Teaching ESL classes has caused me to focus more on the “whys” of the English language.

Have you ever considered how a foreign student must read between the lines when they are under the gun to get up to snuff with the English language? While a fly on the wall knows that you’re beating a dead horse to think that you’ll receive a million bucks on a silver platter, an ESL student will not have the foggiest idea what you are talking about. The spoken idioms of the English language can be food for thought but hard for a non-American student to come to grips with. But when push comes to shove, or the rubber meets the road, each one of our Chinese students has the guts to take the bull by its horns to become a sharp cookie. And, even though it’s a bitter pill to swallow, our English language is, for the record, plain NUTS?!! Our I-20 students have tremendous courage to come to America and immerse themselves in English with all its idioms, collocations, and grammatical irregularities.

As the ESL teacher at Killian Hill this year, I am so proud of our I-20 students and have a new appreciation for the obstacles they tackle daily. Many people have asked me, “What’s the difference between ESL and EFL or ESOL and ELL, for that matter? That’s a great question, so I researched the acronyms. ESL stands for English as a Second Language, whereas EFL is stands for English as a Foreign Language. In short, if I were teaching English to Chinese students in China, I might be an EFL teacher; however, since I teach English to Chinese students living in the USA, I am an ESL teacher. But what if the student is fluent in three languages—should we call it ETL?! I think that’s where ESOL came in as English for Speakers of Other Languages, and finally there’s the ELL or the English Language Learner, which generally applies to the student who is mainstreamed in a general classroom setting.

Regardless of the acronym used, the “ESL” classes at Killian are specially designed for students whose first language is not English. In our ESL classes, we cover thousands of idioms, like you read in the first paragraph, and other culture-specific content for listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The Oxford University curriculum that we use is specialized for second language learning with a targeted AWL (academic word list) to help students adjust to a new academic system by gaining adequate lexical knowledge as quickly as possible. The low student-to-teacher ratio offers a supportive environment to help students have the confidence to ask questions and put to practice what they are learning.

I love when my students ask questions because typically “the Asian learning style is teacher-centered and closure-oriented,” according to an article entitled “Asian ESL Students and Literacy Development.” In the article, Professor Peter Edwards explains why “Asian students dislike ambiguity, uncertainty, or fuzziness.” In other words, they like to memorize but struggle to infer meaning. One of his students believed she could become fluent in English by memorizing all the grammar rules, but vocabulary tends to be the greatest challenge by far. He explained, for example, how “happy” in Chinese can be used as several parts of speech, while in English the word changes to “happiness” or “happily.”

ESL students undoubtedly face challenges in learning English that are different from American students. Concepts as common to us as which articles and prepositions to use in various situations can be quite frustrating to an ESL student. Learning common collocations or words frequently used together helps understanding to build. Noticing context cues, recognizing word families, and identifying main ideas is crucial. And accepting all the irregularities is necessary. For example, how many apples (countable noun), how much tea (noncountable noun), but how much money (mass noun)—even though most of don’t have more money than we can count!

The more knowledge I can gain in relation to other cultures and languages, the better I will be able to assist my students. Due to my editorial training, it has been fun to focus a day a week on helping my ESL 2 students express themselves in creative writing. This process gives me a glimpse into their Chinese culture and helps them to develop a vital skill. My ESL students this year are truly an inspiring group of students, and I’m thrilled to see them jump in head first, taking advantage of the opportunities offered to all students at KHCS.

This article is also posted at khcs.org where Sarah teaches ESL classes to Asian students.