the number of English Language Learners (ELLs) has risen significantly in classrooms all over the U.S., with the increasing diversity of American society (Drucker, 2003). English language learners (ELLs), as a group, has consistently fared far worse in standardized testing than their peers, especially in the case of language arts tests. Essentially, state tests indicate that ELL students typically score 20 to 30 percentage points lower than their peers. Just as disturbingly, their performance does not improve significantly over the years (Abedi & Dietel, 2004). While various factors have been identified as the reasons for their poor performance such as the departure of high achievers from the group (Abedi & Dietel, 2004), another possible reason is the educators' lack of knowledge and understanding of ELLs. According to Drucker (2003), 41 percent of the three million public teachers surveyed by the National Center for Education Statistics reported that they teach ELLs in their classrooms. Yet, only 12.5 percent have undergone eight or more hours of training (Drucker, 2003). As a result of this lack of training, many educators possess many myths and misconceptions of ELL students, which have undermined their capacity to provide adequate instruction to these students. In this paper, an analysis of the myths and misconceptions of ELL students will be presented, which represent both perspectives of this topic.
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thod deviates from children's natural learning preferences, children from native English-speaking cultures have been able to acquire language in this fashion (Meier, 2003; Rossi, 1999). In this type of learning, students are required to acquire discrete elements of reading and writing skills that are often divorced from specific contexts (Street, 1993). In practice, this means that the students have to learn how to decode written text phonologically, spell words with either phonetic or visual spellings, figure out the sound-letter correspondences, before they are allowed to move onto more complex, but more interesting texts (Ehri & Wilce, in Drucker, 2003).
However, this pedagogical approach is extremely foreign to ELLs who come from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. When they fail to respond to this type of instructional approach, teachers often have the misconception that these students lack the intellectual capacity to cope with the learning. Therefore, they further simplify the instruction that typically entails rote learning and drilling of discrete subskills, which in turn further leads to the students' inability to acquire the learning (Meier, 2003; Rossi, 1999).
As a result, many ELLs are typically
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Approximate Word count = 1316
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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