TESOL Fieldwork: Building Trust With ELL Families
This paper reports on a TESOL fieldwork experience involving a 16-year-old native Spanish-speaking high school sophomore with a SOLOM score of 20/25, indicating limited English proficiency. Drawing on research supporting parental involvement in ELL student success, the paper identifies "building trust with families" as the selected instructional strategy. It describes a home visit conducted with the student and her parents — both of whom had limited English fluency and no formal education — and documents the outcomes of that visit, including the parents' willingness to engage with school activities and even promote a family literacy program in the broader community.
- Overview of the Student and Assessment: Student profile and SOLOM score introduction
- Rationale for the Selected Instructional Strategy: Why family trust-building strategy was chosen
- The Role of Parental Involvement in ELL Education: Research on parental involvement and ELL outcomes
- Implementing the Strategy: The Home Visit: Details of home visit with student and parents
- Outcomes and Reflections: Results and parent commitments from the visit
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds its strategy selection in peer-reviewed research on parental involvement, linking theory directly to a real fieldwork application.
- It moves logically from assessment (SOLOM score) to strategy rationale to implementation to outcomes, maintaining a clear narrative thread throughout.
- Specific, actionable steps — such as attending English language classes or accompanying students on field trips — make the strategy concrete and replicable.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates applied evidence-based practice: the student-teacher selects an instructional strategy supported by published research, implements it in a real-world context, and then reports observed outcomes. This research-to-practice loop is a foundational technique in teacher education and reflective fieldwork writing.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a brief student profile drawn from the SOLOM assessment. It then introduces and justifies the chosen strategy using scholarly sources, outlines specific implementation steps, narrates the home visit in detail, and closes with the results of that visit. The references section cites three sources in APA format. The paper is concise but covers the full practicum cycle from assessment through reflection.
Overview of the Student and Assessment
The student observed for the Student Oral Language Observation Matrix (SOLOM) was a native Spanish-speaking 16-year-old female who was a high school sophomore. The student's SOLOM score for the observation was 20/25, indicating limited English proficiency. Based on what was learned about the student during the SOLOM initial assessment and previous fieldwork experiences, this paper identifies an appropriate instructional strategy for use with this student and reports the results of that strategy.
Rationale for the Selected Instructional Strategy
The instructional strategy selected for this exercise was "building trust with families," as advocated by Pompa (n.d.) of the AdLit organization. Just as it is vitally important for clinicians to forge a therapeutic relationship with their clients in order to formulate efficacious treatment interventions, it is likewise vitally important for ELL teachers to reach out to students' families in order to encourage their more active involvement in the education of their children. Indeed, the importance of parental involvement in children's education has been well-documented, and this importance extends to ELL learner families as well. Studies have repeatedly shown that parental involvement in children's education is one of the most important predictors of academic success in the United States as well as abroad (Vera & Israel, 2012).
References
Pompa, M. (n.d.). Building trust with families. AdLit.
Silverman, F. (2009, July). Hitting the books — together: Through a family literacy program, Hispanic parents and their young children are learning to be partners in educational success. District Administration, 40(7), 24–26.
Vera, E. M., & Israel, M. S. (2012, Fall). Exploring the educational involvement of parents of English learners. School Community Journal, 22(2), 183–189.
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