TPE C ELL

Deborah Short and Jana Echevarria's article Teacher Skills to Support English Learners I found to be quite schematic and superificial. As someone whose first language was Spanish, and have struggled for years to develop my English, the pedagogical points are obvious or over formalized. The third paragraph is titled "Not All the Same" and goes into how English learners, just like citizens, are not all the same and have different learning abilities. Wow how usefull!

The article continues with the Sheltered Instruction Observation Model Protocol (SIOP) that was part of a seven year research project. The conclusion researchers had of the SIOP model was it "performed significantly better on an academic writing assessment" than did other educators' models. But when one digs under the surface, learning English from a disadvantages position contains hurdles that are very difficult. The emotional, personal, psychological, and social factors come into play, which are mentioned, but dealt with superificially. The actual experience, and the medium of education, the nature of social relations in the classroom, of the ESL student is one qualitativly different than a student who is a citizen.