To meet your students where they are, first you have to find them:

Working with culturally and linguistically diverse students

by
Ken Pransky
Francis Bailey

Summary
Ken Pransky, ESL teacher, grew less confident in his teaching skills especially when a
number of Cambodian refugee students thrived in their school to study. At fist, he thought that
the students have deficits and weaknesses in dealing with the academic activities but he was able
to realize that it was he and the school that are unequipped for the students. How he found this
out is through case study vignettes which illuminated his perceptions about the students.
At risk students as how he called them are the students who are at risk academically due
to cultural and linguistic differences. The four steps on the reflective process namely awareness
(observance of a breakdown in communication), inquiry (identification of the cause of the
problem), reconceptualization (improvement of the perspective) and lesson (revision and
restructuring of the lesson) together with their role in the formulation of concepts were utilized to
come up with a better and more effective teaching strategy.
Case study 1 dealt on the cultural assumptions about teaching and learning and how they
affect the educational process. The activity calls for students to correct the mistakes intentionally
done by the teachers but some of the students in this vignette are American Cambodians who
find it inappropriate to critique elders. This led the teacher to inquire about the students’
background and make adjustments in the lesson. He also took the chance to instruct the children
about the school’s expectation for good students therefore enabling the at risk students to
explicitly act in a different manner whenever they are in school.
The second case study covered how the cultural norms, assumptions, and learning
expectations color the learning environment. Ken, in his process of teaching sound-symbol
correspondence, was led to a real-time inquiry about the importance of listening which then
resulted to the discovery of children’s perception of listening with the eyes. This case eventually
pushed the teacher to take a closer look at the Cambodians’ way of giving importance to
listening. It was then discovered that listening is not as important as the teacher values it.

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Therefore, he realized the important role of social and cultural context to at risk students’
construction of meaning.
Dealing with the sound-symbol correspondence was also the for of the third case study.
Ken’s real-time inquiry drove him to investigate about the reason why a student who already had
a lot of sound-symbol correspondence activities was not successful in the application of this
lesson. Later, he recognized his need to shift to the zone of proximal development of children
when he sees that they can respond more to external factors than to actual language content.
Case study 4 tackled the breakdown of communication between Ken and the students.
The academic performance of the students made the teacher question their level of
understanding. Ken tried to teach his students the concept of inference but a collapse in his
methodology occurred when the students weren’t able to answer him. So, he decided to take a
more personal event that would make his students relate and infer more easily. Through this, he
was able to elicit the desired inference from the students and led him to the following
conclusions: 1. students had better inference skills given they can articulate in English well; 2.
students develop awareness that home experiences can be carried to school; 3. with continuous
application, the students will be able to inculcate it in their mind and use in personal reading.
The fifth case study highlighted the idea of the importance of students’ cultural context in
determining the ways, types and level of student participation in classroom discussion. The
Cambodian students who were thought of being aloof in the class surprisingly gained confidence
to share their answers to the class. It was then found out by the teacher that the task and lesson
content which reflected the student’s home culture background together with the support that
they got from the paraprofessional enabled them to build confidence and share their experiences.
The article concluded by stating that different variables such as cultural load and social
background affect academic performance. In lieu to the premise of the study which states that
learning is fundamentally a social and cultural process that language teachers must be prepared
and equipped of, home and school customs may be compromised to contribute to better learning.

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Evaluation/Critique
The paper dealt with five case study vignettes and a critique on each case study will be
done first before proceeding to examining the vignettes as a whole.
Abraham Maslow provided us with man’s hierarchy of needs namely physiological
needs, safety needs, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization being the highest
(“Hierarchy of Needs”). In congruence with the first vignette, human’s need to belong played a
big part in the student’s behavior in class. Their need of a mediating adult was so apparent to
help them build confidence and trust themselves. The students couldn’t find ease in the
classroom due to the fourth element of language: the cultural load (Orillos 14). Coming from a
different country with a different culture, the Cambodian students found it hard to feel that they
too belong in the class. This indifference gave the core problem to the teacher and set the tone of
the proceeding studies. This factor was actually mentioned at the onset of the journal but no
justifiable theory or explanation on why they felt indifferent was given so I am taking the
initiative to explain why this problem occurred to the students. These can actually be attributed
to the students’ cultural load and their need to belong in the class. In search for the answer on
why the incident happened, more emphasis was given to the students’ reaction to the activity
done by the teacher. Therefore the writer needed to introduce the concepts of Discourse
Community defined as where as people share similar thoughts, ideas and speech conventions
(“Discourse”) and Mismatch Theory as the traits that have been passed down through
generations and preserved through the adaptive function (Mismatch Theory”) as the base schools
of thought in this vignette. These theories explained the reasons why this communication
breakdown happened in the class of Ken. Starting from the shared speech conventions of the
Cambodian students with Seiha to the perpetuation of the cultural norm of not answering back to
adults of said students, these theories provided us with explanations and ways on how change
can be done to improve the situation. In spite of these, I believe that with the Schema theory of
R. C. Anderson, which states that prior knowledge is essential for the comprehension of new
information and schemata grow and change as new information is acquired (“Schema Theory of
Learning”), a better understanding of the students’ position is possible. In light of this, the
teachers either need to help students build the required knowledge, or remind them of what they
already know before introducing new material. The question for this would only be: What will

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happen to the student if the time comes that no mediating adult will be there to help them? Will
their learning stop? worse, will there still be learning at all?
The second case study dwelt on constructivism as the driving theory. This theory states
that by reflecting on our own experiences, we construct our own understanding of the world we
live in (“Constructivism”). In this vignette, the students constructed their own meaning of
listening and responded to it based on how the idea formed into their minds. This idea of
listening well of students may be attributed to the preceding discourse that happened between the
students and the teacher. This previous discourse shared by the teacher and the student
unconsciously taught the students how to listen well by sitting up straight and looking at the
teacher. Looking at the Linguistic Context and Social Context which refers to what has been
previously said and shared in the conversation and the social relationship of the people involved
in communication respectively, whenever the teacher asks them to listen, they will listen the way
they know how to. Taking into consideration Hyme and Halliday’s theory of communication in
which language is said to be acquired in a social context- by interacting with other people
(Orillos 7), it can be deduced that the students’ understanding of the word listening led to be
understood and manifested through non-verbal forms of understanding (sitting straight and look
into the eyes of the teacher). It was also mentioned that teachers must create appropriate learning
context for the students especially at-risk students to better understand and grasp the intentions of
the teacher. Supporting this statement is one of Krashen’s Hypotheses called Input Hypothesis
which states that humans can better acquire language through understanding messages or
receiving comprehensible input (i+1) (Orillos 207). In this view, the teacher must be familiar
with the different learning strategies to make the student comprehend faster and correctly. The
learning situations must be understandable by the student to avoid any misunderstandings and
misconceptions about the matter at hand. As the children construct their own meaning, the
teacher must provide just and suitable environment for the student to learn accordingly. A branch
of linguistics called pragmatics must also be taken into consideration. It is the way of explaining
language use in context (“Pragmatics”). Meanings change according to the context of the
utterance, so it is important for the teacher to be able to provide a proper environment and
context for faster and clearer comprehension of the message.
In the third case study, focus was given to the students’ zone of proximal development or
ZPD which deals with the identification of the exact area where students need assistance in order

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to accomplish academic tasks (Zone of Proximal Development”). This enabled the teacher to
recognize the need to shift in ZPD which enlightened him on children’s academic learning
behavior and then restructure the lessons accordingly. On the other hand, Ken’s real-time inquiry
led to confusion on the children’s train of thought. They cannot somehow be blamed for
committing a mistake because the question led to a sudden change in the discussion. Students’
familiarity or intelligence and understanding of a lesson was questioned right away. This
occurrence even happens in a classroom set-up here in the Philippines. The teachers would often
say that it is to test the students’ underlying knowledge and would even help the student to have
a deeper understanding of the lesson. Despite of this belief, it can’t be helped but this kind of
post-structuralist type of discussion may bring even more confusion especially to at-risk
students.
The fourth case study dealt on the students’ ability to draw inferences with factors that
would relate the students’ home experiences to academic contexts. It emphasized that the more
lessons were grounded in the students’ life experiences, the more likely they are to make
inferences; in the same way that contrastive analysis goes. Contrastive analysis states that a
learner finds it easier to learn the language with similar features and characteristics with that of
his/her first language (Orillos 39). It is because the student finds it faster to adapt the skills
needed in speaking the language with similar features. Without having any direct relation
between the two, for cultural background dealt with the effects of culture and the Contrastive
Analysis tackled language learning, the latter was just used to show the parallelism between two
theories.
The last case study vignette showed how important the role of a student’s cultural load in
learning and studying in a classroom is. The familiarity of the Cambodians on the most important
things that they should carry was brought by their awareness and the situation they grew up in
namely, their culture. The Cambodians’ confidence in answering the question not only proved
how important a cultural background is but also changed Ken’s wrong thinking of Cambodians
as naturally weak or are cognitive deficient. The students found it easier to participate in the
discussion wherein personal expertise can be felt regarding the topic. Taking pragmatics in this
context it can de deduced that for Ken, his question is just plain and simple, but for the
Cambodians, the question was not because it meant their life. The environment more commonly
referred to as the cultural load, in which the students grew up gave them the notion of always be

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prepared for survival. The simple question turned into a question of how to survive for the
Cambodians making their answers more serious than the rest of the kids.
As a conclusion, this article pointed out the different contributing factors that affect at-
risk students’ performance in school. It was also discussed that learning is a social and cultural
process. Not only the teacher and the students were given focus but more importantly the context
of the learning environment. It made us realize that not only teachers’ wisdom and experience,
students’ competitiveness and desire matter but also the school’s readiness take on such
challenge; to educate at-risk students and that different learning strategies and theories should be
applied holistically to arrive at the desired outcomes.

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References:
Book
Orillos, Lorenzo Q. (1998). Language Acquisition Theories, Principles and Research.
Office of Academic Support and Instructional Services, UP Open University

Electronic Sources

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Kendra, Cherry. “Hierarchy of Needs” about.com. 15 Aug 2010. <http://psychology.

about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/hierarchyneeds.htm>.

McGuigan, Brendan. “What is discourse?” Wisegeek. 15 Aug 2010. <http://www.

wisegeek. com/what-is-discourse.htm> .

North Central Regional Education Laboratory. “Zone of Proximal Development”

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.“Pragmatics”. Seminar for Sprachwissenschaft. 15 Aug 2010. <http://www.sfs.uni-

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