Blog #10

Chapter 2 is about inner circle and outer circle, and expanding circle. The inner circle rejects English Language Learners and believes that it is a problem to have language diverse in society. The outer circle encourages English but ELL students need to learn English as much as native language students. The expanding circle is motivating ELL students to learn English even though they might not have perfect proficiency in English. Chapter 3 is about different approach to help ELL students in Great Britain and the United States. In the U.S., they pulled out programs that focus on language and social aspects. In Great Britain, they believe that pull out classes aren’t working.

These two chapters were very interesting to me because these chapters talked about controversy within ELL students. Many people believe that bilingual education isn’t a good program for ELL students. However, there are so many wrong facts about bilingual education. Also, not many people know about bilingual education, and some bilingual programs taught in a wrong way. Before I went into major, I was against bilingual programs because I saw social segregation when I was in a bilingual and ESL programs. My friends and I rejected to hang out with Americans because we believed that they wouldn’t understand us and only hung out with the students in ESL or bilingual programs. However, after taking all these classes about bilingual programs, I realized that ESL or bilingual programs that I attended to didn’t teach us about values of cultures. We only focused on grammar of English than social values. I think many bilingual programs in school don’t necessary focus on other except English. Because ELL students don’t learn the values of cultures in classrooms, they have stereotypes against the Native English speaker students. I went back to my ESL class for volunteer. I saw the same reaction and thoughts with the students in the ESL class. They didn’t want to hang out with American students, and they only hang out with each other. They believed that Americans don’t accept them because of their limited English. It has been ten years since I graduated, and it was so shocking to me to see the same problem that many students struggled with the years ago. Sometimes, I am so sad that many people don’t know the benefits of bilingual programs. I met many people who don’t even know about bilingual programs. I believe as future teacher, it is a good idea to learn about other programs than pulled out programs that is the best for ELL students.