DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES BETWEEN SPECIAL EDUCATION AND ESL
In a discussion of meeting the educational needs of ESL and/or special education students, Garcia and Ortiz (1988) long ago noted that if a child who needs ESL instruction is mistakenly placed in a special education environment, there is an increased risk that the student will experience academic failure because the special needs classrooms and programs will not fully accommodate the child's particular learning needs. In other words, while there may be some similarities between special education and ESL instruction, there are also differences. The purpose of this paper is to examine the research on these similarities and differences.
ESL and Special Education: Similarities and Differences
According to Sousa (2001), there are two similarities between special education students and ESL students. The first is that both groups of students often need to work on the sounds of the English language and how to discriminate among them. In this regard, Schoebach, Greenleaf, Cziko and Hurwitz (1999) notes that at the early or elementary level of education, the instructional techniques and methods given to both groups of students for learning and discriminating among sounds is quite similar.
However, there is also an important difference. As both groups of children progress in learning, the group of ESL students will make faster progress, not only learning to read more rapidly but also reading to grade level and beyond far quicker. Practice and a good deal of instructional focus on "picking up the language details" will continue to be a mainstay for special education students long after other instructional techniques have supplanted these with ESL students. ESL students will have far less difficulty in terms of making gains in reading comprehension. Thus, if they are placed in a classroom that provides a great deal of instructional effort to learning reading comprehe
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