Five most common misconceptions about ELs

Do you ever wonder how long will it take for your ELs to become proficient? Maybe you are not sure if using cognates will help them develop their comprehension. Perhaps you are looking into using some modified instructional materials to use in your lessons. Or you are wondering if they need to learn all the letters/sounds before you can put a text in front of them. But there is so many misconceptions about these ideas that you are not sure if you are doing what's right for them...
I get it. So much so that I sat down to write about the 5 most common misconceptions about working with ELs. So keep reading! Are you ready? Here we go!

1- They need to learn of the letters/sounds of the alphabet before they can read.

Depending on the child's L1, this is not the case for English Learners. Students who learn English after they have developed literacy skills in their first language are more advanced than students who had no literacy experiences.

It's important to point out that some languages are closer to English in terms of their alphabets and print than others. For example, languages like Arabic where writing occurs from left to write may cause some difficulty for a student new to English.
In other words, the more similar the alphabet in their first language is to the English alphabet, the best equipped the student will be to handle acquiring a second language like English. So, there's no point in delaying the reading instruction until they are familiar with all the sounds in the English language.

2- Modifying assignments means lowering expectations.

This misconception is particularly common for students in the upper grades. When it comes to modifying assignments for English learners, there is a lot of misinformation about how to do this "without" watering down the content. As a matter of fact, this is not an easy task. Many times I had come across instructional materials especially designed for ELs which have been oversimplified to the point that what is left as content makes little sense for the student. In other words, all the details that were left out, were so key to the understanding of the text, that instead of it becoming easier and accessible becomes just the opposite, making the student more confused than confident.
Keeping high expectations has nothing to do with modifying assignments. On the contrary, in order to keep the expectations high, ELs need to have access to the same rigorous content their native English speakers have access to. The how, what and when to modify assignments is a topic for another blog post though.

3- They should only speak English at school if they want to become proficient.

Most English learners can understand more than they can say in English, so they my use their first language to retrieve information or to communicate. When language learners are totally immersed in the target language, both languages are active in the brain whether they are using them or not. During the first stages of language development, students are absorbing as much as they can using their receptive skills or using reading and listening in English. At the same time, they are processing all that input and connecting it to their mother tongue or first language (L1). This is an extremely exhausting process for anyone in the first stages of acquiring a second language. So that means that even though the speaker is not using English to communicate, they are still understanding and trying to process the input before being able to produce output in the target language (L2).
When we were born and were able to produce our first words in our first language, it took about 9 months before we were able to say our first words. So for a speaker of English as a second or third language, it is ok if they use the first language while acquiring English.

4-They can rely on cognates to develop their vocabularies.

Unfortunately, this is not always the case. For students who are new to the country and had had many years of successful schooling in their first language, using cognates might help them in developing their vocabulary and could even enhance comprehension. But, for students who are born here, who can speak their first language (Spanish),  using cognates is not a reliable strategy because they were not taught any academic language in Spanish. Their first language proficiency is mainly for social or family communication purposes. So they have to connections whatsoever about tier 2 words in Spanish. In addition, some Spanish speakers living in America have adopted several English terms that look like cognates, but they are being used with a totally different meaning. To make this phenomenon even more complex, this does not exclude multiple meaning words.
For example the word "yard/s" is being used among Spanish speakers as "yardas" meaning working in landscaping as well as the metric unit.

5- They can take between 5 to 7 years or more to develop Academic Language skills.

It has been a common belief that English Learners can be proficient - and by that we mean having mastered social and academic language- in a minimum of 5 years. With effective, well-trained teachers who can provide high quality instruction, this statement which was backed up by research, is being challenged in a good way.
In part, this is now changing for the better due to the amount of virtual, interactive and digital resources that in the past were not as common. Now, students can expedite their language development by utilizing so many new platforms that can make learning easier and fun. In addition, because the number of English learners has increased so drastically during the last five years, there has been more professional development for mainstream teachers working with them.
All these factors translate into the fact that English learners are better off to become proficient  in less time than what they used to. It all depends on the quality of the instruction they receive, and the resources made available to them.


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