Barriers to Meaningful Instruction for English Learners

Lois M. Meyer is associate professor of education at the University of New Mexico. T ENGLISH LEARNER SITS IN CLASS, not completely understanding or fluently speaking English and possessing limited experience with the cultural practices and expectations of school. What is it like for this student to go to school in English only? When the learner’s language is not the school’s language, how does he or she feel when confronted with academic lessons, school texts, and classroom learning activities that are partially or totally incomprehensible? How can teachers recognize and remedy the barriers to meaningfulness that their instruction through English creates for English learners, in order to encourage both academic achievement and English language development through strategies that are effective and humane? There are predictable areas of confusion for Limited English Proficient (LEP) students any time an academic lesson is taught through English. Many English learners will find such lessons confusing, even overwhelming, if the teacher has not done the instructional work to help construct their understanding and participation. Teachers’ strategies are able to create classroom conditions that enable English learners to cross over the instructional divide from confusion into meaningful learning. In 1934, Vygotsky (1962) stressed the social and cultural nature of the development of children’s language and of their higher mental processes, and the crucial importance of instruction and collaboration with adults in these processes. Through dialogue with adults, children learn to transfer their experiences from the plane of physical action to that of words, creating “verbal thought” (pp. 88-89). Challenging the views of Piaget and other developmental psychologists of the time, Vygotsky claimed that collaboration with adults who explain, supply information, question, correct, and make children explain provides the structures of adult language and rational thought that children will finally internalize. Adult collaboration, “invisibly present” (p. 107), enables children eventually to solve problems verbally and cognitively on their own. Despite this conception of the interdependence of language development, cognition, and instructional collaboration with adults, teachers of English learners have been told for more than a decade that their role in the second language acquisition process is a largely passive one of providing “comprehensible input” (Krashen, 1981). Consequently, far more attention has been paid to the learner’s process of English acquisition than to the impact of teaching strategies such as effective teacher talk, teacher-student interaction, and adult support for students’ developing oral and written language production. This approach is challenged by social interactionist theories (Diaz, Moll, & Mehan, 1986;