ELL Classroom Analysis

I am not currently working in a school, but the schools I attended while growing up had two extremely different approaches to ELLs. I actually lived in Flagstaff in elementary and middle school and I was completely unaware of non-English speakers even attending my school. I think this is partially because I was 13 and focused almost entirely on myself but also because, at that time, the school system almost entirely separated these students from the "main stream" kids. While I can 't speak to the actual curriculum of these sheltered immersion classrooms, I believe this type of instruction is beneficial to a certain extent; separating ELL students from the rest of the school population, however, limits their exposure to English in a social setting …show more content…
Most of my peers were children of U.S. military personnel, so their ties to the United States were strong but many of them spoke Spanish as their main language. Whether it was due to lack of funding and support or the misguided belief that ELL learners were not prevalent in our school, the students were subject to a “sink or swim” approach to mastering the English language. The only support for ELL students, from what I could tell, was a single period of sheltered instruction that most students didn’t want to attend because they didn’t want to be marked as non-English speakers; the rest of the time ELL students were thrown into mainstream content classes with the rest of us. This caused many of my peers to struggle in classes and, because of their lack of understanding and the discomfort that came from that, acted out and created distractions in the class. Despite the benefits of being fully immersed in the language and having the opportunity to converse and interact with native English speakers, this is obviously not a successful approach since it does not take into consideration that ELL students might need concepts and ideas explained in multiple