Does every international student need to take ESL classes in the United States and Canada?

The fact is that few ELLs arriving in Grade 11, whether in the US or Canada, have a sufficient command of formal, academic English to function at maximum effectiveness in any of their academic subjects, including mathematics. Their command of English is at best colloquial, suitable to the mall but not the secondary school classroom.

ESL teachers will try their best to help ESL students to get used to the regular classes in school, for example, teachers may provide them additional tutoring time, but two years are insufficient. International students, particularly those from non-German and non-Roman Language countries, need at least three years of secondary language training to be able to function effectively at the post-secondary level.

ESL classes are proven to be effective as the teachers use both the interactive and communicative approaches in their classrooms. Students are encouraged to become active learners who take responsibility for their own learning. “Differentiated instruction” can be very challenging for teachers of regular classes, but is manageable when one is dealing with fewer than a dozen ESL students.

Furthermore, if they all have the same first-language, their tasks can be similar, and they can work with the think/pair/share strategy rather than in small groups. What matters is that the learners have plenty of opportunity to speak, argue, and debate.

Effective Strategies for Learning English

Most secondary English teachers view utilizing an appropriate mix of individual, pair and group work activities as effective classroom practice. However, students who have taken the majority of their schooling abroad may be used to direct instruction.

Most Canadian English teachers know the value of all types of activities, not just group activities, as they are important for students with different learning styles and preferences.

Direct teaching of vocabulary is completely necessary for ESL students, but of course they can share their pre-knowledge of vocabulary terms in whole-group discussions led by the teacher. This type of instruction includes pre-teaching of vocabulary, explicit teaching of vocabulary, and some specific vocabulary teaching methods such as using synonyms and antonyms, flashcards, guessing word-meaning, and teaching affixes/word parts.

Most ESL students have little knowledge of Latin, Greek, and French origins of academic English vocabulary. And many students from abroad have the odd tendency to think that, for example, Canadians are highly uniform in their tastes, preferences, and attitudes. In a diverse society, an expression such as “our life” makes little sense.

The importance of time in the classroom

International students surely need ESL classes as regular school classes require students to have good academic English as many ESL students, trained in the scientific method, automatically want to couch all ideas in the passive voice. Encourage and model the use of the active voice. Do not resort to the ridiculous exercise of having students translate active voice constructions into passives. Constantly reaffirm the clarity, forcefulness, and directness of the active voice.

International students also do not usually know how to distinguish formal English from informal English. In other words, they do not adequately differentiate between academic English and colloquial English; this confusion may cause inaccuracy or even misunderstanding.

For example, some ESL students may like to use the colloquial “you” when the student-speaker clearly means “the average person,” “a member of society,” “a citizen,” or “an individual,” all of which are third-person singular. ESL students find such singular expressions as “somebody,” “everybody,” “everyone,” and “nobody” confusing because they wish to make them plural when they are clearly singular (“body,” not “bodies”).

Unfortunately less educated native speakers of English can possibly perpetuate this confusion. Thus, having separate ESL classes helps students to improve their abilities in academic English.

Most ESL students will eventually go to universities in Canada or the US. They may face more academic challenges if they don’t spend extra time learning academic English, including speaking skills, in ESL classes.

Several studies have exposed problems that ESL students experience if mainstreamed too soon, and have revealed that some international students sense an assumption of unintelligence from their peers, teachers, and professors because their accents were deemed unintelligible. Put in the manner of teenagers, all too often international secondary students are regarded by their native-speaker peers as “dummies.”

In conclusion, if the ESL students can take some necessary ESL classes in their secondary years, they will face many fewer challenges in their academic journeys in Canada and the US in the future, when they go to college or university.