ESL Teaching Has Developed Along

ESL teaching has developed along with educational principles since the years of its inception. Today, teachers are faced with various challenges in ESL teaching. Increasingly, a single classroom incorporates students with a very wide diversity of language skills and abilities. A foreign ESL student may for example learn communicative English within a single year, while another may be linguistically challenged to such an extent that the language barrier would prevent him from ordering anything other than hotdogs from the cafeteria menu for three years. To help teachers with this problem, Chapter 4 and 5 of the book Assessment and ESL: An alternative approach, provides valuable insight.

Chapter 4 for example provides guidelines on assessment and providing students with a supportive environment for learning. This is vitally important, as students who find both meaning and support within their learning environment will also learn more quickly. In the "Emerging Literacy" chapter, the authors observe that each student has a specific level of literacy that they bring to the classroom. These need to be assessed and used as a basis for development. Here, context is of great importance.

Context in terms of language learning can have more than one meaning. Firstly, there is the context of the classroom, where students use the target language to communicate with their classmates and teacher. Such communication can take place by means of reading, writing, and verbal interaction. Teachers can assess students by means of their written language as well as by means of their spoken language. Each assessment can then be used as a basis from which to measure future development, as well as to derive a supportive environment for learning.

It is also important to recognize that students operate within a language context that is wider than the classroom. The authors note that students have a variety of purposes in using language. In the social context, they communicate with their friends on any number of topics, such as popular films, sports, clothing, and so on. They also use language to negotiate with parents and teachers for pocket money and extra time for assignments respectively, and so on. All these contexts can be used to provide students with a familiar and supportive environment of learning.

The most important element that emerges from this chapter is the fact that students can no longer be seen as homogeneous automatons, who learn language in precisely the same way. Human beings all differ in terms of ability and learning style. Recognizing this enables teachers to better address their students' learning needs and also to derive better ways of assessment that truly measures the learning process. An integrated assessment, in other words, will provide a better way of assessing the learning process rather than only fragments of language learning.

Chapter 5 focuses on the importance of observation in assessing the process of speaking and listening skills. Closely connected to preliminary and ongoing assessment, it is also important to derive information about students by means of their speaking and listening activities in the classroom. Teachers can talk with students both individually and in the group process. By means of observation, extra information can be derived not only about their abilities, but also about the way in which they prefer to learn; what they regard as important, supportive, and threatening in the learning context.