Service Learning: A MUST-HAVE ESL Technique
September 23, 2008 by ehaveman05
First, I feel I should define service learning—as even I was unaware of this technique. Service learning “refers to a teaching method that seeks to enrich learning by “engaging students in meaningful service to their schools and communities” which Natalie found “link the task to self-reflection, self-discovery” (1).
Basically, Natalie gave her students the opportunity to teach themselves while helping the community. At the beginning of the school year she asked her students what they would like to do to help their small Nebraska town. Their answer: make a English/Spanish Phrasebook. (Context note: their town had many immigrant workers and the city had socially divided itself in two: English Speaking and Spanish Speaking. Although the town sold translating dictionaries, there were not phrasebooks).
Natalie then let her students divide themselves into groups according to the tasks they felt they needed to complete to accomplish their mission. The class decided that they would need things like: printing press donations and questionnaires for the city to determine which phrases would be included in the book. Finally, they asked peer Spanish and English classes to help revising and editing their phrase book before it was printed.
Her assignment self-motivated the class to find solutions for every issue that came about; meanwhile, Natalie stood on the side lines coaching for her ESL team to learn from their project: and they DID!
While the groups questioned city folk and begged for donations, they were gently pushed into the real world where they were required to survive on the little English they knew. This forced the students out of their comfort zone; however, it also pushed the city out of their comfort zone and also created a link that would come to bridge the two sides of town forever.
The students were so inspired that they asked for additional course material to ensure that they were doing the best job possible for their city. As a result, the students defeated their task at hand and many continued on to begin new community service projects, such as recycling programs.
BOTTOM LINE: Service Learning WORKS!
Just take a look at all the progress/results Natalie recorded from her first year using service learning:
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Connected ESL students to community
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Connected ESL students to other students
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“Reinforcing the students’ language skills in real-world settings
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“Developed leadership and problem-solving skills”
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“Skills in listening, research, building relationships
and communicating diplomatically”
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“Began to take an active role in their education” in other classes
Wow! I know, personally, I have never experienced any school project that helped me accomplish half that much. Plus—these kids ENJOYED every minute of their project!
I think this is an absolute must have when it comes to teaching any subject, but especially ESL! I’m extremely excited to make some sample lesson plans to further flirt with the whole new concept!
So, what’s so different from Natalie’s project to book work? She says, “it enables them to address problems they care about outside of the classroom. It provides answers to the question “Why do we have to learn this?”
I feel as though I’ve found the simple answer that was there all along:
I just have to answer: “Why do we have to learn this?”
(That shouldn’t be too hard, right?!)
Lol. Well, it looks like I have my work cut out for me, but I definitely have a better road map than I did yesterday. Thank you, Natalie M. Russel. In your little town of Omaha, Nebraska, you have dramatically inspired a teacher—soon to-be teacher that is!
“Teaching More Than English: Connecting ESL Students to Their Community Through Service Learning”. By: Natalie M. Russel.
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I’ve done a lot of reading about service learning in the past, but this caught my eye because it involves English, Spanish, and ESL students, three of my favorite topics. The project you describe is awesome for a lot of reasons, which you discuss in your post, but the one I’m most intrigued by is the fact that it helps the ESL students forge connections with their non-ESL classmates. That idea seems simple enough, but when I stop to think about it, it’s more complex than it sounds. I mean, it’s always a challenge to integrate students into a school when they don’t speak that school’s dominant language. And unfortunately that social isolation can function as an obstacle to achieving the goal of English proficiency. To put a slightly different slant on that idea, it’s interesting to note that foreign language students face a related—although not nearly as severe—dilemma. In addition to teaching English, I’m also going to be certified to teach Spanish. As a potential foreign language teacher, one of the issues I wrestle with is the difficulty of helping students integrate themselves into their second-language community within the confines of a North American school. That issue is made even more complicated by the tendency for self-segregation, even in areas where there are sizeable groups of Spanish and English speakers living in the same communities. The cool thing about this project is that not only did it get the ESL students working cooperatively with their peers, and thereby help them improve their language skills, but it also allowed the Spanish students to interact with native speakers, which surely helped their language abilities as well. Plus, it seems like their native-speaker status would’ve put the ESL students in the position of being Spanish phrase “experts” while writing the booklet. That’s encouraging, because it’s unlikely that their classmates considered them experts in other areas, even when they truly were, due to their limited English proficiency. Also, the project assigned a great deal of value to the ESL students’ native language, which I believe is very important, but often overlooked. I think it would be really interesting to try this same project in a school district where there are three or four widely-used languages. If I ever get the opportunity, I just might have to give it a shot.