The Root Causes of Academic Underachievement for English Class Students

Wright (Chapter 1)

In the past, some researchers placed the blame of underachievement on the students and their families with claims of lower IQs and cognitive inferiority. Several researchers these days have countered this claim. Academic underachievement is blamed on learning opportunities. Poor and minority students are mostly segregated in the underfunded and overcrowded schools which could account for their poor academic outcome. Schools that serve, poor, minority and ELLs have the least experienced and fewest resources. They are most likely taught by teachers who do not major or minor in the subject they teach.

In addition, poor and minority students tend to have parents who have little or no education.

These parents find it difficult to assist their kids with schoolwork neither are they able to afford supplemental education services. Many of them also live in a low-income neighborhood where living conditions are crowded, have a high crime rate, and where access to library resources is limited. These conditions make it difficult for these students to find quiet places to study and thus constitute further obstacles to learning.

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If the low achievement of the students is attached to low IQ rather than the socio-cultural background, teachers may not be able to provide the best possible decisions for providing effective instruction for their ELLs. These students may eventually become dropouts which may affect the economy of the country adversely.

Children are most often the innocent victims of poverty (Lyster, 2007), Johny was the first child of a single 32-year old mother of four children.

He was a victim of bullying and kids would often pick on him, He skipped classes to go and cut jobs. He was enrolled in a dance class and his mother couldn’t afford the shoes.

In Grade 8, he was on the honor roll. After the family went on social assistance, he started failing. He is in Grade 10 now and struggling with many issues.

Another person was Jabu whose parents were refugees from a war-torn country. He is an eleventh grader in my current school. He is a third of the five children in the family. His school dress is so old. Most time, he looks emotional and finds it difficult to collaborate with others in the class. He is struggling with math in my class and in almost all of the other classes.

Fenner & Snyder

Access to content cannot exist without effective literacy skills. Likewise, language morphs from being social to academic when used to talk about content. Thus, one cannot exist without the other.

Learning Language and content simultaneously empower English learners (ESL) to access content while developing language skills (Lyster, 2007). Content is both essential to learn and perfect as a meaningful purpose to use academic language.

Content classes can be the context for ESL to develop academic language (Goldenberg & Coleman, 2010). It’s in science classes that students learn to communicate like scientists by talking about data, forming hypotheses, and validating of an experiment. It’s in history classes that students learn to talk about the reliability and bias of a resource.

Teachers can collaborate to meet the instructional needs of ELLs. The language teacher and the content teacher can come together to prepare a lesson plan that satisfies both the content requirement and the language requirement. After all, a teaching method that is devoid of understandable input won’t allow the ELL to grasp the required subject matter. It is thus necessary to provide scaffolding instruction such as Sensory scaffolds (incorporating pictures, videos, images, and artistic works to teach content), Interactive scaffolds (making students learn through social interactions), and Graphic scaffolds (offering tables, graphs, and infographic to learn content).

These strategies help all learners access content while learning the language at the same time. For ESLs to develop the language used in each discipline, the language teacher can offer language lessons that model how science language or history language is used based on what topic the science teacher or the history teacher is teaching at a time.

References

1. Goldenberg, C., & Coleman, R. (2010). Promoting academic achievement among English learners: A guide to the research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
2. Lyster, R. (2007). Learning and teaching languages through content: A counterbalanced approach. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.