Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

In the Fall of 2023 I had the privilege of working as a tutor with two students at Beman Middle School. One of my students, Esperanza, was from Mexico and the other, Eliana, was from Peru. They were coming to Middletown at completely different levels of their language learning. Esperanza demonstrated complete control of the language only needing certain vocabulary help and small grammar adjustments; however, Eliana was at the beginning stages of her English practice. I had worked as both a TA and Spanish tutor before so I had some experience switching between languages during a lesson; however, it wasn’t until working at Beman that I began to recognize the wide ranging impact of language on problem solving, general comprehension and social capital. Now, of course, it feels obvious to say that schooling in a second language would pose challenges for understanding math functions or biology cycles; but, as someone who primarily learned a second language through confined Spanish classes or controlled grammar exercises, I had never really considered the impact of language learning on other school subjects. To me, language learning had always been about enhancing your vocabulary and practicing with different tenses. Working with Esperanza and Eliana, I discovered the extra work that goes into making sense of history lessons or chemistry homework when you must translate each assignment as you go. It wasn’t until I myself went abroad that I had any semblance of what this was like. 

With Eliana, as she was a beginner English learner, I quickly found that for science or math homework, understanding the concepts and processes of each assignment was often more important than making sure she knew every word of the page correctly in English. We had been sent specifically as language tutors, but I sometimes switched into Spanish so that Eliana could learn, first, how to solve the problems conceptually and then she could turn to me or translators for specific word help. Furthermore, I made deliberate efforts to engage Esperanza and Eliana with their classmates and asked them to collaborate on group work. I was amazed by how gracefully they created friendships with a language they were still learning. Ultimately, working as a Beman tutor was my first introduction to language learning outside of a language class and the practical problems it poses. I had to challenge my assumptions for how I could be most useful to my students and realized that their conceptual understandings and social frameworks were much more important than the vocab lessons I had planned to offer them.