Post 111: Case Study for Sheltered Content Class

Post 111: Case Study for Sheltered Content ESL class

ESL content or shelter classes. may be self contained, or students may attend ESL content classes part of the school day and participate in monolingual English instruction classes (mainstream classes) the remainder of the day. ESL Content classes or sheltered classes are considered remedial class so that an ESL teacher can make academic content 'comprehensible input' for ESL students without watering down the curriculum.

I am Chinese American. Both my parents are Chinese and spoke Chinese at home until I was 6. Up to the age of 5, I  only understood the English of other kids. I did not understand the fast and complicated English of my teacher.  In kindergarten, I sang the alphabet song and learned to count without understanding what that meant. But as you would read in my previous blog, I did learn how to pull pranks since I did understand the English of other kids.  This worked well for kindergarten, but once the teacher talk in English got harder in 1st grade, I ran into problems.  Once my first grade teacher told my mother to speak English at home, I learned my academic content areas in English using the Submersion method because we did not have ESL classes at our school. I at least knew a little bit of English, but for students with no English at all, having ESL classes is imperative.

When I was teaching at a private school, I taught ESL Content/sheltered classes to incoming Chinese students. These Chinese students had varying degrees of English Language Proficiency. Some came to the US with only reading and writing knowledge of English (EFL) they had picked up in China. Others came with no EFL at all and did not know any English at all so I had to teach them how to read, write, and speak English.  Then, there were the older Chinese students who had been at the school a few years and already knew English, but was having difficulty in their academic content areas that required a lot of reading and writing like English class, Biology class, and Social Studies. They also had trouble understand Math Word Problems.

I created simplified material for these older students for their 9th, 10th, 11th grade English Literature and English Writing classes. I also taught students how to read complicated Biology and Social Studies textbook units by teaching them how to create timelines, look at titles and pictures to predict content. My ESL Content Shelter classes were separate classes that my ESL students took like a remedial class.  I also used Longman Literature books which had simplified versions of the literature being studied in the English 9th, 10th and 11th grade classes.

For instance, in the 9th grade class, the 9th grade mainstream English Literature class was studying The Wizard of Oz in its original English version. I found a simpler version of The Wizard of Oz and I also rewrote some chapters of the original Wizard of Oz in simpler English for my ELL. The ELL really appreciated my simpler Wizard of Oz chapters. Interesting though, when the American native speaker students found out that I was creating simpler Wizard of Oz chapters, they too wanted to read the simpler chapters rather than read the original! I remember the American NS would line up outside my door as I made copies for the American NS as well. The American NS would get their copies after their regular teachers had left for the day since they were supposed to be reading the original Wizard of Oz.  I was told by my students that my simplified Wizard of Oz chapters was much better than Sparknotes or Cliff Notes! 

The ELL students did not like the stigma of having to come to a remedial ESL content class because anything remedial made it look like that they (ELL) were not as smart as the English NS students. So what I did was I invited English NS to come to my remedial sessions and I rebranded my ESL Content class as a 'Study Skills' class to make my tutoring sessions less of a stigma for the students. I will discuss the effects of Subtractive Bilingual programs vs Additive Bilingual Programs/ESL in another post but I touch on it briefly in this paragraph.  Inviting English NS into the ESL class helps bring down the stigma of ESL Content Remedial class and it worked like a charm! This is why the Two way Bilingual Program/Dual Immersion program (Additive Bilingual) works so well because having both English NS and ELL in one class makes all students equal in each others' eyes. This topic deserves its own blog post because of the role of culture and other aspects that add to a bilingual program.

To conclude, Sheltered English/ESL Content Area classes really do help ESL students with academic content that requires a lot of reading and unfamiliar English words. It is good for ESL students to have a teacher trained in 2nd Language Acquisition to teach them how to navigate difficult academic content from an ESL point of view.  ESL Sheltered classes play a vital role in the student success of ELL.