Is it ELA or EAL?

I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to observe and help in an English class for EAL students. This class style presents obvious challenges as these students need to meet the curricular outcomes, but also overcoming the language barrier was very difficult. So if ELA is required for graduation, then how can we gear English class to students who are still learning English?

To start off, I would like to state that I believe it is not fair to grade these students based on their comprehension of English literature. For example, the students I was helping had great ideas and made interesting connections between the text and their lives. In order to achieve these results, I had to find a way to make the content of the novel relevant to them. Not an easy task.

The class was studying the hunger games. The teacher told me that it was going very slowly. It had taken them over a week to read 1 chapter as the students would often need to stop and ask what certain words mean, or what was happening in the book. This makes any novel study very difficult. In response, the teacher showed the film version of the hunger games, hoping that the visual version would help the class understand the story. From talking to the students about the film, they seemed to have understood the basic plot elements.

After the film, the class was given question about the hunger games. Many of the students struggle with this activity because they didn’t understand what they were being asked to do. Every student needed help from the teacher. I was glad I was there to help answer the question. Most of the students needed me to rephrase the question so they could understand what it was asking. Once they understood the question, they had pretty good answers.

With one of the main themes in the hunger games being inequality, I feel that the study of the book should have been done in compliment with discussion on Canadian society. I wonder if it would be better to create a class in which students new to Canada and English could take the themes out of the book, and study them as they appear in society. I think we need to find a solution that fits the needs of the students or we risk losing potentially brilliant ideas.