Where Do I Start?

"I have students who don't speak English. Where do I start?"

This is the most common question teachers ask me, typically at the beginning of the school year or when a new student is placed in their class. To be fair, I asked the same question as a third-year teacher when I had a student named Roberto in my fourth period class. Roberto was a delightful student who quietly sat in the back of the room, smiled when asked a question, and dutifully submitted his assignments whether they were finished or not.

I don't think I ever modified an assignment for him or scaffolded the lesson because I didn't know how. The thought of teaching him how to analyze a short story, write an essay, and the English language was overwhelming. My experience with language learning involved translating passages about the Appian Way and watching Pedro Almodovar films, and those experiences were buried far enough in my memory that I forgot any explicit instruction offered by my high school Latin teacher and Spanish class professor.

So I get it.

I get that feeling that you're doing a disservice to the student because you're not really teaching them content and you're not really teaching them English.

That the best way to learn a language is to be fully immersed in it.

That there's not enough time to plan for the language scaffolding the student needs.

That you have 24 other students in the room who need your attention.

That you're not trained to teach language.

That there's no way to teach them all the words and structures they need to begin to communicate.

Sometimes Failure is the Beginning

More than a decade after Roberto sat in the back of my classroom, I found myself teaching an English class in the evenings. This wasn't a "let's read Shakespeare and talk about what we read" kind of English class. It was a "let's learn the days of the week and how to describe people in a community" English class. After countless failed attempts at reading short, simple paragraphs, I finally caved to what I had learned in the ESL training classes I had taken over the years.

I gave them a sentence frame. If they filled in the blank and read the canned sentence, they would be able to answer the question.

They couldn't fill in the blank, so I gave them a bank of words.

They didn't know which word to choose, so I gave them pictures.

Eventually, they had enough to answer the question.

We All Start Somewhere 

A few years ago, I was teaching an ESL endorsement class when a teacher asked THE question. I looked at the heads nodding in agreement and expectant faces waiting for an answer that would unlock this riddle. I looked down at the carpet and drew in a deep breath before I answered.

"Start where they are."

I let that sink in for a minute, buying myself some time to figure out how I wanted to explain what I meant.

"If they need words, give them the words. If they need phrases, give them phrases. If they need sentences, give them sentences." I used my experience with the night class as an example.

In a perfect world, they would know all the cognates and recognize that blanks are meant to be filled and pick up on the structures of questions and answers. Of course, if they could do that on their own, they don't really need me, do they? Ultimately, I'm there—and so are you—to help them make those connections and show them how to unlock the language patterns.

So Where Do I Start?

I realize that you're probably looking for a more concrete answer than "start where they are." That does require some investigation, and you likely do not have the freedom I had to fail night after night until landing on a solution that seems to work.

So pick an entry point. Here's how.

1. Identify the critical content. Repeat this after me, "I cannot teach them everything." You can't teach them everything, but you can teach them what is most important at this point in their lives. This could be how to identify the main idea or how to multiply fractions or explain the steps of the water cycle. Just keep in mind that everything is not critical.

2. Figure out how they will show you what they have learned. Your students will have to say, write, or do something to prove that they've learned the most important content. Perhaps they will highlight repeated words in a paragraph or show you the steps they used to multiply fractions or act out the water cycle. They need a way to get the information in their heads out and into the world where you can see it.

3. Determine what you need to provide for them to produce the product. They may need access to a picture dictionary or translation dictionary to find the words they need. You may need to give them a diagram with blanks for them to fill in. They may need to work in their native language and have time to translate it into English.

Keep your eyes on the endgame and accept that the product may not look like what you originally had in mind. Writing a perfect sentence or paragraph may not be in the cards right now, but that doesn't mean your students aren't learning. Not knowing a word in English (or two or seventeen) doesn't mean they have no possibility of ever mastering the content. Our language is filled with synonyms that can be just as effective for showing what they know.

Language learning takes time, and you have an opportunity to be part of the process. Embrace your contribution to your students' learning and give them what you can.