Shadow, Support & Reflection

Having shadowed and supported the teachers who educate learners enrolled in ESOL, I have discovered ways to tailor my materials accordingly and differentiate correctly (where applicable). For instance, when PE/E1 learners are practicing the identification of lower case and capital letters, the number of letters a learner can identify can vary for those who are having trouble with character recognition (1 – 2 letters of the alphabet in this instance) or are exceedingly proficient with such an activity (6+ letters to develop or even challenge other learners). This approach is supported in Tomlinson’s “The differentiated classroom” p11 where under “Elements of Differentiation” it lists the same technique as a means where “the teacher modifies content, process and products” in order to stretch learner understanding.

City & Guilds ESOL Skills for Life Paper E1 4692

As understanding (comprehension) and production (providing the correct usage) are the two main goals of a language teacher to achieve with their class. I chose to research psycholinguistics (cognitive linguistics) to find out what processes go on in a learner’s mind, and how that could benefit or hinder the learning process. Aitchison’s “Words in the Mind” (2012) explains “the big dictionary effect” where synonyms, antonyms and homonyms all derive from smaller words, which make up what the average native language speaker uses throughout their lifetime. Aitchison notes there are “50,000” of these words, though connotation and collocation play a big part in the understanding of their definitions.

Prior to deciding which words to teach (either due to institutionalised examination or general curriculum design) the learners comprehension and production grows from the foundations of four specific understandings. –

"Cognitive processes: information processing and restructuring" p8 from Pitt's
Debates in ESOL Teaching and Learning.

Although the language may come from the classroom or even the local surroundings in which the learner may live, encouraging the learner to recognise the context is key. As the teacher it will be my duty to get learners to speak to one-to-one or as a group, who all come from the same local area and wish to achieve the same goal – bettering their language proficiency. As someone who also comes from the local area, I am able to share with them the same concerns I had when moving to this area for the first time and motivate them to overcome their fears and speak in front of each other to encourage learning through active participation.

One way I could do this is through seating arrangements (Harmer’s Separate Table formation, p179 from “The Practice of English Language Teaching”) and sorting the students equally amongst learners from other ethnic backgrounds. By doing this it encourages learners to talk with – and educate themselves about – people from other cultures (and thus British Culture and Values simultaneously) all the while developing their English language skills, as they’d have no option to switch back to their L1’s with no learners from the same mother tongue seated nearby. This also would solve the issue I originally raised regarding Translanguaging and forces learners to listen more carefully, in order to better understand social context.