Journal 2 Inclusive Education for ELLs

I have spent the last 8 years of my life living and teaching English in South Korea. Many of my students have come to Canada or the United States to study for a year. Although the Korean math curriculum advances faster than it does here in Canada, many of my students returned to Korea and told me how difficult they found mathematics. One of the major causes of this is that we do not learn academic English until we reach an advanced proficiency level in English. Another reason that they struggle is the cultural bias of our instruction. The language we use in mathematics classes is unfamiliar to ELLs. The terms we use in every day English conversation and the terms we use in the Mathematics classroom are very different. For this reason, students are asked to decode the language and develop the cognitive mathematics skills at the same time. They are essentially asked to do twice the amount of work that the native English speaking students are doing. Even simple terms such as using multiply instead of multiplication can be confusing to students. As teachers of ELLs we need to take these things into consideration and make questions as visual and hands on as possible to help reduce the strain on these students. The bigger issue is the cultural bias inherent in so many of the questions we present to the students. The students have no cultural reference for many of the things we take for granted. Words and phrases such as allowance, pigs in pens, flower bed, kitchen island, Madison Square Garden (a circular structure), soccer ( football), Super Bowl, yielding, Thanksgiving, and block (of houses), are all terms that would be difficult to decode for someone with no cultural reference to draw from. If we are going to use these references in the classroom we need to use them as teachable moments to engage the students in a discussion of North American culture. If we are not willing to, or do not have the time for, these discussions then we need to alter the questions in order to reach these students.

If our ELLs seem to be struggling to grasp mathematical concepts, instead of assuming that they do not have the cognitive skills to solve the problems, we need to examine our lesson content and teaching styles to see if maybe the problem is not the content but the method of instruction.