March 7, 2008
A NEW WAY?:
English as a proficient language: More non-native students in Oregon are succeeding after the state goes to a new teaching style (BETSY HAMMOND, 3/06/08, The Oregonian)
Oregon schools have dramatically changed the way they teach English to non-native speakers over the past two years, and the new methods are paying off with more students reaching proficiency, new state figures show. [...]Educators chalk up the improved results to a new way of teaching that has swept Oregon ESL classrooms in the past couple of years.
Schools have begun explicitly teaching the grammar, rules and structure of English. And they are doing it in a carefully ordered way, making sure that students don't miss any of the building blocks of how English verbs are conjugated, words are ordered, conversations are expected to proceed and sentences are constructed.
"For a long time, we just read to them and exposed them to English and figured they would pick it up just like native speakers do," said Danelle Heikkila, who directs the English Language Learner program for Gresham-Barlow schools.
"But the state has asked us to . . . make sure that we teach them about English, about the rules and forms and structures of English."
All progress these days is counterrevolutionary. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 7, 2008 8:47 AM
I wish they would start doing this for American students. Most of them wouldn't know a pronoun if it smacked them in the face.
Posted by: Bartman at March 7, 2008 9:00 AMWhy is this an ESL class? I learned more about grammar from my Spanish classes than I ever did in English.
Posted by: Jay at March 7, 2008 10:11 AMSo the new approach to teaching english is, er.... to teach it?
Radical!
Posted by: Mike Earl at March 7, 2008 10:53 AMExactly so Jay. You were taught Spanish as a second language or SSL.
Unless grammatical English is spoken and insisted upon in the home where they learn to speak, children won’t learn to speak English correctly.
The public schools are no help since it was determined that kids going to school after the 60's were too dumb to learn the rudiments of the English language (or was it the teachers), it wasn't taught much.
The kids in Oregon ESL classes will have an enormous advantage if they come out of school with a skill that so few of their native born counterparts have, i.e., an ability to speak and write the English language correctly.
Posted by: erp at March 7, 2008 10:53 AM