The Change in English Language Learners Acquisition of English

The major theme of chapter five was change. There was a change in the students’ proficiency, growth of English acquisition, fluctuation of English acquisition, and there was a change of the authors’ assessment methods in order to measure the students’ English acquisition.

One word I chose to describe the change that took place in this chapter was proficiency. The students in the One-on-one English program began not understanding the English language, but by the time they ended the program they could understand the volunteers, form multiple sentences on their own and know the difference between past, present and future tense words.

I chose growth to describe the changing of the ELLs’ proficiency. At the beginning of the program the students that were chosen were selected because they were beginners of the English language. By the time they finished the program, 2-4 years later, they had become multi-dimensional with their English. At the end of the program the students could narrate a story, use conjunctions, and use conventional dialogue markers, where as before they were unable to perform these tasks.

The students fluctuated in their learning of English, some students would make achievements in their English acquisition demonstrated in an assessment, and then in the next assessment the results showed that the student had regressed. Usually when the students regressed it was after summer break and the assessment results would show they had improved before school let out in the summer.

The final word I would like to use to describe the theme, change, portrayed in this chapter is assessments methods. The authors varied their assessments of the students’ English acquisition throughout their time in the program. In order to assess the ELLs’ acquisition the authors observed and assessed the students’ lexical growth, emergence of verb systems, sentence structure, turn types, language usage, and grammatical accuracy. The authors’ observations and assessments of the ELL can be connected to our class learning of the Functional Behavior Analysis, because in special education the students are observed by professionals that determine what behavior they are lacking or gaining that is making them not function properly. In the book the authors were observing the ELLs to determine what they are lacking or gaining of the English language.

My question I pose to you is: keeping in mind the over-population of classrooms, do you believe that the students in the One-on-One English program could have become as proficient, and changed as much as they did, had they not attended the program?