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Second Language Learners in International Schools Maurice Carder
ISBN 978-1-85856-859-1
9 7 8 1 858 568 5 9 1
UCL Inst itute of Edu cation Press
20 Bedfo rd Way
London
WC1H 0AL
www.ucl-ioe-press.com
‘This straightforward and ferociously honest study provides vital and attainable
suggestions for creating an effective, inclusive ESL programme for international
schools. A must-read for teachers and leaders whose goal is to set students up for
future academic success.’
— Melanie Sanchez, TheLanguageContinuum.com
By 2020 it is estimated that there will be more than ten thousand international schools
educating five million students. Native speakers of English, the language of instruction
in 90 per cent of these schools, will be in the minority.
The learning needs of second language learners in national education systems differ
fundamentally from those in the international community. This book argues that second
language learners in international schools are better provided for within models of
instruction that do not assimilate to any political system; where motivation can come
from areas other than wanting to belong to a specific culture; and where students can
develop all their languages equitably.
The authors trace the theories underpinning second language learning programmes in
international schools and delve into the complexities of teacher relationships and the
influence of curriculum agencies on second language learning. Through case studies
and vignettes, they argue for establishing a department of Professional English as a
Second Language at the centre of the academic life in each school, whose staff will
build on the widely acknowledged potential of second language learners and enhance
their capabilities in all their languages.
‘This is a great book, offering a clear vision. It gives international schools compelling
ammunition to steer away from an ESL “support” model and create truly equitable
multilingual schools in which ESL and mother-tongue centres of expertise provide
complementary professional programmes for students, teachers and parents.’
— Joris van den Bosch, Secondary EAL teacher, The British School of Brussels
Maurice Carder is the former head of the ESL & Mother Tongue Department at the
Vienna International School.
Patricia Mertin is former head of the ESL Department at the International School,
Düsseldorf.
Sarah Porter is EAL Co-ordinator at the British School of Bucharest.
Trentham
Books
Trentham
Books
SECOND LANGUAGE
LEARNERS IN
INTERNATIONAL
SCHOOLS
Maurice Carder
with Patricia Mertin and Sarah Porter
Foreword by Virginia Collier
Second Language Learners in International Schools_Final.indd 1 19/10/2018 15:09
‘As a former ESL teacher and workshop leader, I found myself nodding in
agreement page after page of this important and well-researched book. The
authors expose the truth that many international schools, unwittingly or
even deliberately, disregard the crucial role that a strong, properly staffed
ESL and mother tongue programme plays in promoting the language
rights of all students and allowing access to the school’s curriculum to
help nurture each student’s true potential. It is a compelling argument.’
Victor Ferreira, IBDP Coordinator, American School of The Hague
‘This straightforward and ferociously honest study provides vital and
attainable suggestions for creating an effective, inclusive ESL programme
for international schools. A must-read for teachers and leaders whose goal
is to set students up for future academic success.’
Melanie Sanchez, TheLanguageContinuum.com
‘This is a great book, offering a clear vision. It gives international
schools compelling ammunition to steer away from an ESL “support”
model and create truly equitable multilingual schools in which ESL and
mother-tongue centres of expertise provide complementary professional
programmes for students, teachers and parents.’
Joris van den Bosch, Secondary EAL teacher,
The British School of Brussels, Belgium
Second Language Learners
in International Schools
Second Language Learners
in International Schools
Maurice Carder
with Patricia Mertin and Sarah Porter
First published in 2018 by the UCL Institute of Education Press, University College
London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL
www.ucl-ioe-press.com
© Maurice Carder 2018
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
ISBNs
978-1-85856-859-1 (paperback)
978-1-85856-884-3 (PDF eBook)
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978-1-85856-886-7 (Kindle eBook)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the
copyright owner.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission
for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions
and would be grateful if notied of any corrections that should be incorporated in
future reprints or editions of this book.
The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not
necessarily reect the views of University College London.
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Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Cover image © Ao Co., Ltd./Alamy Stock Photo
vii
Contents
The authors xiv
Foreword xvi
Professor Virginia Collier
Preface xix
List of abbreviations xx
Introduction xxii
Part 1 International schools and inuences
on their provision for second language
students: Islands of language and a high socio-
economic base
1 What second language learners bring to
international schools 2
Patricia Mertin
How do we dene an international school? 2
What international schools have in common 2
What makes international schools different 4
Accreditation 5
Challenges for international schools 6
Culture shock 6
Continuing teacher development 7
Maintaining and developing the mother tongue 7
The development of ESL instruction in international
schools 8
The consequences of importing national models 11
The culture of the student and the school 11
The benets SLLs bring to international schools 14
The benets ESL parents can bring to international
schools 15
Linguistic challenges 16
2 Characterization of the international school
clientele in language matters 18
viii
An international space rather than assimilation 18
English can be culture-free 19
Minority students as a majority 20
Linguistic intolerance – linguicism – seen as acceptable 21
The need to inform parents in depth of the
linguistic issues 24
The myth of the native speaker 26
Parents’ views on mother-tongue instruction 27
Mother tongues unrewarded and requiring
extra payment 28
Change requires pressure on power structures 29
SLLs and their parents locked in a culture of silence 30
3 ESL students and their requirements in international
schools: The encroaching politicization of ESL and
MT provision 31
Overview 31
Linguistically responsive models 33
ESL staff and programme structure affected by
management 35
School directors’ ignorance of SL issues impacts
negatively on meaningful second language
programmes and their stafng 35
The need for ESL to be recognized as a
distinct discipline 37
Lack of experience of school directors, and
ambition versus ability 38
How national systems permeate thinking on ESL 39
More examples from international schools, showing
the low status of ESL teachers 41
Both at recruitment level and within schools,
ESL teachers are regularly downgraded 41
Negative impact of this downgrading on SL students’
access to professional programmes 42
An ESL professional on the failure of valid
recruitment policy 43
Incoming school director reduces ESL stafng
because groups are smaller 43
SLLs affected by uninformed policies concerning
pedagogical programmes for SL students 44
Linguicism in action 44
ix
NNESTs 45
The downside of charging extra for ESL 47
Lack of effective scrutiny of language ability
and its effects 49
An extreme example of leadership ignorance 49
Insights into a SL student’s perceptions 51
Managerialism in the international school context as
relevant to second language issues 54
Teachers and democratic professionalism 56
Conclusion 56
Part 2 Bilingualism and second language
acquisition: Developments in theory and research
4 How the elds of bilingualism and SLA can guide good
practice for viable SL models in international schools 59
Relevant research and other publications 59
Bilingualism: Introductory comments 62
The status of English in the contemporary world 63
English language teaching in the world 63
Native English speakers as smug 64
Models of practice 65
Theory, practice and the reality in international
schools 65
Bilingualism as the basis of good practice 66
The development of bilingual studies 66
The advantages of bilingualism 67
Bilinguals as more numerous, but more complex,
than monolinguals 68
Each bilingual community is unique 69
Factors involved in academic success: Additive and
subtractive bilingualism 70
The work of Cummins on bilingual issues 72
The threshold hypothesis and the developmental
interdependence hypothesis 72
BICS and CALP 73
Time needed for second language learners 74
Empowered versus disabled students 75
Societal agendas 78
The work of Collier and Thomas on bilingual issues 80
Models of good practice 80
The Prism model 80
x
Other research 82
Professional models of practice for ESL in
international schools 83
Sheltered instruction 83
CLIL: Content and language integrated learning 84
Conclusions 86
Part 3 The human factor
5 The reality of teacher relationships, their implications
for teachers and pedagogy, and the consequences of
a decit model for SLLs 88
Teacher relationships 88
Contrived collegiality 89
Implications for relationships 90
Implications for pedagogy 92
Teachers’ professional lives 95
The consequences of a decit model for students 99
Part 4 The role of external curriculum and
accreditation bodies: Pitfalls and alternatives
6 The role of external bodies, such as the Council of
International Schools and the International Baccalaureate,
in international schools: The erosion of the
acknowledgement of SLL needs and potential 102
Accreditation 102
ESL and mother tongues in the CIS and the ECIS 103
Mother tongues in accreditation documents 105
The elephant in the room 107
Other international agencies that provide alternatives
to EAL, and their impact on ESL programmes in
international schools 108
A working ESL model in the IBPYP 109
ESL in the IB, especially the MYP, in international
schools 110
IB structure for languages 111
Second language students in the MYP:
Reviewing the path of the IB 112
Foreign language and second language:
Essential pedagogical differences 115
International schools and national systems
in the IB 117
xi
The need for a dedicated ESL programme of
instruction in the MYP 117
The IB and critical thinking 118
The reality of ESL in practice in the MYP 120
The language competences of students confused
with appropriate pedagogical instruction 125
SLLs and the IBMYP: Examples of how the
programme impacts on them 126
IB terminology on language as a contributor to
misdirected programmes 127
Concluding statement 130
Part 5 The current situation in an
international school
7 How one international school is implementing the
model proposed in this book 133
Sarah Porter
Bringing the issues alive 133
The benets of having NNESTs 134
Building up content materials for the upper school,
and sharing them worldwide with other
international schools 136
The benets of the Cambridge IGCSE: The importance
of equal status for ESL students 136
The overriding necessity of CALP and academic
language acquisition, and the need for all
teachers to have CPD in these 138
The need to make an EAL department a centre of
expertise 139
Immediate and long-term benets of the model 140
The need for ongoing training in subject
content support 141
Tips for school leaders on putting the model
into practice 143
Keep students in ESL lessons for long enough 143
Educating the parents of ESL students is of
prime importance 143
Acknowledge the importance of an effective
language policy 144
Recognize the need for ongoing training for
both ESL and subject content teachers 144
xii
Ensure that ESL staff are appropriately qualied,
or willing to be 145
Part 6 Constructive solutions that build
consistently on international students’ language
trajectories: Empowering ESL and MT teachers as
specialists
8 Establishing a department in the secondary school
as a ‘centre of expertise’ for all matters ESL and
mother tongue 148
Theoretical background 148
How research supports the arguments for an
independent department responsible for
teaching SLLs 155
Sound correspondences for English vowel letters 156
Researchers describe the need for direct instruction of
language 157
Length of time in the ESL programme 162
Appropriate assessment models for SLLs 163
Common-sense facts about the need for separate
instruction for SLLs 171
Issues relating to the misplacement of SLLs in SEN
programmes 176
Realities and practicalities 179
Implications for international schools, accrediting
agencies and curriculum providers 181
9 The need for continuing professional
development (CPD) 184
Patricia Mertin
The administration 186
The teachers 187
Varieties of in-service training 190
Induction 190
Professional development 191
10 The importance of maintaining mother tongue
development 196
Patricia Mertin
Recognition of the mother tongues in the classroom 197
Informing the students and their parents 199
xiii
Factors that inuence bilingual development 200
Some of the benets of bilingualism 201
The goal 202
Research-based developments 202
Responsibility for mother tongue maintenance and
development 204
Administration and board of governors 204
Parents 205
Examples of negative practice concerning mother
tongues in international schools 206
Advice for parents 208
Teachers 209
In the classroom 210
11 Advice and guidance for school leaders, teachers
and parents 212
Obstacles to instituting the proposed model 212
Further insights into why more effective SL
programmes have not been instituted 214
Tame and wicked problems 214
Different types of bias 215
Rationality versus irrationality 216
Native speakers versus non-native speakers 217
Solutions 220
Unrealistic pretensions of having a ‘native’ accent 220
The need to inform parents 221
The marketization of professionalism versus
commitment 223
12 The challenges ahead 226
Maurice Carder and Patricia Mertin
What should an international school be aiming for? 227
Closing comments 230
Appendix: Websites for SLLs in international schools 232
References 233
Index 260
xiv
The authors
Maurice Carder graduated with a BA honours degree in Spanish
in 1967 (Bristol); he followed a PGCE with a special focus on ESL in
1970 (London, Institute of Education) and an MA in Linguistics for
English Language Teaching in 1979 (Lancaster), and completed an EdD
(International) on ‘Challenging the English-only orthodoxy: Linguistic
pluralism, recognition and diversity rather than assimilation’in 2010
(University College London, Institute of Education). From 1967 to 1981
he taught English in various parts of the world in universities, institutes
and schools, and from 1981 to 2009 headed the ESL and Mother Tongue
department at the Vienna International School, Secondary. He worked
closely with the IB on developing language A2 in the Diploma Programme,
and on the Language B Guide and the Second Language Acquisition and
Mother Tongue Development Guide for the IBMYP. He was an examiner
for the International Baccalaureate IBDP language A2 and a moderator
for language B in the IBMYP. He has served on many CIS accreditation
teams around the world, co-chairing them at times. He chaired the ECIS
ESL and Mother Tongue Committee for many years, and organized
several conferences. He has given workshops on ESL and mother tongue
issues at international schools worldwide, including teaching ‘ESL in the
Mainstream’. His book Bilingualism in International Schools (2007) gives
comprehensive details of a successful model for second language learners.
Visit www.mauricecarder.net(accessed 13 February 2018).
Patricia Mertin began her career in education at Goldsmith’s College,
London University, by completing her teacher training in 1969, after which
she taught in London and in Germany with the British Forces Education
Services. Subsequently she taught English as a foreign language in a German
state school and various further education establishments, teaching both
children and adults. She completed an external BA in Old High German
Literature with London University, and an MA in TESOL with Shefeld
Hallam University. In 1993 she joined the faculty of the International School
of Düsseldorf, where she taught ESL for twenty years. She became department
chair in 2003, and also developed the mother tongue department. In 2006
she completed a PhD on the topic of ‘The role of culture in second language
acquisition’ with Goldsmith’s College. She served on the ECIS ESL and MT
xv
The authors
committee as a member and as its chair, and hosted the 2011 ESL and MT
conference in Düsseldorf, which had over four hundred participants. She is
an IBDP English B examiner. She also serves on accreditation teams for the
CIS and is a CIS Afliated Consultant for ESL.
Sarah Porter rst taught ESL at the ‘Palace of Pioneers and
Schoolchildren’ in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, before qualifying as a teacher of
Russian, French and German in 1999. After teaching modern languages at a
state school in north London, she completed a master’s degree in Russian in
2001. Her next post was teaching primary French at St Aubyn’s Preparatory
School in Woodford Green, Essex. She moved to Bucharest with her husband
and three children in August 2013 and has taught in the British School
of Bucharest (BSB) secondary EAL department since then, becoming EAL
co-ordinator in September 2017. She has begun a master’s degree in applied
linguistics and TESOL.
xvi
Foreword
Virginia P. Collier
Professor Emerita of Bilingual/Multicultural/ESL Education
George Mason University
International schools provide a unique and important context for schooling
diverse students whose parents serve in occupations that require them
to live in multiple locations around the world. As global citizenship and
multilingualism become more common, these schools are multiplying
rapidly throughout the world; it is predicted that within two years there
will be at least 10,000 international schools, serving over 5 million students
(see the Introduction). This book is a timely and much-needed resource for
the administrators and teachers who serve these schools. As experienced
teachers in international school settings, its authors provide challenging
perspectives as they examine in depth the research and writings that inform
international school educators’ decisions.
The unique process that students experience in international schools
provides a powerful context for transforming schooling that might be
applied to other multilingual settings in education, but these schools have not
yet reached their transformational potential. Most of them follow Western
curricula and Western ways of learning and teach the curriculum mostly
in English. As stated by Dr Carder in Chapter 3, the student population
of these schools typically consists of about 25 per cent native speakers of
English, 25 per cent speakers of the host-country language, and 50 per
cent speakers of other languages. Since the language of the curriculum is
usually English, this means that around 75 per cent of the students receive
their curricular subjects through their second language, not the language(s)
spoken to them as young children by their family. This raises the interesting
possibility, as proposed by the authors of this book, of transforming the
way second language schooling is carried out in international schools, thus
making them a model for global schooling designed to meet the needs of
the twenty-rst century. These schools have enormous potential when the
multilingual communities who participate in this school context are viewed
as an immense resource.
Now what does this mean? What does the research tell us? The
authors of this book go in depth into the research that informs the eld
of education regarding the schooling of second language learners. Most
xvii
Foreword
important is, rst, to understand the crucial importance of the mother
tongue in the student’s cognitive development. From hundreds of research
studies of the relationship between students’ mother tongue and cognition,
we know that children must develop cognitively in their mother tongue until
at least age 12 in order to be successful in curricular mastery in their second
language. For example, our longitudinal research ndings from the analysis
of over 7.5 million student records from 36 school districts in 16 US states
(summarized in Collier and Thomas, 2017; Thomas and Collier, 2017)
show that English learners who do not continue to study school subjects
in their mother tongue are typically two to four grades behind students
who attend dual-language classes. In the US, dual-language schooling
typically integrates the two language groups, so that the students acquire
the curriculum through both their languages, and leads to above-grade-level
achievement for all groups, in both English and the partner language (the
home language of the English language learners).
In a multilingual context such as that of international schools,
parents are important partners with the school in continuing mother-tongue
development. In Chapter 4, Dr Carder states that, often, international
school parents ‘focus principally on their children becoming uent in
English, while not considering what might happen to their children’s own
language and identity’. Parents must assume responsibility for continuing
the non-stop cognitive development of their children’s mother tongue(s),
including literacy skills, but this book illustrates that international schools
also need to provide mother tongue curricular support when possible. The
goal of all international schools should be to graduate bilingual/multilingual
students academically procient in their mother tongue and English, with
the possibility of adding the host-country language as a third language of
instruction, as well as other languages.
A major new research nding with implications for international
schools comes from one of our latest research studies, which analyses
statewide data from North Carolina on dual-language schools: innovations
from second language teaching strategies help all students do better in
school, not only second language learners. We found that students who in
the US are considered most ‘at risk’ benet greatly from second language
teaching strategies – specically, students of low-income background,
including African Americans and Caucasian Americans, and students with
special education needs, as well as English language learners. Our analyses
of 3.3 million student records over a six-year period (grades 3–8) show that
after several years of instruction in both English and the partner language,
at-risk dual-language students’ gains were two to four years greater
Virginia P. Collier
xviii
than those of peers of the same background not in dual-language classes
(Thomas and Collier, 2014, 2017). From interviews with administrators
of these schools, we found they were convinced that courses that prepare
second language teachers to teach the curriculum through students’ second
language lead to strategies for teaching that benet all students, especially
in diverse contexts. These school principals insist that all their school staff
must use the innovative teaching strategies of second language teachers,
and they provide ongoing staff development, given by those trained in these
strategies, to support all staff. Second language teaching strategies include
scaffolding supports, collaborative learning, real-world problem solving
across the curriculum, varied student work groupings, sensitivity to cross-
cultural issues, emotional support for all, and intentional and explicit non-
verbal and verbal clues to meaning for both content and language.
This means that, in international schools, ESL teachers certied to
teach academic content (not just language) are the best prepared to bring
about academic success with very diverse classes, and these staff should
provide ongoing staff development for the whole school. Dual certication
should be required of all teachers, so that they get thorough training in
second language teaching techniques and the standard coursework for the
age group and curricular subject(s) to be taught. In dual-language schools
in the US, typically two teachers team together, one teaching the curriculum
through English and the other teaching the curriculum through the English
learners’ home language, working with two classes and trading the classes
back and forth. The authors of this book illustrate many ways in which
mother tongue and ESL teaching methodologies can be used effectively in
international school settings. ESL teaching has formerly been viewed as an
additional support for students, provided separately from the mainstream.
Now it is clear from the research that second language teaching strategies
benet all students.
xix
Preface
This book came about as a result of a conference in Amsterdam in 2014.
Patricia Mertin and I were both scheduled as consultants at the ECIS ESL and
Mother Tongue Conference there in the early spring, attended by some ve
hundred participants. We were each allocated a room, and ESL and mother-
tongue teachers could sign up to discuss their professional concerns. We had
met sporadically in recent years and were aware of our common interest in
promoting the linguistic potential of SL learners, and that we were both
living and raising children in multilingual families. Over coffee one morning
we began to recount the issues that teachers were bringing to us. It turned
out that we were both overwhelmed by the number of distressing issues
that were being raised: how ESL programmes were being downgraded and
teachers’ status reduced, and how directors were dictating policy on how
ESL should be taught, allowing no input from the professionals concerned.
Coincidentally, we had pursued very similar career paths. We both
had an initial degree in languages, and had followed a teaching certicate,
done a master’s in matters relating to linguistics, and ended our teaching
careers with a doctorate on second language/mother tongue issues. We had
also each headed a secondary department with the title ‘ESL and Mother
Tongue’ in a large international school. As the conference progressed, and
the enormity of the situation facing the teachers and students of English
as a second language continued to emerge, we resolved to write about the
matters being raised in order to make quite clear to those responsible what
the fundamental issues were, why SL instructional programmes were taking
a wrong turn, and how to resolve those issues.
We are condent about our writing in this book: we have spent our
professional lives in the classroom, at conferences and at workshops, writing
programmes for international curricula, and taking part in international
accreditation processes. We have studied in depth, and to the highest levels
possible, the theory and intricacies of issues relating to SL acquisition and
bilingualism.
Our hope is that those responsible for curricula, accreditation and
programme implementation in international schools around the world will
take note: that can only benet all of those who make up the international
school community.
xx
List of abbreviations
AfL Assessment for Learning
AGM annual general meeting
BICS basic interpersonal communication skills
CALP cognitive and academic language prociency
CELTA Certicate in English Language Teaching to Adults
CIS Council of International Schools
CLIL content and language integrated learning
CPD continuing professional development
EAL English as an additional language
ECIS Educational Collaborative for International Schools
ELL English language learner
ELT English language teaching
EMI English as the medium of instruction
ESL English as a second language
FL foreign language
IATEFL International Association of Teachers of English as a
Foreign Language
IB International Baccalaureate
IBDP International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme
IBMYP International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme
IBPYP International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme
IELTS International English Language Testing System
IGCSE International General Certicate in Secondary Education
INSET in-service training day
xxi
List of abbreviations
L1 rst language
L2 second language
LOI language of instruction
MT mother tongue
NALDIC National Association for Language Development in the
Curriculum
NEASC New England Association of Schools and Colleges
NNEST non-native English-speaking teacher
NNS non-native speaker
NS native speaker
Ofsted Ofce for Standards in Education
PE physical education
PGCE Postgraduate Certicate in Education
PISA Programme for International Student Assessment
PTA parent–teacher association
SEN special educational needs
SFL systemic functional linguistics
SIOP Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol
SL second language
SLA second language acquisition
SLIC second language instructional competence
SLL second language learner
TA teaching assistant
TESMC teaching ESL students in mainstream classrooms
xxii
Introduction
The number of international schools is set to rise rapidly in the near future.
Whereas in 2000 there were 2,584 international schools worldwide with
just under a million students, in 2013 there were 6,400 international
schools, and by 2020 it is predicted that, worldwide, there will be over
10,000 international schools with over 5 million students (Brummitt and
Keeling, 2013: 27–8).
This presents a huge challenge to those involved with international
schools: curriculum providers, accreditation guide writers, school leaders,
and teachers. In many of these schools, second language learners are a
majority. Native speakers of the school language of instruction, which
in 90 per cent of schools is English, thus represent a minority. Students
learning English are described as ESL students.
A word on terminology is appropriate at this stage as, rst, the eld
of linguistics and bilingualism is complex and, second, the provision for
sound models of instruction has been heavily inuenced by political rather
than educational concerns, which have spread from national educational
systems to the international sphere, where they should have no place.
The most often used terms the reader needs to be familiar with are
‘second language’, ‘foreign language’ and ‘mother tongue’. It is essential
to make a sharp distinction between second and foreign language. ‘Second
language’ is the term used to describe the language students learn in
order to follow the entire curriculum of the school. ‘Foreign language’
refers to a language learnt in the curriculum, often French or Spanish, for
a xed number of lessons per week, which is not generally used outside
that classroom. For example, if English is the language of instruction in
the school, students who are not able to work comfortably in English will
need a comprehensive programme of instruction in English as a second
language. ‘Second’ does not refer to a mathematical progression: that is, it
is not necessarily students’ second-best language; ‘second language’ is the
standard linguistic terminology for a language learnt after the rst language
for everyday purposes and needs. It is useful to remember the expression
‘second nature’: if something is second nature to you, you have done it so
much that you no longer think about it, and it seems as if it is part of your
character. It is the same with a second language: you will develop such
uency in it that it will become part of your character. The term is based on
the theory of second language acquisition.
xxiii
Introduction
In England and Wales in the 1980s, there was much politicization
of the process of programme delivery, prompted by fears of racism, which
tainted the models of delivery and the terminology, so that a new term was
introduced, English as an additional language (EAL).
[T]here is a proliferation of labels in the eld internationally.
For instance, in the USA, language minority students from non-
English speaking communities who are learning English are now
referred to as English Language Learners (ELLs; previously ESL,
English as a Second Language, students). In England the teaching
provision of English language to adult students is referred to as
ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages); for school
aged students the preferred and widely used term is EAL (English
as an Additional Language, up until the mid-1990s it was known
as ESL). The term ‘second language’ is used in many European
contexts. … [T]he different terminologies reect the particular
histories and experiences of the different countries.
(Leung, 2013: 13)
The term EAL will not be used (except where it refers to writings, or
situations in schools, that use the term), as it has come to be associated
with the ‘support’ model for ESL students, which we regard as inadequate.
Crawford and Krashen have written:
[E]ducators must learn to cope with external pressures and
become strong advocates for the programs that best serve ELLs
[English language learners]. Perhaps no other area of education
has been more politicized in recent years. Immigration has become
a stormy controversy and language a frequent lightning rod.
(Crawford and Krashen, 2007: 10)
They added:
What are the worst mistakes that schools make in serving ELL
students? Three common responses can be summed up as denial,
delegating, and remediation. None of them is benecial to ELLs.
(ibid.: 14)
These are issues that we address throughout the book, and which underlie
much of what has developed in second language issues in the international
school sector.
Since the book is aimed at international schools worldwide, where
English is not always the language of instruction (the IB offers its curriculum
Introduction
xxiv
model in Chinese, French and Spanish, for example), the term used will
often be second language learners (SLLs), that is, learners of any language
of instruction in a school. However, since at present ‘The British Council
reckons that English is spoken at a useful level by some 1.75 billion people,
a quarter of the world’s population’ (Ostler, 2018), the terms ESL students
and EAL students appear more frequently when used by various writers to
refer to those who require a dedicated programme of instruction in English
which is relevant to their academic and social needs, a second language
programme (SLP).
‘Mother tongue’ (MT) will be used to refer to the native language of
students, and although there are many cases where students have more than
one language in the family, or have imperfect knowledge of their mother
tongue, the aim is to convey the sense of the student’s home language(s).
The focus in this book is on the middle and upper school, where the mastery
of academic language is of overriding importance.
The book is divided into six parts and twelve chapters. Each chapter
heading is followed in the Table of Contents by subheadings intended
to guide the reader through the arguments developed in the book. The
book begins with an overview of the international school and its essential
differences from most national schools, and continues with the many factors
that have inuenced the development of programmes for SL learners; all the
facts related are supported by research, the experience of the authors, and
vignettes from teachers. Part 2 summarizes the theories behind the proposed
models, and summarizes the writings of those who have inuenced them. Part
3 delves into the complex aspects of teacher relationships, and investigates
what is actually taking place in classrooms and across disciplines. Part 4
traces the development of provision for SL learners in particular curriculum
agencies – the IB – and accreditation guides – the CIS. These are well-
documented investigations that show how quickly better models for ESL
students can be overtaken by political forces.
Part 5 brings the situation to life, with a description of a young
teacher’s direct experience of encountering the challenges faced by SL
learners in an international school. It leads on to Part 6, in which the authors
lay out their plans for building on the potential of SL learners. They include
establishing a department of professional ESL staff, ensuring that all staff
receive appropriate continuing professional development, and building up
a system for maintaining students’ mother tongues. Chapter 11 investigates
how it is that, even after so much has been written about the importance
of recognizing the potential of SL learners and what they can contribute,
many international schools still provide what is essentially a monolingual
xxv
Introduction
programme based on that of national educational systems. The authors
close in Chapter 12 with the hope that ‘school heads and directors who are
genuinely persuaded by the arguments in this book will need not only to set
up the model advocated, but to back it all the way. This will mature into a
lasting embedding of equitable and professional programmes for SL learners.
Policies alone are not enough: they need consistent implementation.’
1
Part One
International schools
and inuences on their
provision for second
language students: Islands of
language and a high socio-
economic base
2
Chapter 1
What second language
learners bring to
international schools
Patricia Mertin
How do we dene an international school?
How do we arrive at a satisfactory denition of an ‘international school’?
State schools in Europe and other parts of the world where the rates of
immigration are high could well claim the title ‘international’ if this simply
meant that the students came from many different countries. Here we try
to identify what makes an international school different, rst looking at the
features that international schools have in common, and then examining
the diversity found in the sector. Finally, we consider the challenges faced
by students, teachers and administrators in delivering effective education,
and ask to what extent are international schools meeting these challenges?
What international schools have in common
International schools charge fees (see chapter 3 for a discussion by Maurice
Carder). Langford (2001: 28–9) highlights other important commonalities
among international schools, in addition to the multinational composition
of the student body, such as high population turnover and international
mobility. A consequence of parental career paths is the likelihood that
students will not complete their education in the country in which the school
is located, but will move on to another city or country, or repatriate to their
passport country. The students will probably be inuenced by the culture of
the host country as well as by the cultures they themselves embody.
The teaching staff at international schools also share important
characteristics. They fall into three main groups: host-country nationals,
locally hired expatriates, and overseas-hired expatriates. The number of
host-country teachers hired depends largely on the location of the school
and the language of instruction. There are more possibilities for hiring host-
country teachers for an English-medium school in Anglosphere countries
(see below) than in countries where the language of the school is not the
3
What second language learners bring to international schools
local language, as host-country teachers are likely to be hired to teach the
host-country language classes.
(The Anglosphere comprises those English-speaking nations which
have a similar cultural heritage, based on people originating from the nations
of the British Isles (England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland), and which today
maintain close political and military cooperation. The term does not usually
include all the countries in which English is an ofcial language, although
the nations that are commonly included were all once part of the British
Empire. In its most restricted sense, the term covers the United Kingdom,
Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which,
post-British Empire, maintain a close afnity of cultural, familial and
political links. See also ‘Angloworld’ in Belich (2011), and Kenny and Pearce
(2015). A more specic denition has been given by James C. Bennett: ‘This
term, which can be dened briey as the set of English-speaking, Common
Law nations, implies far more than merely the sum of all persons who
employ English as a rst or second language. To be part of the Anglosphere
requires adherence to the fundamental customs and values that form the
core of English-speaking cultures. These include individualism, rule of law,
honouring contracts and covenants, and the elevation of freedom to the
rst rank of political and cultural values’ (www.theguardian.com/news/
blog/2004/oct/28/explainingthe, accessed 13 February 2018).)
Locally hired expatriates tend to be the partners of host-country
nationals or of expatriates employed in other work. A disadvantage is
that they may leave abruptly if their partner’s contract changes. On the
other hand, locally hired expatriates who have lived in the host country for
some years will bring valuable knowledge of the language, the culture and
local resources and facilities, all of which contribute greatly to the school’s
international understanding.
Overseas-hired expatriates tend to be young and enthusiastic, but
they seldom stay in a school for long. They make a valuable and interesting
contribution to the faculty of any school. The younger teachers introduce
a new dynamic to the school, often questioning the way things are done,
introducing new ideas and adding valuable impetus to teaching and learning.
A nal commonality relates to the administration of international
schools. Administrators tend to come from anglophone countries and are
often monolingual. It is unusual for them to learn the language of the host
country. As Blandford and Shaw (2001: 14) point out, ‘There is less security
of tenure for a headteacher in an international school than in most national
schools: being red is a frequent occurrence.’
Patricia Mertin
4
What makes international schools different
Although international schools share many characteristics, there are also
important differences within the sector. In this regard, Murphy (2000, quoted
in Hayden and Thompson, 2000: 1) asks not only ‘What is an international
school? but also ‘What is an international education?’ The answer to the
rst of these questions underlines the huge diversity observable in schools
that include ‘international’ in their title. As Skelton (2002: 34) points out,
‘[we all] know that “The International School of X” may be a very, very
different place from “The International School of Y”’.
Some schools have, for example, been established by small groups
of parents to full family needs; others have been set up by companies for
prot or may even be part of a chain. International schools vary in size from
fewer than 200 students to over 1,500. Some are well established, many
are new: two of the longest-established international schools – Yokohama
International School and the International School of Geneva – date back
to 1927 (Hayden and Thompson, 2013: 3), whereas today ‘international
schools are being established across the world at an unprecedented pace’
(Brummitt and Keeling, 2013: 27–8). In the start-up phase of a new school,
the numbers will be low; they will also vary according to, for instance, the
location of major companies.
The student population also varies considerably. Some schools have
a large proportion of students from the host country whose parents want
them to benet from an international education. Some cap the number
of host-country nationals in order to maintain the balance and nature of
the school population. The other students may be from embassies and
international companies in the area, and may come from any country in the
world. It is not unusual for a school to have students of up to a hundred
different nationalities, each with its own language and culture.
In most cases, one language is used as the main medium of instruction,
usually English or French; occasionally, a policy of bilingualism is pursued.
The predominant language and nationality of the students will depend on
the school’s geographical position, the population of the area it serves,
and the location of international companies. If English is the language of
instruction and also of the environment, both students and parents will feel
comfortable. However, it may mean that the students have less opportunity
to learn a further foreign language, and the dominance of English may make
it harder for students to maintain their mother tongue. If the language of the
environment is less accessible to parents and students, the school is likely to
become a major social centre for the families.
5
What second language learners bring to international schools
Accreditation
The accreditation status of international schools varies: some are accredited,
others are not. They may follow American or British school systems, with
implications for the curriculum and examination system they follow. As
Murphy observes:
Maybe it is time … to stop trying to organize the unorganizable
by dint of words alone. … We might want to accept, nally, that
we do not, in this community, speak with one voice; that we are
educators with different experiences and backgrounds working
in many different kinds of schools for different reasons, and
whose common enterprise reects a rich variety of approaches;
and that we may or may not eventually arrive at a point where
we conform to a single vision.
(Murphy, 2000, quoted in Hayden and Thompson, 2000: 1)
In answer to Murphy’s second question – ‘What is an international
education?’ – a useful starting place is ‘international-mindedness’. This term
is philosophically related to UNESCO’s Aims of International Education,
1996, which are to develop:
● a sense of universal values for a culture of peace
● the ability to value freedom and the civic responsibility that goes with it
● intercultural understanding which encourages the convergence of
ideas and solutions to strengthen peace
● skills of non-violent conict resolution
● skills for making informed choices
● respect for cultural heritage and protection of the environment
● feelings of solidarity and equity at the national and international levels.
(Ellwood and Davis, 2009: 205)
The ultimate goal of any international school must be to provide an
international education to students from a wide variety of different linguistic
and cultural backgrounds. As Hayden and Thompson afrm:
many students in international schools value interaction with
those of other cultures as one of the fundamental characteristics
of international education which promotes the development of an
‘international attitude’ …. The deliberate, planned interaction of
students from different cultural backgrounds is widely regarded
as a cornerstone of international education.
(Hayden and Thompson, 2000: 3)
Patricia Mertin
6
Although interactions of this kind contribute to an international education,
three other dimensions are commonly recognized: a balanced formal
curriculum, exposure to cultural diversity, and a range of appropriate
administrative styles. As we will see, however, the extent to which
international schools succeed in meeting these ideals varies.
The development of international-mindedness creates a need for an
international curriculum. Hill (2000) lists four underlying principles for such
curricula: that they contain course content that provides an international
perspective, they recognize that the countries of the world are increasingly
interdependent, they provide activities that bring students into contact
with people of other cultures, and they create a context for world peace
by providing opportunities for many cultures to learn together in mutual
understanding and respect.
The most widely known example of an international curriculum
framework is provided by the IB, with its emphasis on the attributes of
the Learner Prole (International Baccalaureate Organization, 2006),
which encourages children to become inquirers, thinkers, communicators,
risk-takers, knowledgeable, principled, caring, open-minded, healthy and
reective. The Learner Prole is, however, strongly oriented to the West;
many of the desired attributes, such as inquiring and risk taking, are not
necessarily regarded as desirable attributes in other cultures.
Challenges for international schools
International schools face a number of challenges in delivering quality
education, such as the culture shock experienced by new students and new
teachers, the lack of initial training and continuing professional development
(CPD) for teachers, and the difculty of supporting students to maintain
their mother tongues.
Culture shock
Teachers and students experience culture shock when they arrive. According
to scholars (Fennes and Hapgood,1997; McCaig, 1994; Mertin, 2006;
Storti, 1997; Useem and Downie, 1976, 1986) their acclimatization has
three main phases. At rst they feel excitement and anticipation: everything
is new and wonderful. In the next phase, when the new and wonderful
seems less wonderful, reality sets in and sometimes frustration and even
anger are experienced, which are connected to a feeling of loss of identity
and dissatisfaction. This is compounded when the language of the local
environment is not spoken and the organizational systems both within
the school and in the outside world are unfamiliar. The nal phase of
7
What second language learners bring to international schools
acclimatization is acceptance of the situation and appreciation of its positive
features. Because of the turnover of teachers and students characteristic of
international schools, this process is continuous.
Continuing teacher development
On top of the problems of adjusting to a new country, new teachers have
seldom had much preparation for dealing with the complex needs of
international school students and their families. As Cummins (2000: 13)
explains, ‘Pre-service teacher education programs across North America
typically regard knowledge about linguistic and cultural diversity as
appropriate for “additional qualication” courses rather than as part
of the core knowledge base that all teachers should possess.’ Neither
are they familiar with the international curriculum taught in the school.
Consequently, they require specic training, particularly for an IB school.
Teachers must be able to explain all aspects of the material they are
using – the content, concepts and language. Academic demands increase as
the students get older; they are not only learning a language, but learning
through that language, and need to do it quickly. It is crucial that students
are taught by teachers who understand the linguistic challenges they face.
New teachers must learn to appreciate and value the many languages and
cultures in their classroom and understand that they are a major resource.
New teachers will nd it valuable to learn the language of their new country,
and that experience will give them some insight into the challenges that
second language students face.
Maintaining and developing the mother tongue
English language learners studying in international schools will return to
their home country at some stage and continue to study in their mother
tongue. For them, maintaining and developing the mother tongue is vital.
Furthermore, as Baker has shown, translanguaging supports students’
second language development: it ‘attempts to develop academic language
skills in both languages[,] leading to a fuller bilingualism and biliteracy’
(Baker, 2011: 290).
The question remains, however, as to how successful schools are in
responding to these challenges. They will fail to meet the ideals of a truly
international school if, for instance, students are expected to leave at the
school gates not only their language but their culture and required to speak
only English throughout the day, and mother tongues are banned. Or if the
administrators and the majority of teachers are monolingual English speakers
with experience only in their own national systems. Or if the only sign of
internationalism is the ubiquitous collection of ags and a visitor walking
Patricia Mertin
8
through the school would only hear, see and read English. Or if the norms
and philosophies of administration and teachers were completely Western.
The development of ESL instruction in
international schools
In the 1970s and early 1980s the preferred model in many international
schools was to pull ESL students out of classes and give them English
language instruction in small groups. The focus was on the four skills –
listening, speaking, reading and writing – plus grammar and spelling:
a traditional approach. ESL teachers were seen largely as an adjunct to
English departments, and peripheral to the traditional subjects taught by the
main departments: maths, science, humanities, English, foreign languages,
arts and PE.
At a conference organized by the ECIS ESL committee in 1987,
Professor Jim Cummins talked to ESL teachers from many international
schools about his research into the time students needed to learn English
and the importance of maintaining literacy in the mother tongue, as skills
learnt in the latter transfer to the second language. He distinguished between
conversational English, learnt in two years or less, and academic English,
which requires up to seven years. He stressed the importance of ‘empowering’
ESL students so that their sense of self-worth enhanced their progress.
The committee built on this breakthrough in 1989, when Professor
Virginia Collier was the keynote speaker at the second ESL subject
conference. She and Professor Wayne Thomas, both at George Mason
University, described their massive project of number-crunching vast
amounts of data about ESL students in the US (Thomas and Collier, 1997).
Their research showed which types of programmes beneted students most.
However, their work focused on the benets of bilingual models, which
in the USA implies English/Spanish. International schools generally have
small groups of speakers of many different languages, so a bilingual model
is not possible. Accordingly, Collier wrote the following specically for the
international schools context:
When the demographics of a school population include a
multilingual student group with small numbers of each language
represented, then mother tongue literacy development for each
language group, combined with ESL taught through academic
content, may be the best choice for support of non-English-
speakers’ needs.
(Collier, 2003: 8)
9
What second language learners bring to international schools
This statement from such a respected expert in the eld afrmed the potential
of ESL students to bring a great deal to international education, instead of
being seen as a challenge. Certainly, we have found over many years that
the second language students we taught were high iers. This mirrors the
view of Frank Monaghan of the Open University that ‘some of the highest
achieving pupils in British schools were those not having English as a rst
language’ (quoted in Woolcock, 2014).
It is easy to see international schools, with their clientele of wealthy
students and their spacious, well-equipped facilities, as a desirable model
of education that attracts parents. However, our experience of visiting
international schools throughout the world has shown us that second
language students are often catered for in precisely the ways that researchers
have shown to be inadequate: they have no mother tongue programme,
their approach to pedagogy is not about encouraging critical, interactional
teaching, and testing has become valued above all else, often disadvantaging
the second language students in particular.
The cultural values of the predominant school nationalities, the
culture of the school rules of discipline and expected behaviour, the cultural
style and content of the lessons, and the teaching styles and attitudes of
the staff, all construct a framework within which the non-dominant
nationalities must interact. Matthews showed in his study (1989a, 1989b)
that international school teachers are predominantly American or British,
have little or no training in cross-cultural learning differences, and largely
retain their national teaching style. These factors can impact negatively on
the motivation of other national groups. As Hedges observes:
Most elite schools … do only a mediocre job of teaching students
to question and think. … They focus instead … on creating
hordes of competent systems managers. Responsibility for the
collapse of the global economy runs in a direct line from the
manicured quadrangles and academic halls … to the nancial
and political centers of power.
(Hedges, 2009: 89)
The heads of successful ESL departments in large international schools in
various locations in Europe have commented on the failure of their directors
to recognize the needs of second language students. As one told us, ‘I have
given up trying to persuade the director to always employ content teachers
who have undertaken serious professional development in “linguistically
responsive teaching”’. Another said – upon retiring – ‘I couldn’t face the
Patricia Mertin
10
thought of having to educate yet another director on how we successfully
run ESL and mother tongue programmes here.’
There is clearly a need for strong, informed leadership to ensure a
structured programme of second language instruction, and that it is given
institutional back-up. But this is hard to establish when school leaders
bring with them the outdated and inaccurate ideas about second language
acquisition of their national systems – especially England’s – and know little
about the benets of bilingualism. Many are wholly unaware of how poorly
ESL students are served by the current models in their national systems.
Frequently the result is ad hoc ESL and mother tongue provision, or none
at all, which marginalizes both ESL students and their teachers. The only
recourse for the teachers is to seek their own strategies for providing sound
second language programmes.
However, given the hierarchical management structure of international
schools, in which policies are determined from above and teachers’ views
are not necessarily given credence, and given that two principal educational
agencies, the IB and the CIS, give ESL students peripheral status (support),
the knowledge and advice of the ESL teachers may well be ignored. Yet
the children of the international community live in a sociological bubble,
an international space in which their individual personalities are shaped
by linguistic factors (Carder, 2013a). They have no national identity to
which they have to assimilate; they would benet from a structured second
language programme with a mother-tongue programme to back it up, so
that their social, cognitive and intellectual potential can be fully developed.
Only when there is equity of programme provision for ESL students will
they receive the education they deserve.
Some international schools worked hard in the 1990s and 2000s to
promote appropriate, meaningful in-service training for content teachers
by adopting the ‘ESL in the Mainstream’ course and its successor ‘TESMC
– Teaching ESL students in mainstream classrooms’. However, even this
modest step forward is being undermined by ESL teachers themselves. At
a conference in January 2016 of the Association of German International
Schools (AGIS), a new group, the English as an Additional Language
Working Group, was formed. It decided that ‘English in the Mainstream’
(meaning in fact ‘ESL in the Mainstream’) was a comprehensive programme
but could be costly to implement in terms of time, resources and money.
So they designed, instead, a 5-hour professional development course to
enable EAL teachers to take the training back to their schools and present
it to teachers. We know from the experience of one of the authors of this
book that this represented a huge step backwards, since he devoted much
11
What second language learners bring to international schools
time in the 1980s and early 1990s to developing just such a course and
producing a handbook on it for teachers and school leaders. When he was
shown ‘English in the Mainstream’ he could see the massive difference in
the quality and quantity of the material. His ‘ESL in the Mainstream’ was
run at the school several times. It did take up time and cost money, of
course, but such was its impact that it proved its worth. What the EAL
teachers of the AGIS had done was to step back 25 years and conrm that
they had the same low status as the ESL teachers of the 1980s: they were no
more than supporting, peripheral staff in whom it was not worth investing
time, resources and money.
The consequences of importing national models
Teaching staff and management cannot but bring from their own countries’
systems the prejudices and lack of knowledge about the best way to nurture
the potential of SL learners – emerging bilinguals. Most of the teachers have
had no specic training, so they see ESL students as they did in their national
systems, as peripheral, potential SEN students who have to be supported.
Pearce (2013: 61–2) sums up the pernicious consequences of such
performance on the teaching of ESL in international schools thus: ‘in general
teachers have performed international education according to the national
models in which they have been trained’. It may be possible to nd teachers
for international schools who have the appropriate knowledge in specialist
areas such as maths and science – although these subject areas also have their
own distinct languages – but different approaches are needed for teaching
the social sciences, especially history. Foreign languages, surprisingly, do
not need so much adaptation, except that foreign-language teachers coming
from the Anglosphere may be surprised at the abilities of the students. But it
is above all the approach, methodology, theory and practice of addressing the
needs and seeing the potential of second language students that Anglosphere
teachers and school leaders so urgently need to learn.
The culture of the student and the school
The wide range of students in any international school means a concomitant
variety of cultural values, and this can affect a student’s learning if there is
a cultural clash between their behaviour and expectations and the teacher’s.
We seldom realize how our culture affects our ways of behaving, and it is this
lack of awareness that causes us surprise when we encounter behaviour that
differs from our own or from what we expect of students. Administrators,
teachers, parents and students in the international community must take
account of the variations in the students’ cultures and the part they play
Patricia Mertin
12
in education. Culture must not be seen as just the 3 Fs – ags, festivals
and food.
If we think of cultural differences as an iceberg, the part we see
corresponds to the visual, easily recognizable aspects of culture – dress,
language, traditions and so on. The larger part of the iceberg, which lies,
invisible, underwater, corresponds to the signicant, but often covert, aspects
of culture – expectations, values, perceptions, norms, time orientation,
learning styles, space and so on. The situation of students facing in school
a culture very different from that of their home and their previous school is
well researched, but it is seldom considered in international schools.
Hofstede (1980) identied four areas of deeper culture which can
be compared across cultural groups: power distance, individualism versus
collectivism, masculinity versus femininity, and uncertainty avoidance. He
later added a fth: long-term orientation. Three of these areas are relevant
to international education, which sees in the classroom the meeting of minds
from many diverse cultures.
It is helpful to our argument to consider power distance: the
unequal distribution of power in society. In a high-power-distance culture
the members are respectful of people in authority or who have seniority.
Students from such cultures treat the teachers with great respect. They
expect the teacher to know the correct answers, and would not argue or
express contrary opinions as this would show a lack of respect. In low-
power-distance cultures, the relationship between teachers and students can
be much more informal, and in some ways equal. Alternative views are freely
expressed and discussed. Students from a high-power-distance culture can
nd this atmosphere, the tone of discussions and the general air of equality
confusing. Their families are probably accepting of authority too, are
respectful of teachers and expect unquestioning respect from their children.
The student who moves between differing cultures at home and school has
to deal with two quite different ways of behaving and communicating.
ESL students generally learn after a while to copy the behaviour of
their peers and this can cause difculties if an ESL student hasn’t learned
the invisible boundaries of acceptable behaviour in the dominant culture.
They see the other, predominantly Western, students discussing with and
challenging their teachers in a way which would be found unacceptable in
the ESL student in their home country. But when they try to behave in the
same way, they don’t know the accepted norms and limits the other students
unconsciously follow and may appear to behave inappropriately. It is worth
noting that many of the students in international schools have come from
schools where they were accustomed to being academically successful; this
13
What second language learners bring to international schools
too makes their situation as second language students more difcult. The
previously successful student can nd that their lack of prociency in the
language of instruction puts them in an almost unbearable situation.
After a strenuous school day speaking in a second language,
learning in it, and always having to overcome challenges but never being
the acknowledged expert, students can feel very frustrated. At home, they
must revert to the accepted ways of behaving, however restrictive this now
feels. Such constant readjustment imbues the ESL student’s life with stress
and tension, whereas the native speaker of English transfers from home to
school with little need of linguistic or cultural adjustment.
This conict of cultural beliefs, related to so many aspects of
education, can also undermine the student’s academic success. The ESL
student from a high-power-distance culture expects their learning to be
driven and controlled by their teachers; self-directed, independent learning
is a new and alarming concept. The student assumes that the teacher will
talk and the student will listen, but the teacher from a low-power-distance
culture expects the students to express their views. The student from a high-
power-distance culture expects their teachers to provide all the information
they need to be successful and will be confused when other students ask
questions or challenge their teachers. These differences in expectations need
to be carefully explained to new students and, especially, to new teachers.
And this applies to other areas of cultural differences that may impact
on the learning of students from other cultures, such as individualism versus
collectivism. The Western, individualistic society encourages individuality,
independence, self-fullment and standing out, whereas the collectivistic
culture emphasizes group membership, interdependence, social responsibility
and tting in. A student from a mainly collectivistic culture may nd it
difcult to cope with being in a classroom in which their peers are from an
individualistic culture. The Japanese have an expression, ‘The nail which
stands out will be hammered down’; this explains why many students from
collectivist societies are unwilling to express personal opinions or speak
in front of the whole class, or do anything which might disrupt harmony
within the group.
In the common classroom situation in which students volunteer
answers to the teacher’s questions to the whole class, students from an
individualistic culture will want to contribute and stand out, whereas
students from a collectivistic culture will remain silent to avoid standing
out at all costs. Teachers need to have a basic knowledge of such cultural
differences.
Patricia Mertin
14
Teachers also need to understand uncertainty avoidance, another of
Hofstede’s areas of cultural difference, which presents huge challenges for
students from non-Western cultures. These students want clear guidelines
and to have matters explained thoroughly. Moreover, they expect the
teachers to have all the answers.
The philosophy of education in most international schools emphasizes
cultural norms that are in radical contrast to some of the students’ cultural
values. This puts them in difcult situations when they can’t recognize
where the limits are in the new culture. At the same time, they must be able
to adjust their behaviour in situations out of school in which their natural
culture rules.
Several of the provisions in the IB Learner Prole (International
Baccalaureate Organization, 2005–18) contrast greatly with important,
desirable aspects of collectivist cultures. Clearly, it is not only the students,
but also their parents, who need to be prepared for the culture and practices
of any international school when it presents a direct contrast to the family’s
own opinions, behaviours and beliefs. And their teachers need to be sensitive
to the students’ conicting views and values.
Ezra lists 16 recommendations to facilitate new students’ entry to
an international school, most of which concern culture shock as it affects
both native English speakers and speakers of other languages. She sums up
as follows:
Since culture, language and personality are inextricably bound,
teachers must develop awareness that the speed and ease
with which children are successfully acculturated into a new
English-medium environment are dependent on cultural values
and traditions, the rate of English-language acquisition and
differences of personality.
(Ezra, 2003: 144)
Consequently, international schools need to provide teachers and
administrators with CPD related to cultural differences, so that they can
enable students to succeed academically and socially.
The benets SLLs bring to international schools
In international school classrooms across the world, students from a
wide variety of nations sit next to each other, work together, discuss and
debate and, at the same time, learn from each other. Through this fruitful
collaboration, the students learn to accept world views and opinions other
than their own, and to develop new ways of looking at their own ideas. They
15
What second language learners bring to international schools
are learning to be world citizens through the experiences gained by working
closely with and learning from students from other nations and cultures.
These interactions play a key role in the creation of truly international
communities, but for a community to be truly international every member
must be able to contribute equally, and every member must be heard.
When ESL students are not actively encouraged and empowered
by the teachers and administration in international schools, the result,
in Cummins’s view, is a ‘disabling’ of the students. Cummins lists four
organizational aspects of schooling that are affected by the administrator’s
or teacher’s own attitudes to the education of multilingual, multicultural
students. The rst two of these are particularly relevant to this discussion:
● The extent to which students’ language and cultural
background are afrmed and promoted within the school;
this includes the extent to which literacy instruction in school
afrms, builds on, and extends the vernacular literacy practices
that many culturally diverse students engage in outside the
context of school.
● The extent to which culturally diverse communities are
encouraged to participate as partners in their children’s
education and to contribute the ‘funds of knowledge’ that
exist in their communities to this educational partnership.
(Cummins, 2000: 47)
The most important area of an international school for second language
learners is the ESL department, which often provides a safe haven for those
who nd the culture of the school and the language used unfamiliar, strange
or even frightening.
The benets ESL parents can bring to
international schools
The parents of English language learners in international schools share,
of course, their children’s mother tongues and cultural orientations. The
parents themselves may come from different cultures and each have their
own mother tongue, so the students may already be bilingual within their
own family. Parents are an immense asset to any school, not only through
sharing food, dress and other outward signs of culture, but also because
they represent the international in the title ‘international school’. So it
is vital that their voices are heard, but this is not always the case in the
school community. This may be partly because of linguistic challenges but
can also be because they receive little encouragement or recognition from
Patricia Mertin
16
the administrators, who are often monolingual. And such are the cultural
differences between these parents and those who are self-condent and
assertive, and speak on equal terms to teachers and other parents, that their
voices are unlikely to be heard. It is the responsibility of the administration
and the teachers, and also the other parents, to be sensitive to cultural
differences and to give equal recognition and equal attention to all the
families within the school community.
Linguistic challenges
In any international school, parents who have the same mother tongue
will naturally gather together. All parents need information about the
school, not only the condent English speakers. The language challenges
non-native speakers of English encounter often start during the admissions
process, unless the school has culturally and linguistically aware admissions
staff who have been trained to communicate effectively with people from
different cultures and language backgrounds.
The admissions forms, school yers, handbooks and other documents
given to parents should be translated into all the languages of the school
community. If the information is important enough to be handed out, it
must be equally important to ensure that every parent can easily understand
it. Translation can, for example, be made part of a community service
project for senior school students.
Parents within school communities who share a mother tongue nd
each other quite quickly and are very helpful in welcoming new parents to
their group, keeping them informed and encouraging the use of their mother
tongue by both parents and children. Such social groups can be a lifeline
for new parents who nd themselves in a country where they cannot speak
the language, dealing with a school in which a further language is used, and
who may feel isolated when their partner works long hours or is frequently
away, and the children are at school all day. The parent groups also play a
key role in school-wide events such as international days at which attention
is paid to their talents, languages and cultures.
The concept and practice of sharing and valuing other languages and
cultures should, however, also be upheld when parent representatives are
elected to school governing boards, on which the parents who don’t speak
the dominant language tend to be underrepresented. In a truly international
school, all language groups should be represented so that the parents from
various linguistic and cultural backgrounds can play an active role in the
school, bringing their knowledge and experience to the table.
17
What second language learners bring to international schools
During the school year, parents receive information in the form of
weekly bulletins, emails, notes home, invitations to parent conferences
and of course report cards. These should be offered to the parents in their
mother tongue whenever possible, to show them that their contributions are
valued and their languages respected.
Some school administrators hold parent coffee meetings during the
school year at which parents can ask questions and raise their concerns.
Parents of second language learners may have many questions but not know
how – or whom – to ask, and will be understandably hesitant, whereas a
native speaker of English will often just nd their way to the person who
can help, or re off an email whenever they wish.
As well as linguistic impediments, parents may have cultural issues
which make communication with teachers or administrators difcult. A
British or American parent can easily talk to a teacher on an equal basis.
Teacher and parent have a common language in which to talk about
education. Their previous experiences of education and school culture
are generally similar, so any misunderstandings can be easily cleared up.
However, a parent who has had quite different educational experiences and
expectations won’t easily nd common ground in discussions with teachers.
In addition, parents whose cultures are hugely respectful of teachers will be
reluctant to question the way things are done in the school. The teachers and
administrators must ensure that the educational philosophy of the school
is clearly understood by the whole school community, so that no serious
misunderstandings arise. If questions are left unasked, and so unanswered,
and issues simmer unresolved, misunderstandings and further difculties can
quickly develop. So it is particularly important that the parents who don’t
speak the dominant language of the school have a forum for discussion in
which a knowledgeable translator can assist the process of communication
and effect clarity for all concerned.
To summarize, the students who don’t speak the dominant language,
and their parents, are what make the school international. They should be
valued as a major resource, and provisions and practices should be in place
to ensure that they receive all the advantages that the school affords the
students and families of the dominant language group.
18
Chapter 2
Characterization of the
international school clientele
in language matters
Education must transform itself into sociology, that is, it must teach
about the societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of
political forms.
(Adorno, 2005: 203)
An international space rather than assimilation
In international schools many students’ language repertoires are central to
their lives in ways that differ from those in national schools: these students
can benet from an enrichment of their language repertoires.
An assimilationist pedagogical ideology towards English is not
appropriate for international school students, where English as an
international language is but one part of their language repertoires, their
mother tongue(s) maintaining a prominent position in their identities as
regards sociocultural, cognitive and academic formation. A summary of
the positions of assimilation and multiculturalism is given by Baker and
Prys Jones:
At the heart of the assimilationist ideology is the belief that an
effective, harmonious, society can only be achieved if minority
groups are absorbed into mainstream society. Harmony and
equal opportunity depend on a shared language and culture. …
A multicultural viewpoint is partly based on the idea that an
individual can successfully hold two or more identities.
(Baker and Prys Jones, 1998: 299)
Some families realize too late the tragedy of children losing their mother
tongue. Azadi tells of her brother leaving Iran to live in the USA:
The shock of changing cultures so drastically … caused him
terrible psychological problems later. The hardest part was that
he went to live with a family where no Persian was spoken ….
One morning, about six months after moving there, he woke up
19
Characterization of the international school clientele in language matters
to nd that he could neither speak nor understand Persian any
longer. To this day, when Cyrus is at a family gathering, one of us
has to translate for him when the conversation turns to Persian.
(Azadi, 1987: 43–4)
International school students live in an international space, having arrived
with or without a knowledge of English, and much of their life will be lived
in an international arena: their parents probably work in an international
organization in which English is likely to be the medium. Their friends will
be international school students, and they may be viewed by those not in this
milieu as an elite: elite children, however, require as much understanding
and attention to their linguistic, emotional and related proles as any other
children. Thus the model most applicable to such students is that of pluralism
and multiculturalism. In international schools an assimilationist model is
not appropriate as there are no political pressures for assimilation; there is
no nation state to assimilate to, nor political measures to treat immigrants
circumspectly: international school students are not immigrants. A model
can and should be provided that promotes enrichment in each student’s
mother tongue while encouraging students to gain biliteracy in English.
International schools provide a unique opportunity for a truly multicultural
and multilingual teaching programme.
Pennycook (2003) proposed that the term niche should be applied
to particular groups, networks, or communities of practice. Thus there will
be a niche for international school students as a community of practice.
(Those wishing to read more widely about the assimilationist policies of
England and other Anglosphere countries are referred to Mohan et al.,
2001; Crawford, 2000; Leung and Franson, 2001a, 2001c; Monaghan,
2010: 15–31; Carder, 2008a, 2013a, 2013b, 2017a, 2017b.)
English can be culture-free
In an English-speaking environment with English as the medium of
instruction (EMI) and teaching and administrative staff largely from the
English-speaking world, it is frequently the case that there is a drift towards
a naive acceptance by the teaching and administrative staff of ‘getting by’
in English without consulting the broad range of research now available.
Interestingly, MacKenzie (2003) undertook a small research project which
substantiated that parents overwhelmingly wanted their children to learn
English at any cost – apparently including the loss of their mother tongue.
This reects the observation by Edwards in the context of South Africa,
though applicable to our case:
Maurice Carder
20
[t]here is a palpable tension between the perception of parents, on
the one hand, that the surest route to upward mobility is through
English-medium education and the rm belief of policymakers,
on the other hand, that a strong foundation in the children’s
mother tongue will lead to more equitable outcomes.
(V. Edwards, 2009: 44)
We should add to us the proviso that in international schools it is often
dedicated practitioners rather than policymakers who advocate the
importance of the mother tongue.
The world of international school students today therefore requires
a relevant model from the IB, the ECIS, the CIS and all other curriculum
providers and accrediting agencies for the best possible linguistic framework
as opposed to one lifted from national systems in the Anglosphere.
Minority students as a majority
Students in international schools, as noted above, are rather in a bubble of
internationalism where English is the language of the school for academic
and social purposes, but not of the wider environment. The language of the
host country can be anything from Italian to Indonesian and may be taught
in the school if it is considered ‘useful’ for any future purpose; thus host-
country languages such as Vietnamese or Mongolian are usually not taught,
French or Spanish being preferred as a foreign language suitable for study.
Students return to their own countries for frequent visits, and some continue
their university studies in their own country (see the ECIS Directory for a
list of international schools worldwide). It is clearly in students’ interests to
maintain uency and literacy in their mother tongue.
On a visit to an international school where teachers had collected
vignettes of students, I found that one was of an English student who ‘had
been at the school for 15 years but spoke not one word of the host-country
language’. Such behaviour on the part of an immigrant would be lambasted
by politicians and the press in many countries, but is accepted as perfectly
normal in an international school, especially when the student involved is a
native speaker of English. Discussion with another invited workshop leader
revealed her experience in Asia, where she felt students were often totally
isolated from the local community; she commented that some students
lived in a ‘bubble within a bubble’, their wealthy parents ensuring that they
‘oated above the daily lives of ordinary people, their feet literally hardly
touching the ground as they were chauffeur-driven around and pampered’.
21
Characterization of the international school clientele in language matters
The situation of many educators and school leaders in international
schools seems to be that of those in national systems: over time students
will move away from native-language cultural maintenance and absorb
majority English language and culture. Many parents see knowledge of the
globally dominant language, English, as a safer guarantee of a secure future
for their children than their native language (the children are unlikely to
have a say in whether they move to a new school abroad), and globalization
and technology may have added strength to their argument. This is often
the non-specialist’s view, unaware of the issues of additive and subtractive
bilingualism.
The existence of a mother-tongue programme may be seen as
a solution, and the mother-tongue teachers are certainly among the few
professionals who understand the depth of the challenges faced. But the
need for a solid core of ESL professionals to act as a central pivot in the
middle school is overwhelming, and in the few international schools where
there is an ESL department it does not have the inuence, status or power
to provide the guidance for the whole school that is necessary for successful
outcomes for the majority of ESL students, and is under constant threat of
having its staff reduced or forced into a support role.
Linguistic intolerance – linguicism – seen as acceptable
In 2004 workers at a branch of McDonald’s were asked to speak English
at all times, not only when serving customers but also in the staff room.
The McDonald’s staff sign said: ‘Attention all staff. Due to the common
language within the store, all staff members must use English at all times.
This is in accordance to HQ.’ It added: ‘Warnings can be issued to anyone
who doesn’t follow this notice. Thank you.’ Complaints by staff were made
to Qassim Afzal, a former Manchester city councillor and member of the
federal executive of the Liberal Democrat Party.
McDonald’s issued a statement which said:
Within McDonald’s we specically encourage teamwork and
inclusivity, and this encompasses the language spoken. We have
over 70,000 UK staff who speak many languages, representing a
diverse, multi-ethnic workforce.
We recognise, however, to ensure consistency that there is a need
for a common language and in the UK this is English. There are
many sensible benets to having a common language, including
consistency in customer service, food quality and safety. As a
result, staff are encouraged to speak English when working
Maurice Carder
22
and when liaising with customers. Outside of these times we,
of course, respect their right to converse in whichever language
they choose.’
Employment law specialists said the ‘English language only’ rule
could be discriminatory – because only someone of English origin
could fully comply.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/manchester/4022461.
stm; accessed 17 September 2018)
This example reveals the complexities involved wherever the languages being
spoken come up against an institution or workplace, and the lack of clear,
or indeed any, legislation on linguicism. This state of affairs makes it all the
more important to make a determined effort to demystify bilingualism and
consistently research for the best models. The German Chancellor, Angela
Merkel, when congratulating Trump upon his election as US president, listed
the values that bindGermany and the US together, offering cooperation
only on the basis of these values: ‘Democracy, freedom, as well as respect
for the rule of law and the dignity of each and every person, regardless
of their origin, skin colour, creed, gender, sexual orientation or political
views’ (www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/12/europe-trump-
america-president, accessed 13 February 2018). The attributes that should
not affect respect for the dignity of every person did not include language.
The term ‘linguicism’ was proposed by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas in
1986, and a full account of it is given in Skutnabb-Kangas (2000), where
she dened it (p. 30) as ‘Ideologies, structures, and practices which are used
to legitimate, effectuate, regulate, and reproduce an unequal division of
power and resources (both material and immaterial) between groups which
are dened on the basis of language’. She comments: ‘Ignorance about
language(s) is not the main reason for the killing of languages, though –
power relations, including structural forces, are. Formal education is,
together with mass media, a main killer of languages’ (ibid.: 29). Whereas
in international schools we are talking about muting rather than ‘killing’
languages, there is a case for positing that formal education in English,
parents’ overwhelming desire to have their children become uent in
English, and school directors’ (most of them monolingual in English) desire
to please the clientele, all go a long way towards reducing children’s ability
to maintain literate uency in their mother tongue.
Mission statements will routinely contain such aims as ‘We do not
tolerate any form of discrimination’, but the realities of adhering to such a
practice are rarely thought through. Skutnabb-Kangas outlines six classes
23
Characterization of the international school clientele in language matters
of prejudice, namely racism, ethnicism, linguicism, sexism, classism and
ageism, which she denes as follows:
Ideologies, structures and practices which are used to legitimate,
effectuate, regulate, and reproduce an unequal division of power
and resources (both material and immaterial) between groups
which are dened on the basis of:
Race (in biologically argued racism);
Ethnicity and/or culture (in culturally argued racism,
ethnicism … or culturism);
Language (in linguistically argued racism, linguicism);
Gender (in sexism);
Class or social group (in classism); or
Age (in ageism).
(Skutnabb-Kangas, ibid.: 369)
International schools have a responsibility to follow through in ensuring
that four of these practices of discrimination are ‘not tolerated’. Schools
have students from the global mix of races, and racism becomes a non-
issue. Gender and class fall in the same category. An interesting insight in
this area was apparent at a CIS symposium at which a Mexican presenter,
not familiar with international schools, was talking about her experience
in the USA. She had been in contact by phone with various agencies about
her willingness to talk to schools about her experiences of multicultural
education. She spoke of the surprise of ‘white’ school principals when they
met her, as although on the phone she sounded like ‘an American’, she
looked ‘like a Mexican’. In an international school such observations would
not enter the radar: international school students are from all over the
world and teachers soon learn not to categorize them by race or colour. An
American colleague sitting next to me commented that ‘in the USA, though,
race is the determining factor’.
Age is not an issue in a school, which by denition is limited to
young people. Efforts are made to accommodate the various cultural
attributes of students and their families, though here the predominantly
‘Western’ culture of international school staff clearly has an overwhelming
effect on the general school ambience. Cultural issues are usually, though
not necessarily, closely linked to those of language, and linguicism is the
issue that is the most difcult for schools to get to grips with. How can
Maurice Carder
24
we provide an equitable pedagogical programme for children coming to an
international school, possibly without their consent and not knowing the
school’s language of instruction, English, without committing linguicism?
There is only one solution, and that is to ensure that parents are fully aware
of the facts pertaining to studying in a second language: that it is crucial to
maintain and develop the mother tongue throughout the child’s study at
the school, and that it is equally crucial to provide a comprehensive second-
language-learning programme, in a school where all staff are trained in and
aware of all that is involved in teaching emerging bilinguals.
An extreme version of linguicism was highlighted in the press when
an Australian senator told another senator to ‘learn to speak Australian’ in
the Australian Senate – the object of the criticism had a Scottish accent. The
journalist writing about the incident recounted how, when she arrived from
Scotland at school in Australia,
It was made abundantly clear to me, from the rst day at school,
that I was different. For every child who found me to be a curiosity
they wanted to strike a friendship with, there was another child
telling me angrily and hatefully to go back to my own country.
Telling me they couldn’t understand my accent. Telling me to
‘speak Australian’.
(Duncan, 2015)
If this can happen to a uent native speaker (of Scottish English), imagine
the potential for the bullying of L2 speakers. In fact, since she was not
speaking another language, but a dialect of English, this could be termed as
‘dialectism’!
The need to inform parents in depth of the
linguistic issues
It is a truism to say that parents are a major factor in how their children
are educated. In international education, especially at international schools
where there are large numbers of parents who work for international
organizations such as the United Nations, international agencies, embassies
and other prestigious bodies, parents have high expectations of the
educational programme. As in any group of people, there is a variety of
attitudes towards education, and clearly the cultural background of
each family will inuence its attitudes. As Baker says, when discussing
bilingualism in Wales:
25
Characterization of the international school clientele in language matters
There is a signicant task in persuading parents to pass on the
language to their children. Such persuasion is always going
to be difcult. It is not easy to reach parents, nor is it easy to
inuence them.
(C. Baker, 2003: 101)
Fishman, too, discusses the matter of parental involvement, and
recommends that
if intergenerational mother-tongue transmission is being aimed
at, there is no parsimonious substitute for focusing on the home-
family-neighbourhood-community processes which bind together
adults and children … in early bonds of intergenerational and
spontaneous affect, intimacy, identity, and loyalty.
(Fishman, 2004: 435)
At international schools, there are various parental groups which are ofcial
bodies, for example the Parent–Teacher Association (PTA), and an annual
general meeting (AGM) at which parents elect a new board of governors.
The PTA focuses largely on fund-raising and organizing such events as
an annual bazaar; the AGM is mostly taken up with choosing new board
members and the percentage increase of the fees. It is fair to say that a
primary preoccupation of many parents is cost: international schools are
private schools, and any additional costs such as mother-tongue classes will
impact on each family in different ways. Attempts to make mother-tongue
classes more inclusive by including them in the school fees are virtually
unknown. International school parents are unwilling to become activists
for a cause in the way that happens in some national contexts; they are
middle-class professionals and many prefer to take their cause individually
to the director. Since directors do not stay long at a school, such issues
evaporate. Little in the literature on international schools reports on
matters of parental activism for this cause. A further factor is that the
parents, who are often highly qualied professionals in their own elds, are
themselves often second language learners and are linguistically unable to
defend their children. They also assume that the international schools have
the experience and expertise to teach their children appropriately and so
relinquish the responsibility to the school.
We are dealing here with language as a concept in itself, with many
different languages and their cultural manifestations, with an international
community and its many different languages, cultures, prejudices and
aspirations, and with a phenomenon peculiar to this situation: the community
Maurice Carder
26
believes itself to be privileged, but vital aspects of educational provision –
the second language programme and the fact of students’ mother tongues
– are more often than not treated in a way that reects the treatment usually
allocated to a dominated section of society, that is, immigrants. This means
that parents are thrust into a role with which they may feel uncomfortable.
There is a parent body, some members of which have their own agendas,
which is naturally concerned with getting the best academic, emotional and
cultural provision for their children, and in addition has an interest in the
nancial aspects. Also involved is a body of teachers of different linguistic
and cultural origins, who have nancial as well as pedagogical concerns. On
top of this there is the school management, which has to cater for a broad
range of parental concerns in an environment of a perceived elite enrolment
representing international organizations, possibly linked nancially to the
host-country government, perhaps through a subsidy. Finally, there is a
board of governors, who may be unpredictable but are potentially ruthless
towards any management that does not follow its views.
The myth of the native speaker
There are many myths about the desirability of having native English
speakers as teachers in international schools in order to ensure the best
quality. The research is clear about such views: ‘there is a monolingual bias
in research and practice on language learning and teaching which have
deeply negative consequences’ (Ortega, 2014: 32). In addition, there is a
monolingual bias in the eld of second language acquisition which has
become unsustainable. Researchers believe that it is a fallacy to take L1
speakers as benchmarks to evaluate the learning success of L2 learners,
and damaging decit approaches become unwittingly entrenched in many
practices found in classrooms and schools. Non-native speakers (NNS) are
portrayed as having an ‘approximative’ kind of linguistic competence and
native speakers (NS) are taken as the norm, the default. ‘NNS are seen
as subordinate, seen as having a less natural way of doing and knowing
and learning a language than monolinguals; this is harmful from an
ethical standpoint as it casts a decit light on L2 users, who are seen as
less legitimate and less pure’ (ibid.: 35). This state of affairs has arisen
because all SLA research is carried out by monolinguals trying to add on
another monolingual command of the L2. This conrms the hypothesis that
‘monolingualism is taken as the norm; the reality of bilingualism is thus
made invisible; and linguistic ownership by birth and monolingualism are
elevated to an inalienable right and advantage’ (ibid.: 36). The result of this
is that ‘a subtractive bilingualism approach is uncritically embraced’ (ibid.).
27
Characterization of the international school clientele in language matters
It would be more helpful if schools recognized that ‘It is widely
agreed that today there are more second language (L2) speakers of English
than speakers of English as a rst language (L1)’ (Hu and McKay, 2014:
65), and ‘today many speakers do not necessarily aspire to a native-speaker
target but rather want to become intelligible speakers of English’ (ibid.: 66).
There would then be no such demands as the one imposed recently on all
applicants for teaching posts at TH School in Hanoi, founded in 2016
(www.ticrecruitment.com/th-school/, accessed 13 February 2018), which
states that ‘First language should be English’. This will ensure a huge loss
of potentially expert teachers and will be a negative inuence on the many
second language students, who will not see any bilingual teachers with
English as their second language as role models. I have known countless
rst-class professionals whose mother tongue was not English, but who
were excellent teachers in their chosen subjects; this applies especially to
ESL teachers. There seems to be a particular problem surrounding the
issue in Asian schools, researched in depth by Krashen (2006). The school
mentioned above also claims to be encouraging bilingualism. A positive
move on the part of school leaders would be to stop explaining why SL
speakers are not native speakers and talk about the mechanisms of becoming
bilingual.
For many years those directly involved in the teaching of second
language learners have advocated more awareness among those responsible
for curricula and accreditation processes, as well as for programme design
in schools. In many ways little has been achieved at the institutional level;
there may be a reluctance to make changes that conict with perceived
views in political circles in certain English-speaking countries, and nances
also play a part.
Parents’ views on mother-tongue instruction
In conversations with parents at a large international school, I garnered some
useful insights into the status and procedure of mother tongue lessons. The
question of when to have these lessons was important to parents, and they
believed it was intertwined with the status of the programme: scheduling
them after school placed the classes as supplementary, second-class, not
as important as other school subjects. Parents suggested alternatives, but
were not able to agree. They were frustrated that there could be an ofcial
school IBDP foreign-language class with three students in it, taking place
in a classroom, while a mother-tongue IBDP class of ve students had to
have their lesson in a corridor. The point had been raised with the school
management, which responded that the mother-tongue programme was
Maurice Carder
28
extra-curricular and outsourced. In fact, there were a number of ofcial
foreign-language (French and Spanish) IBDP classes which had fewer
students than, for example, mother-tongue Spanish and Russian classes.
The former were taught in classrooms; the latter might have been taught
in a classroom, if one was available, but were often taught in corridors,
which sends a message to students and teachers that such classes are lower
in status. These matters are written about by Cummins (2000) concerning
power relations as they affect second language learners. Fishman (1966,
quoted in V. Edwards, 2004: 121) ‘comments that the only reason for
reference to heritage language teaching schools in ofcial documents is
when they have been cited for lack of bathrooms, windows or re escapes’.
As regards status, Edwards notes that in the UK ‘There was, until recently,
no initial teacher training in community languages, thus perpetuating the
underdog status of this group of teachers and, by extension, their languages’
(V. Edwards, 2004: 124).
Mother tongues unrewarded and requiring extra payment
Parents agreed that matters such as payment and timing could be taken to
the management, as there may be a chance of changing them. They appeared
to believe that a matter such as giving mother tongues the same status in the
IBMYP as in the Diploma Programme would be ‘too difcult’. Having the
programme made a part of the regular curriculum is to do with perception,
on the part of both the school management and parents; for the latter, there
is an unwillingness to be activists for a cause. The students who want to
play football after school are understandably irked when, after being in
the classroom all day, they have to spend another two hours learning their
mother tongue while their peers are outside on the eld.
The issue of the IBMYP is important from a motivational point of
view. There is no doubt that the main reason that many students take their
mother tongue in the IBDP is to get certication, an IB Diploma, for which
a language is required. A standard issuing of similar certication in the
MYP would be a major benet and would surely increase the numbers of
students taking mother-tongue classes. At present the procedures for gaining
such certication are far from standard and present complex bureaucratic
obstacles.
Students who did after-school activities gained points for the
community service requirement of the MYP, whereas students who did
mother-tongue classes after school every week, year after year, gained no
points. Students gained points for such activities as sports of all kinds.
Students who studied their mother tongue were giving up leisure time after
29
Characterization of the international school clientele in language matters
school for more academic work, which was tiring, especially for younger
ones; in addition, their parents were paying for these classes. They were
thus disadvantaged in two respects: the programme was not part of the
core programme, and neither was it acknowledged as Community Action
Awareness. This was demotivating for students, and seen as unfair. The
issue had been raised repeatedly with management without success.
Some parents commented that they wanted to follow a plan of
action that gave results. The comments showed the frustrations of parents
concerning the matters discussed in the meetings. They realized that there
were many issues, but wanted to focus on something concrete. However, it
became evident that the sole agenda of one parent was to bring forward his
own issue of the level of the fees for mother-tongue lessons. He suggested
a petition. Other parents mentioned that such matters were ‘difcult’, and
‘not in our hands’; this suggests a blind obedience to authority and an
unwillingness to take on a matter that, whatever perceived obstacles may
lie ahead, is reminiscent of Bourdieu’s insight in Distinction (1984) that
those in privileged classes are unwilling to challenge the authority of the
dominant power. There was a distinct possibility that if parents had made
a concerted effort they could have pressed the issues successfully. In the
event one determined parent followed through with a petition about fees
for mother-tongue classes, which got a negative response in a public forum
later. It might have been more productive to set up a committee of parents
to bring the matter up with the school management. Such procedures,
however, are time-consuming and demanding, and professional parents
chose not to take the initiative.
Change requires pressure on power structures
Ultimately it is about one factor. As Rusbridger writes,
Real change can only follow from citizens informing themselves
and applying pressure. To quote McKibben: ‘This ght, as it took
me too long to gure out, was never going to be settled on the
grounds of justice or reason. We won the argument, but that
didn’t matter: like most ghts it was, and is, about power.’
(Rusbridger, 2015)
Jones (2015) goes further and quotes the nineteenth-century social reformer,
African-American slave turned abolitionist, Frederick Douglass:
‘Power concedes nothing without a demand …. It never did and
it never will.’ In saying this, he concisely summed up an eternal
Maurice Carder
30
truth of social progress. Change is not won through the goodwill
and generosity of those above, but through the struggle and
sacrice of those below.
(Jones, 2015: 312–13)
Any amount of research may show the best model for second language
students, but the complex factors of a privileged class not wishing to go
public with their concerns, various degrees of ignorance on the part of
school directors and boards of governors, and the surging globalization
and marketing trend of the IB, present considerable obstacles. Parents are
unequipped to take up the struggle by virtue of their privileged social status,
and perhaps also by lack of knowledge or sufcient mastery of English.
ESL teachers are likely to be treated as lightweight, given their status in the
curriculum.
SLLs and their parents locked in a culture of silence
The enforced silence of ESL students and their second-language-speaking
parents makes it all too easy for them to be sidelined by educationally
irresponsible decision makers. Freire believed that the Third World is not
a geographical concept but essentially sociopolitical in character (Freire,
1972: 16–17). He was led by a concern for the oppressed, who belong to
‘a culture of silence’. In international schools the second language learners
are in a very real sense those who may be locked into a culture of silence:
they are not uent in the school’s language of instruction, English. This can
lead to a situation similar to that of Freire’s oppressed: ‘a lack of awareness,
absence of self-respect – even a fear of freedom’ (Crotty, 1998: 155). As
Wittgenstein wrote, ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’
(Wittgenstein, 2007: Proposition 5.6). Many parents of these children are
themselves also not uent in English, do not have the knowledge to engage
in critical vigilance of the school’s programmes, and are hampered by the
socially imposed unseemliness of protesting, as they are members of the
international community with its respectable modus operandi.
It is the aim of this book to clarify exactly what is at stake here – the
waste of the potential of large numbers of ESL students – and to appeal
to the consciences of all those with the power to remedy this situation by
following the recommendations given throughout.
31
Chapter 3
ESL students and their
requirements in international
schools: The encroaching
politicization of ESL and MT
provision
International Schools are the scouting parties of educational
globalisation. At a time when population mobility and cross-cultural
contact are at an all-time high in human history, International Schools
are in the vanguard of exploring uncharted territory.
(Cummins, 2008: xi)
In several ways, not asking why-questions is part of ESL tradition.
(Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000: xxii)
Overview
The epigraphs at the head of this chapter can be construed in different ways.
The Cummins quote leads the reader to believe that international schools
are somehow the trailblazers of a new era, holding out the hope that there
will be positive results. The second quote, from the magisterial book on
linguistic human rights by Skutnabb-Kangas, is in fact part of a section
critiquing the trend in ESL and EFL to focus on the business aspects of
English language teaching (ELT). In the present volume, however, because in
many schools ESL barely exists as a powerful – or any kind of – educational
force, our aim is to refocus on ESL as a positive and necessary programme
in middle schools from an educational perspective, not a business one.
International schools vary widely in their structure and size but
one issue links them: the large number of students who are not uent and
literate in English, the language of instruction. Schools have responded
to this issue in various ways over the years, borrowing ideas from the
many national educational systems of English-speaking countries. May,
for example, wrote (1994: 1), ‘The gap between theory and practice in
education is a worrying one’, and added that ‘For many teachers, education
is simply a matter of survival; teaching children as best they can, and with
Maurice Carder
32
what limited time and resources they have at their disposal’ (ibid.), and
‘Recent developments internationally to deskill the teaching profession
have further removed theory from the realms of educational practice’ (ibid.,
quoting Apple, 1986). V. Edwards (2009: 7) writes that ‘decisions about
best practice are sometimes driven more by politics than the evidence of
research’. May (1994: 1) comments that there has been a tendency to simply
‘insert’ minorities into the dominant culture, which leaves the long-standing
hierarchies intact. May also emphasizes that along with cultural pluralism
there has to be structural pluralism.
In England the situation that persists into the present is one in which
‘few of the English language support teachers had any specialist language
training and … such a role “would not always seem the most effective use
of a trained teacher’s time” ([Bourne,] 1989: 108)’ (Monaghan, 2010: 18).
In the UK England and Wales have a separate education system from the
rest of the country. In this book, in examples that refer to the British model,
teachers, or school leaders, the implication will be that they are from the
English education system. This is the model that new international school
directors, coming straight from the English system, are imposing willy-
nilly on schools with well-established ESL programmes, adding insult to
injury by making ESL teachers subservient to SEN. As Creese notes (2005:
143, quoted in Monaghan, 2010: 21) ‘support modes tend to limit EAL
teachers’ abilities to inuence school policies and practices around the needs
of linguistic minority pupils’. More recently, the National Association for
Language Development in the Curriculum (NALDIC, 2014, 2015) has
stated that what is called English as an additional language (EAL), an
inclusive term which subsumes ESL, is not a subject specialism in teacher
training in England. This has the implication that no one is trained in ESL
(EAL), and, furthermore, that no one needs to be trained in ESL, that is,
anyone can teach it.
This is not a model that is relevant or suitable for international
schools, largely private and fee-paying, where all students can be considered
as being on a level socio-economic playing eld, their parents mostly on
professional contracts. The OECD Programme for International Student
Assessment ‘has shown that language and socio-economic backgrounds are
the two factors that determine school achievement most of all’ (Conteh
and Meier, 2014: 2). Therefore, the political machinations which have gone
into decades of the evolution of programmes – or the lack of them – for
ESL students in national systems render them obsolete for international
schools, and instead we need to look at research, and also examples of
good practice, to see how productive, positive models can be instituted.
33
ESL students and their requirements in international schools
In national systems ESL students are categorized across four dimensions:
prociency in English, race and ethnicity, national heritage and culture, and
socio-economic status. All four of these will affect how the students are
treated in school. In international schools the principal factor is language
prociency: the other three dimensions will be naturally subsumed into the
accepted mix of international school students.
Examples of the negative effects of poor policy on ESL students
in international schools around the world follow. They will highlight the
tensions between school leaders and staff with specialist knowledge of the
needs of ESL students. Every attempt has been made to disguise the origins
of these vignettes, as teachers have contributed them on condition that they
remain anonymous, for fear of reprisals – a very real and justiable fear
– but the stories are so commonplace that each incident could probably
be attested to by ESL teachers in many international schools. The only
recourse that professional ESL teachers have in the face of institutional
poor practice is their own professionalism. The parents of these students
also politely trust that the school leadership will be handling the language
aspects of their children’s education according to the latest research. The
milieu in which the parents move makes it improper to be overly vociferous
in criticism of schools’ programmes for ESL.
Linguistically responsive models
As long ago as 2005, it was announced that ‘The majority of students in
international schools are non-native speakers of English. In the annual
statistical survey, 297 schools with a total enrolment of 161,863 indicated
that over half the student population (56%) spoke “English as an additional
language”. Of these, 198 schools (67%) had 50% or more such students
while only 21 schools had fewer than 10 per cent EAL speakers. In 18
schools none of the students spoke English as a rst language’ (ESL Gazette,
2005). Since that time the numbers of ESL students have risen sharply.
In many international schools there are about 25 per cent native
speakers of English, 25 per cent speakers of the host-country language,
and 50 per cent speakers of other languages, some students being single
speakers of their language. Forward-looking international schools are
beginning to recognize that if ESL students are to gain maximum benet
from the curriculum it is important to institute, as described in detail by
Carder (2007a),
● an English as a second language programme (L2 literacy);
Maurice Carder
34
● a CPD programme of linguistic and cultural awareness strategies for
all staff and management; and
● a mother-tongue programme (L1 literacy).
The rst element aims to provide students not uent in English with the
skills necessary to follow the entire curriculum with increasing success. It
has been shown that this process can take ve to seven years in a good
programme (Crawford and Krashen, 2007; Thomas and Collier, 1997). The
second element can be provided in the form of a professionally designed
course such as TESMC (https://lexised.com, accessed 13 February 2018),
through which school staff receive regular training. The third element comes
in the form of arranging for every child to receive instruction in their mother
tongue: research has given a clear message that maintaining and developing
uency in the mother tongue enhances uency in English, and that students
of middle-school age new to English transfer the subject knowledge they
already have from their mother tongue (August and Shanahan, 2008;
Cummins, 2001c; Rolstad et al., 2005; Thomas and Collier, 2002). An
overview of the most appropriate programmes is given in Carder (2007a),
and strategies for content teachers can be found in Mertin (2013) and T.
Chadwick (2012).
Scanlan and López state that
the goal of crafting effective and inclusive service delivery for CLD
[culturally and linguistically diverse] students is widely espoused
yet infrequently attained. Though work always will remain to
strengthen the knowledge base for reaching this goal, school
leaders cannot claim that empirical research is ambiguous about
the means toward this end. The way is clear: Cultivate language
prociency, provide access to high-quality teaching and learning,
and promote the sociocultural integration of all students.
(Scanlan and López, 2012: 615–16)
Unfortunately, some researchers can paint a confusing picture by stating at
conferences and presentations that ‘there is no one-size-ts-all programme
for ESL students’, a scenario that can be wilfully misinterpreted and misused
by school leaders. Researchers provide invaluable facts about language
learning, but when presenting their hard-won data to the public often do
not foresee the reality of leadership response and how it impacts on students
and teachers.
The aim of relating the incidents which follow is to show how the
knowledge of school leaders about the needs and potential of ELLs has not
35
ESL students and their requirements in international schools
kept pace with latest research and good practice, and is too often based
on norms in national systems. Since ‘racism and linguistic intolerance have
often been closely linked’ (Wiley and Wright, 2004: 145), school leaders
need to ponder deeply their provision of language programmes for ESL
students: racism is strongly rebutted and seen as shameful; linguistic
intolerance or lack of equality of provision – linguicism – needs to be seen
in the same light. In addition, the detrimental effects of rulings that impede
bilingualism and biliteracy have been comprehensively documented (Y.G.
Butler et al., 2000; Rolstad et al., 2005). The aim is not to disparage the
hard work of dedicated school heads but rather to show that they are often
unaware, because of the national backgrounds they come from, of the
harm that can come to ESL students from misguided practices. (Ideally, of
course, models of good practice for ESL students should be instituted in
national systems as well, but that mammoth issue is not the subject of the
present book. In the European Union (EU), ‘Only in AT and DK [Austria
and Denmark] does initial teacher education systematically prepare all
prospective teachers for their role in facilitating the integration of students
from migrant backgrounds’ (European Commission, 2017: 94). Through
such a realization, and subsequent implementation of good models, the
remarkable potential of ESL students can be truly developed, and schools
can only benet.
ESL staff and programme structure affected by
management
School directors’ ignorance of SL issues impacts negatively on
meaningful second language programmes and their stafng
The following events may appear routine to seasoned international
school leaders, but this only highlights the complacency and ignorance
concerning pedagogical programmes for ESL students which can arise from
an uninformed approach. Training and qualications in second language
issues should be seen as essential for all those involved with international
education, and continuing professional development should be the aim: a
one-off six-week course will not sufce.
What follows are examples of what, unfortunately, has become
accepted practice, submitted to me by SL teachers in international schools
around the world on condition of anonymity.
A book was published for international school leaders which had
a section on ‘the particular problems of those of your students
who are being educated in a language other than their mother
Maurice Carder
36
tongue’. The nature of this wording immediately falls into the
trap of dening certain students as a problem, and subscribes
to a decit model for these students. As long as ESL students
are seen as a problem and not as potential successes they will be
demotivated.
In one large international school, a new director from England was greatly
surprised to discover that all the members of the ESL department had MAs
in applied linguistics or ESL-related elds, as he was used to a scenario
where ESL teachers were mostly unqualied assistants. In the same school a
retiring head of the ESL department reported that she had really enjoyed the
pedagogical aspects of her job, but ‘simply could not face having to educate
another director about the ESL issue’. These examples show the opposed
poles of those involved with and responsible for ESL students, and those
who have the power to shape provision for them.
An ESL teacher at an ECIS recruiting fair was informed by a
school leader that ‘a qualied ESL teacher is not very high on the
lists of many directors’ priorities’. Many ESL department heads
face a situation where ESL is seen as a safe area for teachers who
cannot cope, and also as a suitable position for the unqualied
wives of directors and teachers; in one school an ESL department
was made to change its name to EAL as it was considered more
modern although all the ESL teachers were against it.
International school leaders may bring in consultants who recommend
the abolition of ESL departments. This appears on the surface to be
educationally progressive and to aim for the second language aspect of
ESL students’ education to be undertaken by mainstream staff, and it often
brings in the buzzword ‘inclusion’. However, content staff frequently do
not have the training to do this; such training is not often done (Crawford
and Krashen, 2007: 45), and ESL departments are essential to provide the
knowledge required for teaching beginning and intermediate ESL students,
and spread their expertise throughout the teaching staff and management.
An experienced ESL teacher’s response to these factors was:
It seems that in international schools anyone can become a
manager and then make decisions which may have wide-ranging
negative effects on second language programmes and stafng,
and there is no recourse.
37
ESL students and their requirements in international schools
One recourse is for teachers to become more empowered by following
the precepts of Goodson and Hargreaves (1996) for building their own
professionalism, laid out in detail later in this book.
The need for ESL to be recognized as a distinct discipline
An apparently recurring event is this:
An experienced and qualied ESL teacher was placed under the
school’s English department. In spite of lengthy discussions of
how he could develop a better programme for ELLs by heading
a separate department, the head of English, who was English
(British), would not allow this and the school director deferred
to her. The ESL teacher persevered for a year but then left the
school, nding the conditions unworkable.
This is not a unique example. English departments often presume that they
have the right to take care of all things to do with English. Unaware school
principals may go along with this. In fact, English department teachers are
rarely, if ever, trained in linguistics, bilingualism or ELT, and ESL teachers
are the experts who should be deferred to. As Harper et al. note:
the expertise and roles of EAL teachers cannot be subsumed
by teachers of English language arts, reading, or other subjects.
Rather, EAL teachers and other content area teachers must
coordinate their distinct, complementary roles to provide a
coherent curriculum and comprehensible instruction.
(Harper et al., 2010: 91)
Becher and Trowler point out: ‘It often happens that adjoining disciplinary
groups lay claim to the same pieces of intellectual territory’ (Becher and
Trowler, 2001: 60).
This example also reveals the amount of politics that often exists in
international schools, and about which new school directors, fresh from less
political settings in their home countries – or at least with a different type of
politics – have scant understanding. As Pedalino Porter commented (1990:
121), ‘political motives play a more decisive part than considerations of
good education in the language eld’.
There are several issues surrounding the matter of power in schools,
and who controls it. English departments often believe they have the
power to control a curricular area even though none of the teachers in
such departments have any training or qualications in second language
acquisition or bilingualism. ESL department members may have MAs in
Maurice Carder
38
these areas, but even so an ESL department is often perceived in a school as
having low status, certainly lower than the English department.
Lack of experience of school directors, and ambition
versus ability
A further factor is the increasing lack of experience of school directors. A
letter written by Carl Gavin, from Bangkok, relates:
My wife and I left UK in 1999 to embark upon a teaching career
in international schools. Over the past 16 years the average age
of headteachers has fallen with every school that we move to.
These days teachers tend to join the profession in order to
become a head in the shortest possible time and therefore earn
more, more quickly. A modern career progression would be:
degree, PGCE [Postgraduate Certicate in Education], masters
degree in international education (online course, done while
teaching). All of the above will normally be completed within
ve or six years. These teachers then spend a short amount of
time as teachers, carrying out a pastoral role and an academic
management role, and will then apply for senior management
jobs. All of a sudden most managers are seemingly about 30 years
old with little hands-on experience but with a CV that states that
they have ‘done it all’.
(Gavin, 2015)
I can back up these developments from my own experience. For example,
when I was acting as vice-chair of an accreditation visit to a school in Latin
America, the head and assistant head of the school, apparently seeing me as
an inuential person in the world of international schools, bombarded me
with enquiries about the best places to go to further their careers, and how
I could help. This was at the very beginning of the visit. A Spanish writer
sums up such go-getting zeal:
His life seemed destined for the bitter, grey existence of
mediocrities whom God, in his innite cruelty, has endowed with
delusions of grandeur and a boundless ambition far exceeding
their talents.
(Ruiz Zafón, 2013: 68–9)
39
ESL students and their requirements in international schools
How national systems permeate thinking on ESL
An international school requested advice on the following points:
● The best ways to structure EAL support;
● Advice on supporting EAL students with thelanguageof their academic
subjects (rather than teaching them the content);
● How to make the most of in-class support with EAL students;
● Advice on the best resources, apps and materials to use with CLIL/
subject support;
● Supporting students who are EAL and SEN, or EAL and low-ability,
or EAL and AGT.
These points all show how the school has not only taken the vocabulary of
second language delivery from England – ‘EAL’, ‘support’ – but is evidently
under the impression that they have the only possible model. They ask for
the best ways to structure support, not the best ways to provide successful
and meaningful ESL instruction; they want to know ‘how to make the
most of in-class support with EAL students’, with no suggestion that such
a model may not be the most appropriate in an international school; and
they ask how to ‘support students who are both EAL and SEN/EAL’. On
the website of the school in question the secondary school departments are
listed, but the EAL teachers are listed under EAL support. Parents also have
to pay extra for EAL classes; the potential consequences of such practice are
pointed out below.
Fees at these schools are high, and there are usually large numbers
of SL students. Parents are often ignorant of the many issues surrounding
education for children who do not speak the language of instruction of the
school, and will probably be condent that a British international school
will have professional second language programmes in place. The request
for advice from the above school and the wholesale importation of the
British EAL model suggest that this may not be the case.
To counter the national support model that incoming school leaders
may bring from England, below is a summary of Leung’s comprehensive
analysis and searching questions in order to show that it is unlikely that the
questions he poses will, or perhaps even can, be answered in a satisfactory
manner. The questions are addressed to the practices of schools and content
teachers (named as mainstream teachers) in their treatment of SL students.
1. What is the variety of backgrounds of pupils in the school, and are
teaching approaches, teacher expectation and task organization
responsive to this variety?
Maurice Carder
40
2. Is the distinction between language development and cognitive/academic
ability clearly understood at school policy level and translated into
practice accordingly?
3. Does a school acknowledge and publicly display second language
pupils’ achievement in culturally and linguistically sensitive ways?
4. Do teachers in the mainstream (i.e. content) classroom provide
a. content-based comprehensible input?
b. opportunity to use language appropriately for the full range of
naturally occurring purposes, such as recounting an experience,
justifying a decision, describing a process and giving instructions?
c. opportunities for the pupils to receive feedback on appropriate
language use and to act on such feedback?
5. What proportion of class time is devoted to group work? Is group work
organized with explicit reference to participant role, responsibility and
task outcome in a way that is sensitive to pupil needs?
6. Is the language requirement of the mainstream (i.e. content) task clearly
understood by the content teachers?
7. Does the content teacher consider ways of organizing tasks for both
language and content goals, according to some common agenda?
8. Is there any evidence of a common (language-content) agenda in
teachers’ experiences of teacher training and professional development?
9. Is there any evidence of systematic task-based assessment being
conducted in the mainstream context?
10. Is there a conscious recognition of what tasks are being used?
11. When the suitability of a task is being established,
a. do the pupils have the necessary background content and language
knowledge and skills to understand and engage with the task?
b. are the learning activities involved familiar to the pupils? (Do they
know what to do?)
c. are the learning activities appropriately presented and organized to
promote the desired understanding and sharing of thinking (in the
case of a collaborative task)?
d. does the language use required to perform the task contribute to the
pupils’ language development?
(adapted from Leung, 2001: 177–98)
This summary does not do justice to the seven pages of carefully argued
educational practice that these eleven points are abstracted from, but it
is hoped that it will serve to illustrate how much is expected of schools
and content teachers when they cater for ESL students’ needs. Clearly the
41
ESL students and their requirements in international schools
answer to many, if not most, of the questions posed will be negative. These
questions need to be asked in every international school, of every content
teacher. Recruitment policies need to ensure that only suitably qualied and
trained teachers are employed, who can honestly report that they follow the
guidelines implied by Leung’s evaluative questions. This of course implies
that those recruiting new staff also understand the importance of such good
practice for the educational success of ESL students.
More examples from international schools, showing the
low status of ESL teachers
Both at recruitment level and within schools, ESL teachers are
regularly downgraded
In one international school, an ESL teacher was told by the principal of
a large international school that ‘the last thing directors are looking for
at recruitment fairs is qualied ESL teachers’. At a recent conference for
international school teachers there was a steady stream of ESL teachers
asking for advice, as their directors were reducing their status, relegating
them to smaller rooms and even physically pushing them into mainstream
classrooms, saying ‘this is where you should be’. The ignorance surrounding
the true needs of ESL students seems to be reaching new depths.
Another example: in a well-established international school the
entire ESL department of ten teachers were told by their new director, a
monolingual-English North American, that in future they would be seen as
language support, and not as an academic department. They were relegated
to a lower status, with a coordinator instead of a head of department, and
correspondingly lower pay. Their teaching rooms were also downgraded.
When they attempted to have a discussion with the director he told them,
‘My decision is made, there will be no discussion’. This sort of behaviour
will have unpredictable, lasting effects on SLLs as the position and status
of the ESL teachers will reect on the status of the students, allowing a
perception throughout the school that ESL students are not important,
which in turn will affect their learning potential (see Carder, 2014a, for
more examples of such practice).
A group of teachers reported:
In a large international school with a well-established ESL
programme the new, British director downgraded the status of
the department to that of language support, thus undoing years
of consistent effort to create a model which would demonstrate
to ESL students that their teachers were responsible for a
Maurice Carder
42
professional programme of instruction which would also provide
a sense of equity for the students themselves, thereby empowering
them. Previously with the status of a full secondary department
they are now in a support programme, as if ESL students’ needs
are not academic but only emotional.
This follows the model in England, where ESL students and teachers have
low status and academic standing. The inuence from the English system
is clear, as the word ‘additional’ has been added: the term EAL was rst
proposed in England by Rampton (1997), as various government edicts,
produced as a result of fears of allegations of racism over separate ESL
classes, had tainted the use of the term ESL. The school website now reads
‘the programmes for students who have English as a second or additional
language’, a tautology, of course, as ‘second’ and ‘additional’ describe
the same learning process: that required to learn a language for the entire
curriculum. It is possible that the new status has been given in order to t
in with the IB’s use of ‘language support’ on its website. The director of
the school involved commented that the IB was ‘moving forward’ in its
treatment of SL issues, showing his ignorance of the matters at stake and
also the almost obsessive need of some school principals to be positive and
uncritical about any initiative undertaken by a higher body. This is in spite
of the IB’s stated aim of encouraging students to develop critical thinking in
all the subjects they study, while denying that power to staff.
The extent to which school leaders are ignorant of the circumstances
relating to the status of ESL in their own countries can be seen from the
following situation, from a well-established, prestigious international
school in Europe, with a British leadership team. A parent wished to
work as a substitute teacher in the ESL department: she had a master’s in
TESOL. The school insisted that she have a teaching qualication, which
she did not possess. She was referred to the online facility for doing such a
course in England. However, in England there is no requirement for ESL/
EAL teachers to be qualied as teachers, and thus no component in the
PGCE course that she could follow, the nearest equivalent being ‘foreign
languages’. Thus a British-run school was demanding a qualication from a
well-qualied ESL professional that was not only not required in England,
but was not available.
Negative impact of this downgrading on SL students’ access to
professional programmes
In one school a well-established ESL department was attempting to develop
more content-focused classes in humanities subjects. This initiative was
43
ESL students and their requirements in international schools
strongly supported by the humanities department, and is strongly supported
by research on good practice (T. Chadwick, 2012; Schecter and Cummins,
2003; Wolff, 2003). However, it was rejected by the school management,
who decided that the Humanities teachers were just trying to have smaller
classes, off-loading students to the ESL department.
This reveals both the cynicism of management and their lack of
knowledge of sheltered instruction (see Echevarría and Graves, 2014).
Many school leaders reject the model of ESL students in the middle
school having separate classes, as this offends their basic educational
principle of not allowing ‘tracking’ or ‘streaming’, that is to say providing
separate classes for students of different ability. However, students with no
knowledge of English learn very little in a class taught entirely in English to
native speakers, especially when the teacher has little or no understanding
of second language pedagogy. Models of good instruction for middle-school
ESL students have been published by experts in the eld (for example,
Crawford and Krashen, 2007; Schecter and Cummins, 2003). In maths
classes, grouping for different abilities is routine.
An ESL professional on the failure of valid recruitment policy
Here a dedicated ESL teacher, with a well-developed and conceptualized
middle-school ESL programme, expresses his frustration, after many years
of trying:
The only thing missing [in the excellent ESL programme] is for
the admin to have the gumption to tell new recruits that they
must attend mandatory sessions in ESL pedagogy. I gave up that
ght as hopeless a while ago – but it still distresses me how some
teachers can be unsympathetic to or unknowledgeable about the
needs of ESL students.
Incoming school director reduces ESL stafng because groups
are smaller
This event shows a lack of awareness of the needs of students who are
developing their language-learning skills:
A new director (British) reduced the number of staff for ESL
without any consultation with the head of the ESL department.
His decision was entirely arbitrary, based on a cursory look at
group sizes. ESL classes are necessarily smaller than content
classes as individual students benet from more individual focus.
The director saw ESL as coming under the heading of ‘support
Maurice Carder
44
services’, the CIS and British term, and it was therefore an easy
area to cut in order to balance the budget. No other subjects
received any cuts. As a result of his decision, middle-school ESL
beginners were sent to mainstream content classes where they
understood next to nothing, and were frequently in tears.
Research evidence that smaller class sizes benet SLLs comes from Özerk:
by creating rich possibilities for teacher–student verbal interaction
and curriculum-oriented academic questioning, small classes can
provide conditions for better academic performance in content
area subjects … for bilingual students in general and bilingual
girls in particular than do large classes.
(Özerk, 2001: 353)
A similar example is this, from the head of an ESL department in an
international school:
I hope your book [Carder, 2007a] might give us some ammunition
to set up a proper ESL department again next year, with its own
base and specialist ESL teachers. We have had this in the past, but
each director has his own priorities and our present incumbent
sees ESL as something which gets cut when you are short of
teaching units.
SLLs affected by uninformed policies concerning
pedagogical programmes for SL students
Linguicism in action
Two ESL teachers in an international school in the EU (European Union)
reported that there was a large sign at the school entrance that stated, ‘You
are now entering an English-only zone’. Speaking any other language was
discouraged, which discriminated against all speakers of other languages,
gave students a sense of shame about their own language, and detracted
from any efforts made by ESL staff to encourage development in students’
mother tongues.
Cummins wrote (2000: 13), ‘In the vacuum created by the absence
of any proactive validation of their linguistic talents and accomplishments,
bilingual students’ identities become infested with shame’. If there was
a sign saying ‘Only white children may proceed beyond this point’ there
would be outrage, as racism is rightly condemned; ‘linguicism’, however, is
allowed, as can be seen in this example:
45
ESL students and their requirements in international schools
In an international school a teacher gave two students detention
for speaking in their mother tongue, the national language of the
country, as it was against school policy.
NNESTs
Here is an example of teachers ‘mobbing’ colleagues:
In one international school, ESL teachers who themselves were
speakers of English as a second language were intimidated by
other staff, suggestions being made that they could not perform
their job properly.
In fact, ESL teachers who have learned English as a second language often
have greater insights and empathy in teaching SLLs than mother-tongue
English teachers. They have been through the same process themselves, and
now belong to the majority of speakers of English worldwide, those who
speak it as a second language. They are also reported as speaking more
clearly. As Shin surmises,
Despite a great deal of training, non-native speaker teachers may
be viewed as inadequate language teachers because they often
lack native speaker competence in the target language and culture.
However, non-native speaker teachers possess distinct advantages
over native speakers including a deeper understanding of learners’
rst languages and an ability to explain second language features
in ways that students can understand.
(Shin, 2008: 57)
Cherng and Halpin carried out research on students’ perceptions of minority
versus white teachers in the USA. They found that students perceived
minority teachers more favourably than white teachers, and concluded that
their ndings underscored the importance of minority teacher recruitment
and retention. They point out that ‘[a]n overwhelmingly White teaching
force is working with a majority non-White student population’ (Cherng and
Halpin, 2016: 407), that minority teachers ‘are more multiculturally aware
than their White peers and that higher levels of multicultural awareness are
linked to better classroom environments’ (ibid.: 416). They add:
It also may be the case that minority teachers are particularly
well perceived by minority students because minority teachers
may have personal experience navigating racial stereotypes
about academic achievement and can equip students to combat
Maurice Carder
46
these stereotypes. And this rapport, built on positive student
perceptions of teachers, might contribute to academic success for
students.
(ibid.)
They conclude that their ndings attest to the importance of having a
diverse teaching staff: research has shown that students’ perceptions of
teachers are associated with motivation and achievement. Ultimately, they
suggest, minority teachers are often able to form strong ties with students,
and can thus help to empower youth of all backgrounds. Though they do
not specically focus on language, the overall message is clear.
At the annual international IATEFL conference in Birmingham in
April 2016, Silvana Richardson, the head of teacher development at the Bell
Foundation, gave a plenary devoted entirely to the issue of NNESTs. As she
mentions in her presentation:
What quality am I emphasizing by saying that I am a NON-
Native English Speaking Teacher?
How is asserting what we are by negating what we are not a
meaningful and constructive way of referring to ourselves?
Why do we still refer to an aspect of the professional identity of
over 80% of the teachers of English in the world as a ‘NON’?
How is it possible that it is still a legitimate term in our
professional discourse in 2016?
(S.Richardson, 2016)
In the following slides and in her talk she goes into depth to respond to
these questions, with the clear message that
As a profession, we need to move beyond the unhelpful and
pernicious dichotomy, and conceptually stop separating
professionals into different camps. In many cases, this absolute
division is articial, given the global mobility of many ELT
professionals, and how some of us live in other countries for long
periods of time.
(ibid.)
International schools are ideally placed to recruit local professional ESL
teachers, who are well qualied for the job.
47
ESL students and their requirements in international schools
The downside of charging extra for ESL
In one international school the management wanted to charge families for
ESL ‘support’, thereby stigmatizing them.
Nineteen reasons why such a policy is counterproductive are listed
in Carder (2007a):
● The term ‘international’ attached to a school may imply that a distinct
proportion of the student population will be ESL speakers; it is thus
possible to assume that a programme for their language development
in English should be included in the school fees.
● The majority of students in International Schools are now L2 speakers
of English (ESL Gazette, August 2004). Rather than charging extra
for ESL classes, it is more important to have a Language Policy to
ensure that all students are challenged appropriately in their various
languages.
● Invariably Mother Tongue classes are paid for in addition to school
fees. However, those in ESL classes are by denition those who have
a Mother Tongue other than English. They would therefore be paying
twice if ESL classes cost extra. This might lead to nancial difculties,
a reluctance to take Mother Tongue classes, pressure to leave ESL, and
a downward spiral to subtractive bilingualism.
● An extra charge may take advantage of a group already at a
disadvantage, i.e. ESL parents who are often less vocal in arguing
for a cause.
● ESL students do not have an educational problem; they are engaged in
acquiring academic prociency in another language, which generally
takes many years to achieve.
● An extra charge would ignore the essentially long-term nature of
second language acquisition, where academic prociency is the goal
and invariably takes a long time.
● The low self-esteem which some ESL learners are naturally subject to
may be reinforced by an extra charge for ESL lessons.
● It can be argued that ESL students actually receive less instruction
overall, as they ‘miss time’ in mainstream subjects while they attend
ESL classes.
● Pressure on ESL students will increase. Parents are likely to be unhappy
about the cost of instruction and pressure their children for unrealistic
academic and linguistic progress.
● This in turn may lead to more English being spoken at home by
parents who are not procient in English at an academic level. This
Maurice Carder
48
may contribute to the detriment of students’ progress in English and
also to their cognitive development in general.
● Such pressure would also reduce the effectiveness of ESL instruction
as students under strain generally learn less effectively, and they
will leave the ESL programme more quickly than advisable due to
parental pressure. Both these factors may well have a negative impact
on long-term academic achievement, and hence the school’s academic
reputation.
● Where ESL fees are charged, ESL teachers are put in the difcult
position in parent–teacher conferences of having to focus on what a
student cannot do in order to provide a rationale for their remaining
in ESL, rather than giving a positive slant on their progress.
● In international education, fees are relatively high compared with
alternatives – state schools, etc. Adding to these costs is likely to reduce
the client base of an International School, not increase it.
● Extra charges may be seen as a form of discrimination against speakers
of other languages and reect non-inclusivity or even language
prejudice. The diversity of a school population which is multilingual,
and thus consists predominantly of second language learners, brings
linguistic and cultural richness.
● A negative image of ESL would be presented; ESL students would be
seen as a group placing a burden on the school, which in return would
put more pressure on those students and their parents.
● A school mission statement may say that it treats each learner as an
individual and caters to each individual’s needs. It would be seen as
contradictory if ESL learners’ needs require extra payment; they are
needs which must be met before these students can have full access to
the curriculum and are therefore routine in an International School.
(Carder, 2007a: 182–4)
An example of a school showing ignorance of good educational practice for
developing bilinguals is as follows. In an international school new parents of
young children had to sign a form stating that they would speak English at
home (where the family previously all spoke Spanish, their mother tongue)
and agreeing that if their children had not made sufcient progress in English
within a year they would have to take their children out of the school.
Such policies show a distressing lack of understanding of SLA,
and bring to mind right-wing demands in certain countries in Europe
that immigrants should only speak the host-country language at home. It
is perhaps an example of how members of the international community,
49
ESL students and their requirements in international schools
largely well-off and educated, are subject to polices originating from a
conservative milieu that they may well have been sympathetic to in their
own countries, but which are now backring on them. This highlights a
particularly bizarre paradox of international schools: all the parents are
from a high socio-economic bracket, but the ones who do not have good
English, or whose children do not, are subjected to the humiliation of being
treated to policies devised over decades for immigrants.
Lack of effective scrutiny of language ability and its effects
In one international school an ESL teacher was doing reading records to pre-
assess a group of grade-6 ESL students. A Korean boy was reading one of
the Lord of the Rings books. He read uently and with full comprehension
and no Korean accent, so he was asked how he could read so well in English.
He said Korean wasn’t his rst language and that neither he nor his parents
spoke Korean. He had been put in ESL simply because of his nationality.
This may be seen as a simple mistake, but reveals that comprehensive
language and literacy screening for all new students, essential in an
international school, was not being carried out.
An Israeli girl with only conversational English was given a 35-page
humanities hand-out to read and then answer questions on. When the ESL
teacher found out about it the girl had already begun to try to read three
pages on her own. Over the top of every other word was a translation
written by her in Hebrew. When asked how long it had taken her to get that
far she replied, ‘About six hours’. The teacher went to the humanities head
and pointed out what the student was having to cope with. However, that
person ignored the issue.
This girl, a top student in Israel, was trying out the very good learning
strategies that she had honed in an Israeli school, but she was failing and
was completely confused as to why. This scenario encapsulates the handing
out of ‘one-size-ts-all’ documents, which should no longer be acceptable
but still takes place in many accredited international schools. It is similar
to an incident in which a grade-6 teacher gave an ESL student a document
about God being ‘incorporeal’. When another teacher was shown the hand-
out he said, ‘Even I can’t understand it’.
An extreme example of leadership ignorance
In an international school an ESL teacher, along with her entire
class of ESL students, was physically pushed by the director into
the mainstream classroom, and told ‘this is what you will do:
Maurice Carder
50
you will not teach separately; you will support the mainstream
teacher’.
This is an example of the type of activity that has led to many teachers in
international schools leaving ESL and moving to other disciplines, as they
feel unvalued in ESL.
The position and status of the ESL teachers will reect on the status
of the students, allowing a perception throughout the school that ESL
students are not so important, this in turn affecting their self-esteem and
their learning potential.
The education system’s wariness of segregation along racial and
language lines, crucial for the future development of second language
provision, is apparent from this extract from the UK Ministry of Education:
As far as the school is concerned, whenever it is desired to treat
immigrant children in a rather different way from our own
children, for example by putting them in a special class for
intensive English teaching, the parents should be briefed as fully
as possible about the school’s purposes; otherwise it may be cited
as an example of racial discrimination.
(Ministry of Education, 1963: 9, quoted in Leung and Franson,
2001a: 158; emphasis added)
Support is the currently preferred model in England, and has evolved over
many decades of political interference over fears of accusations of racism,
by separating students. Issues concerned with ESL teaching had become
political and ideological, focusing on race, not language-learning needs.
In schools in England language support teachers come under the
umbrella of special educational needs departments. The negative effects of
treating ESL students as SEN students have been documented throughout
the literature (e.g. Cummins, 1984). Leung and Franson comment:
As a curriculum area ESL has not been allowed a distinct
discipline status; there are no ESL curriculum specications and
no national ESL scale for assessment. In the past few years the
funding for ESL has been reduced repeatedly and the cuts have
always been justied on nancial grounds. These can be seen
as indicators which point to ESL’s loss of academic status and
curriculum value in the ofcial view, and with it the privilege to
argue for its protection and development.
(Leung and Franson, 2001a: 163–4)
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ESL students and their requirements in international schools
This mirrors the view of Lo Bianco, who argued:
ESL learning cannot be left entirely to incidental, indirect,
inductive or implicit acquisitional processes. … Whatever
practices are favoured in any case they all derive from the trained
expertise of the ESL specialist.
(Lo Bianco, 1998: 1, quoted in Davison, 2001a: 28)
ESL professionals in Australia continued to resist any tendencies to cut
stafng and programmes for ESL students, and argued that ESL programming
is necessarily complex. It involves interrelated decisions about curriculum
focus, rst language input, modes of delivery, learner groupings, and teacher
roles. It is also assumed that ESL learners will require regular and intensive
small group work with qualied and experienced ESL specialists (Davison,
2001b: 31, 34).
The British model had consequences for international schools: in
2002 the CIS reallocated ESL and put it in the same section as SEN; in 2006
the IB devised a new post of second-language-learning specialist, placing
the appointee in the SEN section; she eventually gained separate status.
International schools in Europe are more affected by the proximity of the
British experience and many ESL teachers in international schools in Europe
are British, and bring with them the British experience. The result is often a
docile acceptance that ESL will not be seen as a separate discipline, and will
be subsumed under the SEN umbrella.
Insights into a SL student’s perceptions
This subsection relates how one student felt about her language development,
and how it affected her (from Carder, 2008b):
Maria (not her real name) begins by saying that her mother
tongue is Spanish, and she came to this large, international school
in Grade 11, so is in her second and nal year. Before that all her
schooling had been in Spanish. She announced that this was her
rst year of being ‘bilingual’, which she understood as meaning ‘I
can communicate, I can say what I’m feeling, I can express myself
completely, I can write, I can read, and if I feel angry I can say
everything I feel’. Asked why she felt angry, she replied ‘I am a
very explosive person and if someone did something bad to me
I feel that I have to tell people how I am feeling so they change
what they have made wrong.’ Asked if not being uent in English
made her feel lost, she said ‘Yeah, I feel lost. At the beginning
when I came I was really shy because I didn’t know how to talk
Maurice Carder
52
so I was afraid of making mistakes and people make fun of me,
but now with time I got more language and I can talk and say
whatever I want.’
Her mother tongue is Spanish, and interestingly she says that she
is now ‘bilingual’ and this may imply that she considers English
has reached equivalence with Spanish as a language of function,
though this is questionable. Expression is obviously important for
her, as is self-esteem, shown by her declaration that she doesn’t
like others to make fun of her mistakes.
Maria had been an excellent student at her last school, so when
asked ‘how does that make you feel, from being a really good
student and you come to a school where you suddenly realize
that the language is going to be the barrier?’, she answered ‘That
was terrible for me. I cried many days because of that, because in
my country when I was there I was the fth student in the entire
school, I got scholarships, all the teachers loved me, I had friends,
I could teach everyone if they need help, now maybe I know this
already but I don’t know the language, so it was really hard.’
Asked if she had now overcome these factors, she answered ‘Yes
and no. Because when I need to read something for Physics or
for Design Technology there’re still words that I don’t use every
single day so I don’t get the real meaning in my mind, so I kind of
know what they mean but maybe I don’t use it in the proper way.
I am a really really good writer in my language, I can write poetry
and I can do songs and all of that, but when I try in English it’s
so hard.’
(Carder, 2008b: 57–60)
Here she shows more of what it is like to be a new student in a new language.
From being a high yer she has had to adapt. She has literacy in Spanish to
an advanced level, and has realized that gaining CALP skills and being able
to write in a specic register require more time and work. She has also had to
accept that her identity will have to be re-established. She had been used to
being surrounded by friends and respected as one of the best students in the
school. At this school she is a student with limited English skills among a
student body of high yers in English; this has affected her deeply.
Asked if she was keeping up her Spanish, she replied:
That’s a problem, because I’m talking in English the whole day
most of the time, I spend most of my day reading, talking or doing
53
ESL students and their requirements in international schools
things in English and if I talk at home basically I say ‘Hi mum,
how are you, how was your day?’; I go to my room and start
to do homeworks in English, then I go on-line, talk in English,
I also talk in Spanish with some friends, but then I got the word
in English but I don’t get really quickly the word to express that
in Spanish, so my mother is like ‘you have been talking Spanish
for all your life, what is wrong with you?’ and I’m feel so bad
about it. She added ‘First of all, I nd it really unfair the fact
that the English-speaking students and the German-speaking
students have four lessons per week of literature mother tongue,
and then I got to pay more [for Spanish] than the school fee that’s
already high and then I got two lessons per week, and I’m doing
IB Spanish A1 High.
(ibid.)
Many fundamental issues of students’ learning identities are revealed in this
long extract. There is again a plea for more time for mother tongue lessons.
It lays bare the fundamental lack of equity across language provision in the
school, even for a language as widely spoken as Spanish. Students studying
English or German are taught within the curriculum; those doing other
languages pay full fees but receive one less language in the curriculum, and
pay extra for their own language. It also reveals the impact of a lack of
understanding on the mother’s part of what it means to be an emerging
bilingual: the mother is only concerned about the failure to nd the right
word in Spanish, and her ‘What is wrong with you?’ can hardly be seen as
supportive.
Asked how she saw English as a part of herself now, she answered:
I feel it’s the best thing ever happened to me because now I can
go wherever I want and if I get lost I can communicate, so I
can go and explain what I want. That’s really important for me
because here I cannot make friends outside the school because
they speak German and I can go to the shopping centre here,
and I can express what I want. As long as English is the world
language, I can make new friends in different countries that open
opportunities for me, I can go to different countries to study.
(ibid.)
Asked why she was taking the school German course she responded:
Because it’s really important for me to express myself, whatever
someone outside of school make something bad to me, I want
Maurice Carder
54
to listen and know what they are saying. Most people in school
speak German and so I nd really annoying, that they talk in
German in front of people who doesn’t understand so they could
make fun of you. That’s another wall when you came because
if they’re going out, in the city as friends and they will talk in
German, but you cannot go with them because you cannot
speak the language, so German is also really important because
I live here.
(ibid.)
Maria values German because it enables her to express herself, and to be
included in a conversation rather than be the object of gossip. She also
values it because she is living in a German-speaking community and wishes
to participate. The German course is not obligatory in grades 11 and 12,
so Maria has made a real effort to learn the language for personal reasons.
There is much to comment on here. Maria is in a school with a
well-developed ESL and mother-tongue programme, but her comments
give valuable insights into the effects of not speaking the languages used
for schooling and social life. Scheff (1988) said that shame was the social
emotion. By ‘shame’ he meant the many emotions to do with feeling which
make a person feel ridiculed, an outsider, inadequate or incompetent, and
vulnerable or insecure. These are all issues that affect Maria, and probably
all ESL students. As Wilkinson and Pickett comment
our sensitivity to shame continues to provide the basis for
conformity throughout adult life. People often nd even the
smallest infringement of social norms in the presence of others
causes so much embarrassment that they are left wishing they
could just disappear, or that the ground would swallow them up.
(Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010: 15)
These are vital issues for schools to be aware of.
Managerialism in the international school context as
relevant to second language issues
Managerial professionalism has had a signicant impact on the work of
teachers because of such factors as restructuring, and the emphasis on
economic efciency. In a review of Education Management in Managerialist
Times (Thrupp and Willmott, 2003), Cambridge (2006) writes about the
increasing dominance of various practices relating to control ‘that have
“precluded debates about the purposes of education beyond preparation
55
ESL students and their requirements in international schools
for the economy” (Tomlinson, 2001: 2)’ (Cambridge, 2006: 369).
The practices include ‘“a language and practice of managerialism, of
accountability, inspection, testing and targets”’ (ibid.). These are coupled
with a focus on outputs and performance rather than inputs, and, crucially,
view organizations as low-trust relationships. He concludes, ‘International
schools and other institutions offering education in an international
context have not been insulated from such developments’ (Cambridge,
2006: 372). These insights neatly tie together the impact of managerialism
on education, on international schools and on valid programmes for ESL
students.
In the book under review, Thrupp and Willmott (2003: 182)
wrote that current ‘school change is fundamentally about extending and
legitimating the neo-liberal managerialization of education, and not about
change (for example, curricular) that promotes real learning and engenders
creativity in pupils and students’. They trace the sources of this trend to
the marketizing reforms of the Thatcher and Reagan era, and see texts on
education management that arose from this mindset as legitimizing the
marketization of education.
Clarke (1995) denes two terms which are the basis of the new
managerialism: universalism and isomorphism. The former is dened as ‘all
organizations being basically the same and needing to pursue efciency,
irrespective of their specic functions’; the latter is dened as ‘the assumption
that commercial organizations are the most naturally occurring form of
coordination, compared with which public sector organisations are deviant’
(quoted in Whitty et al., 1998: 52). Furthermore, Rees (1995) states that
managerial discourses make two claims: ‘that efcient management can
solve any problem; and that practices which are appropriate for the conduct
of private sector enterprises can also be applied to the public sector’.
Taking this argument to what might be seen as an extreme, Pollitt
(1990) describes how the values of managerialism have been promoted as
being universal; therefore, management is inherently good; managers are
heroes; managers should be given the autonomy to manage and others
should accept their authority. Moving on from this position, Clarke and
Newman (1997: 92) believe that the new discourses of managerialism ‘offer
new subject positions and patterns of identication – those of management
as opposed to professionalism’. This suggests, alarmingly, that managers
are outside and above the professional sphere.
Maurice Carder
56
Teachers and democratic professionalism
It seems that the managerial discourse has won out over the democratic
aspirations of teachers when it comes to appropriate curriculum, assessment
and instruction for second language students in international schools. The
power wielded by school leaders, frequently unknowing and biased by their
national education backgrounds when it comes to ensuring professional
programmes for ESL students, is backed up institutionally by the curriculum
bodies and accreditation agencies that set standards. Against such apparent
authority, there is a limit to what teachers can do. To paraphrase Wolin,
teachers of today have been subsumed by the ‘managerial revolution: they
have become jobholders, salaried employees’, hirelings with tenure. The
real problem lies in the fact that for genuine second language pedagogy it
has ‘become a labour of Sisyphus to emancipate itself from the limitation of
teaching as a job’ (R. Wolin, 1992: 2).
ESL teachers are stuck in an endless Groundhog Day of ghting
for the language rights of their students, but there are fewer qualied ESL
teachers, directors are not looking for such teachers in any case, and the
students have been second-language-washed into an amorphous programme
of language learning and support that does not meet their needs.
It is worth noting that research shows that:
Teachers who are given more support are shielded from teaching-
related stress; they experience less burnout and are more likely
to remain in the teaching eld. The support the teachers receive
also inuences their performance; those with greater support are
more motivated, display superior teaching efcacy and are more
willing to adopt new teaching methods. Teachers who believed
they were giving feedback to [ethnic-minority students] supplied
more positive feedback than teachers who believed they were
giving feedback to a white student.
(Harber et al., 2012: 1156)
ESL teachers are generally not given support – often quite the opposite – so
the effects on their performance, and by extension their students’, will be
disabling, not empowering.
Conclusion
Shaw, himself a school principal, writes:
Principals are often tempted to view themselves as experts,
people who have all the answers. Principals who succumb to this
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ESL students and their requirements in international schools
temptation tend to play the role of program implementers, where
curriculum lies within policy documents and can be addressed
through programs that exist in texts.
(Shaw, 2003: 105)
A better solution would be ‘Rather than being the program implementer,
the successful principal practices pedagogical leadership by investing in the
capability development of colleagues and by bringing focus and adherence
to the work of the school’ (ibid.: 106); ‘He [sic] also emphasizes the need for
turning top-down mandates into bottom-up commitment in order to benet
all students’ (ibid.: 99).
The benets of bilingualism and biliteracy – improved metalinguistic
awareness, and considerable cognitive advantages – have been attested
(Adesope et al., 2010; Bialystok, 2010), as has the building of a ‘cognitive
reserve’ (Craik et al., 2010). It is disturbingly paradoxical that the
international community which international schools serve is being harmed
by educational models and personnel, unsuited to international students,
that come from national systems built on political agendas and machinations.
The international community is inuential in the world in many ways; if it
cannot succeed in arranging appropriate, equitable educational provision
for its own children one might be forgiven for asking what other world-
shaping issues it is failing in. Equity on the basis of gender, race and sexual
preference was only achieved after massive movements by those adversely
affected by prejudice. For SL learners there is no possibility of ghting for
their rights as they do not have the language to articulate them; their parents
are usually in the same position, unknowing and not articulate in English.
The entire responsibility of establishing equal language rights therefore falls
on educators: we must ensure that there are comprehensive, successful,
non-peripheral ESL programmes for second language students. Not to do
this would be the educational equivalent of breaking a medical doctor’s
Hippocratic oath.
2
Part Two
Bilingualism and second
language acquisition:
Developments in theory
and research
59
Chapter 4
How the elds of bilingualism
and SLA can guide good
practice for viable SL models
in international schools
Relevant research and other publications
The published research and other writings on bilingualism, SLA and
mothertongue programmes in international schools, is limited, perhaps
because of the mobility of the students, and teachers as potential
researchers, and thus the difculties involved in carrying out long-term
studies. The 1991 edition of the World Yearbook of Education (Jonietz and
Harris) was devoted to international schools. Contributions in this volume
relevant to SL were by Tosi (1991) on language in international education,
and Carder (1991) on ESL programmes. Carder (1995) contributed a
chapter on language issues in international schools to Skutnabb-Kangas’s
Multilingualism for All.
The International Schools Journal Compendium, ESL: Educating
non-native speakers of English in an English-medium international school
(Murphy, 2003), contains all the articles relevant to SLLs for the 22 years
during which Murphy edited the journal (1981–2002). There she writes:
Articles that have appeared regularly in the ISJ through the years,
however, show that in many international schools whose client
base includes large numbers (in many, the majority) of students
whose native language is other than English, such research has
been slow to gain currency, and even slower to produce genuine
change. Even today, many schools organize themselves and create
their curricula as if all their students shared not only the same
language, but the same culture as well.
(ibid.: 9)
In the same Compendium, an article by Carder (1993) discusses the
importance of having a language policy in schools, and of creating ‘biliterate
Maurice Carder
60
bilinguals’. In 1994 Jonietz proposed the term ‘trans-language learners’
to describe how international school students gain or lose prociency in
languages as they travel around the world (Jonietz, 2003).
The other journal which focuses on issues in international education
is the Journal of Research in International Education. Allan, writing about
a research project on cultural dissonance in an international school in
the Netherlands, concludes: ‘Schools must adopt a culturally democratic
pedagogy where different learning styles are recognized in the classroom,
and a non-culture-specic curriculum is delivered in a more pluralist style
which makes it accessible to all pupils’ (Allan, 2002: 82). Both these insights
point towards the development of appropriate teaching styles by subject
teachers.
Carder’s (2007a) book presents the ‘three-programme model’ of
ESL taught through content, alongside a mother-tongue programme and
CPD for staff, as the most viable way of providing an enriching linguistic
framework for multilingual students. Gallagher’s (2008) book devotes a
chapter to ‘Hidden and overt power structures in international schools’
(ibid. 1–34), distinguishing between the often encountered authoritarian
mode of management, and the more desirable authoritative approach, in
which school leaders provide equitable models of language programmes. De
Mejía (2002), in a chapter headed ‘World-wide elite bilingualism’, traces the
history and development of international schools, noting that while many
of the students are in fact bilingual, the emphasis in curricula and school
language provision is monolingual, and often monocultural.
In the International Handbook of English Language Education
edited by Cummins and Davison, Carder (2007b) contributed a chapter
on the ‘Organization of English teaching in international schools’. Carder
(2009a) edited the special issue of NALDIC on International Schools.
The volume on Bilingual and Multilingual Education edited by Abello-
Contesse et al. has a chapter by Carder (2013a) on ‘International school
students: Developing their bilingual potential’, and the compendium edited
by Pearce, International Education and Schools: Moving beyond the rst
40 years, has a chapter by Carder (2013b) on ‘English language teaching:
The change in students’ language from “English only” to “linguistically
diverse”’ and how school leaders can meet this challenge. In two articles
in the International Schools Journal (Carder, 2014b, 2015), Carder traced
the path of ESL provision in international schools over the previous
four decades.
61
How the fields of bilingualism and SLA can guide good practice
Sears’s (2015) book, Second Language Students in English-Medium
Classrooms, gives a good overview of the issues facing mainstream teachers
of ESL students. It contains useful information on how to help ESL students
adjust to their new school in the rst days and weeks.
Mertin’s Breaking through the Language Barrier (2013) contains a
wealth of advice and useful strategies for teachers to use in the classroom
in order to facilitate SL learners’ understanding of subject matter, as well
as chapters on teaching specic subjects. Mertin et al.’s Translanguaging
in the Secondary School (2018) discusses how SLLs can build on previous
knowledge and transfer it from their mother tongues.
Tosi’s PhD thesis (1987) has a section on the language needs of SLLs
in the IBDP. This research led to a working group and to the creation of
language A2 in the IB Diploma Programme. Tosi (1991) pointed out:
In the IB schools as in European Schools, there are three different
language learning processes at work with their multilingual
population:
1. Mother tongue learning for the native as well as the non-
native speakers of the school language;
2. Foreign language learning for the native speakers of the
school language;
3. Second language learning for the non-native speakers of the
school language.
(Tosi, 1991: 94)
Tosi also noted:
The IB emphasis is still on assimilation rather than on diversity
…. [The IB] must rid itself of its Anglocentric cultural and
linguistic biases if schools wish to avoid the criticism of those
governments which are seriously committed to bilingualism and
language equality.
(ibid.: 97–8)
As we have seen, some researchers have labelled linguistic discrimination
(discrimination against students by not providing programmes of instruction
for them in their language) a form of racism, terming it ‘linguicism’ (Fishman,
2009: 426; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000). Fishman, after reecting on the ‘joys
of one’s own language and ethnicity’, states:
[D]emocracy guarantees the right to retain one’s ethnicity, … to
enable one’s children … to develop creatively, and to reach their
Maurice Carder
62
full potential without becoming ethnically inauthentic, colorless,
lifeless, worse than lifeless: nothingness.
(Fishman, 2009: 441)
It is to counter such a dire fate that this book has been written.
Bilingualism: Introductory comments
In 1945 bilingualism was viewed largely negatively. Since then, its study has
become an autonomous discipline, and bilingualism itself has come to be
seen as an asset, though complex: the teacher requires attention to detail, and
sensitivity to each child’s needs and language trajectories. Knowledge of this
discipline, with an awareness of latest developments, is essential for those
working in international schools, especially for those working in leadership
and management positions. As will be outlined below, English no longer
has specic cultural bases to which students can become integrated, but has
an ‘international posture’ (Dörnyei and Ushioda, 2009: 145). Coetzee-Van
Rooy writes:
English is an international auxiliary language. It is yours (no
matter who you are) as much as it is mine (no matter who I am).
… No one needs to become more like Americans … or any other
English speaker to lay claim on the language. … It isn’t even
necessary to appreciate the culture of a country whose principal
language is English in order for one to use it effectively. This
argument assumes a much more complex view of the identities of
second language learners in world English contexts.
(Coetzee-Van Rooy, 2006: 442)
About the mother tongue, she writes:
The fascinating challenge for these groups [L2 speakers] however
is to keep their own cultural and linguistic identity while
mastering the second language. What has been most encouraging
to us throughout these investigations is the fact that with the
proper attitudinal orientation and motivation one can become
bilingual without losing one’s identity.
(Coetzee-Van Rooy, 2006: 441; emphasis original)
This sets out the position of international school students (although written
in the context of South Africa): they learn English as a tool which will
belong to them, and they will keep their own cultural and linguistic identity,
their mother tongue. S. Wright (2004:14) observes, ‘Currently globalisation
63
How the fields of bilingualism and SLA can guide good practice
is producing worldwide social diglossia and ever extending personal
bilingualism.’ This is the world we live in today. The often encountered
alternative to bilingualism is described in the next section.
The status of English in the contemporary world
English language teaching in the world
From a research perspective, English language teaching has changed
dramatically. Until recently, the concept of ‘integrativeness’, dened
by Gardner and Lambert (1959: 271) as ‘a willingness to be like valued
members of the language community’, was seen as the main motivation for
students to learn English – or any language. Thus the model held out was
that of native English speakers. This view has been challenged with the rise
of English as an International Language (EIL) in a sea of speakers of World
Englishes (SWE) (Sharian, 2009: 3). The methodology currently accepted
as most relevant to motivation is ‘the “L2 Motivational Self System”’, with
its concepts of the ‘ideal self’ and the ‘ought-to self’ (Dörnyei and Ushioda,
2009: 3, 4). Coetzee-Van Rooy believes:
The main foundations of the criticism of the notion of
integrativeness are the ‘simplex’ views of the identity of second
language learners and the incorrect assumptions made about the
sociolinguistic contexts of many learners of English as a second
language across the world.
(Coetzee-Van Rooy, 2006: 442)
She explains:
I use the term ‘simplex’ view of identity to refer to the underlying
notion held by some researchers that learning a second language
necessarily results in the loss of the rst language, and the
establishment of a new ‘simple’ identity as monolingual speaker
of the target language.
(ibid.: 440)
She also quotes Lamb, who comments:
As English loses its association with particular Anglophone
cultures and is instead identied with the powerful forces of
globalization, the desire to ‘integrate’ loses its explanatory
power in many EFL contexts. Individuals may aspire towards
a ‘bicultural’ identity which incorporates an English-speaking
Maurice Carder
64
globally-involved version of themselves in addition to their local
L1-speaking self.
(Lamb, 2004: 3, quoted in Coetzee-Van Rooy, 2006: 442)
These ndings relate directly to international school students: they remove
the previously held focus on learning about the culture of the target language,
and emphasize that students will maintain their own language and culture.
It is fair to say that Western-based TESOL is still the model employed in
many schools: textbooks still contain British or American cultural models.
However, international school ESL teachers create their own materials for
language teaching, and their focus is on adapting other subject materials,
such as history, geography and biology. But not all international schools
recognize the language needs of SL learners.
Native English speakers as smug
A reason for getting beyond the English-only approach of the majority
of international schools is students’ identities. Although Crystal (1997)
estimates that two-thirds of the world’s children grow up in a bilingual
environment, the West is largely monolingual in outlook. Even bilingual
countries like Belgium, Finland and Switzerland have populations that
exist in a state of ‘territorial unilingualism’ (Romaine, 2004: 398). English
speakers especially, are prone to entrenched attitudes in the climate of the
current dominance of English. Ireland and the UK are now the only countries
in the EU where there is no requirement to study a foreign language. English
and American monolinguals are often characterized as having no aptitude
for foreign-language learning, this failing often being accompanied by
expressions of envy for multilingual Europeans,
sometimes (more subtly) by a linguistic smugness reecting a
deeply held conviction that, after all, those clever ‘others’ who
don’t already know English will have to accommodate in a world
made increasingly safe for anglophones. All such attitudes, of
course, reveal more about social dominance and convention than
they do about aptitude.
(J. Edwards, 2004: 11; emphasis added)
Fishman uses the same word, ‘smug’, to describe the situation in the USA:
Unfortunately, a country as rich and as powerful as our own,
smugly speaking ‘the language that rules the world,’ can long
afford to continue to disregard the problem.
(Fishman, 2004: 418; emphasis added)
65
How the fields of bilingualism and SLA can guide good practice
Factors which have a negative effect on students keeping up their mother
tongue include: the perception of many parents that English is the solution
(O. García et al., 2006: 39–41; Krashen, 2006), the all-pervasive use of
English in popular music and media, the spread of the internet, on which
most sites consulted by students are in English (although other languages
are increasingly being used) (Graddol, 2006), and the failure of the school’s
accrediting agency, the CIS, to acknowledge the situation of SLLs (Carder,
2005, 2009b).
Scant attention may be paid to what J. Edwards (2004: 22–3) calls
‘linguistic axles and gears occasioned by bilingual competence’, let alone to
the relationship between language and identity, and how it may alter when
more than one language is involved. Other reasons for the slow development
of appropriate SL and MT programmes in international schools are now
discussed.
Models of practice
Theory, practice and the reality in international schools
As mentioned above, there is a worrying gap between theory and practice in
education. May (1994) believes that schools, in order to make a difference,
have to show collective, coordinated resistance, which should be formalized
in a critical practice.
It seems that many international schools still have the view laid out
by Mullard 28 years ago:
the assimilationist perspective was seen … as one which embodied
a set of beliefs about stability. The teaching of English along
with a programme of cultural indoctrination and subordination
… would help in short to neutralize sub-cultural afnities and
inuences within the school.
(Mullard, 1982: 123–4, quoted in May, 1994: 33)
International schools are nearly all private, and parents expect a quality
English-language education. Directors are conscious of this and are anxious
to have staff who do not disturb a smooth operation with ideas of structural
change, even when this would be of benet to the multilingual community.
As Sennett points out,
An organization in which the contents are constantly shifting
requires the mobile capacity to solve problems; getting deeply
involved in any one problem would be dysfunctional, since
projects end as abruptly as they begin. …The social skill required
Maurice Carder
66
by a exible organization is the ability to work well with others in
short-lived teams, others you won’t have the time to know well.
… Your skill lies in cooperating, whatever the circumstances.
(Sennett, 2006: 126)
This describes the author’s experience of attempting to institute systemic
change in the treatment of SL learners. In order to enable change it is
advisable to have good grounds for recommending it; since there was little
research evidence from international schools it had to come from national
systems, and this is addressed in the next section.
Bilingualism as the basis of good practice
The development of bilingual studies
An unwillingness to appreciate and acknowledge the burgeoning literature
on SLA and bilingualism and to recognize them as disciplines in their own
right has much to do with why there is not better provision for SL students.
The study of bilingualism, and interpretations of its effect on young people,
have developed immensely over the past century. Early studies generally
associated bilingualism with lowered intelligence (J.V. Edwards, 2004: 15),
and one well-known study concluded that ‘the use of a foreign language
in the home is one of the chief factors in producing mental retardation’
(Goodenough, 1926: 393, quoted in J.V. Edwards, 2004: 16). However,
in the early 1960s Peal and Lambert (1962) carried out studies which
conrmed a positive relationship between intelligence and bilingualism. They
controlled the relevant variables in an examination of ten-year-old bilingual
and monolingual children, and the bilinguals were found to ‘outperform
their monolingual counterparts on both verbal and non-verbal intelligence
tests’. The authors concluded that the bilingual child had ‘mental exibility,
a superiority in concept formation, and a more diversied set of mental
abilities’, while noting that ‘it is not possible to state from the present study
whether the more intelligent child became bilingual or whether bilingualism
aided his intellectual development’ (Peal and Lambert, 1962: 277, quoted
in J. Edwards, 2004: 16–17).
This produced a surge of publications on language acquisition by
psychologists and linguists investigating bilingual children during the 1960s,
and led to an increase of research activities from the 1970s on, which in turn
contributed to ‘the establishment of bilingual studies as an autonomous
discipline with its own textbooks and journals’ (emphasis added) (Meisel,
2004: 92). This is immensely important: there is now a separate discipline
67
How the fields of bilingualism and SLA can guide good practice
which has devoted vast amounts of research, investigation, conferences and
literature to varied topics that come under the heading of bilingualism.
The advantages of bilingualism
Various authors have written on the earlier metalinguistic awareness
of bilinguals compared to monolinguals (e.g. Ben-Zeev, 1977), their
increased metacognitive abilities and metalinguistic awareness (e.g. De
Avila and Duncan, 1979), and their greater separation of form and content
(Leopold, 1939–49). Cognitive advantages attributed to plurilinguals
by psychologists, such as advantages in conceptual development (e.g.
Cummins and Gulustan, 1974; Peal and Lambert, 1962), higher verbal
intelligence and greater psycholinguistic skills (e.g. Lambert and Tucker,
1972), and more divergent thinking (e.g. Landry, 1974), are all related to
metalinguistic awareness about the practice of switching between languages
(Dewaele et al., 2003: 48).
Bialystok (1991), Cummins (1984, 1993b, 2000), Hakuta (1986)
and Lambert (1974) also show that maintaining the mother tongue and
adding English – in other words bilingualism – confers advantages. This
academic base is vital for practitioners in international schools so that they
can argue their case for appropriate programmes.
C. Baker (2006: 255) records eight potential advantages of bilingual
education, namely, engagement in wider communication across generations
and cultural groups, a sympathetic understanding of differences in creeds
and cultures, biliteracy, increased classroom achievement, cognitive benets,
raised self-esteem, a more secure identity, and economic advantages.
Baker (ibid.: 252) summarizes the situation in international schools,
saying they are ‘[m]ainly for the afuent, … [o]ne language of the school
is frequently English. International Schools that have English as the sole
medium of transmitting the curriculum cannot be included under the
heading of Bilingual Education in Majority Languages’. Skutnabb-Kangas
also comments on international schools, noting that those who want to be
included in the new globalized elites need to be multilingual, and
[f]or them multilingualism means enhanced symbolic capital and,
through a conversion process, economic and political capital.
‘International Schools’ have a similar goal even if they do not use
several languages as media of instruction.
(Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000: 624–5)
This suggests that international schools are perceived by elites as providing
symbolic capital, while not using several languages as media of instruction.
Maurice Carder
68
The situation is not clear-cut, as many discussions with parents have revealed
that they are grateful for any school which can accommodate their children
with English as the language of instruction, since it is the global lingua
franca. My perception is that such elites focus principally on their children
becoming uent in English, without considering what might happen to their
children’s own language and identity.
Bilinguals as more numerous, but more complex, than
monolinguals
Bilingualism is considered to be more common than monolingualism in
the world. Crystal (1997) estimates that some two-thirds of children in
the world grow up in a bilingual environment. On the issue of ‘who does
better’, monolinguals or bilinguals, commentators are increasingly pointing
out that there is an inbuilt bias towards monolinguals, an attitude that:
reects a perspective strongly biased toward monolingualism
in that it implicitly assumes that monolingual acquisition is the
norm. Indirectly, at least, such an approach conveys the view that
multilingualism deviates from what may be regarded as normal.
(Meisel, 2004: 93)
It is equally important to understand, as Grosjean (1989) writes, the
necessity of seeing that the ‘bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person’.
He argues that bilinguals rarely use their languages equally frequently in
every domain of their social environment, but that they use each of them
for different purposes, in different contexts, and in communicating with
different partners (Meisel, 2004: 93, quoting Grosjean, 1989).
Bialystok takes the issue one step further by pointing an accusatory
nger at researchers, who, she says, have:
essentially developed their models from the simplifying
assumption that children have one mind, one conceptual system,
and one language. The limitations of this assumption are
quickly apparent when one considers the inevitable and prolic
interactions between language and thought in virtually every
cognitive endeavor.
(Bialystok, 2004: 577)
She then reviews the major researchers who have contributed to a more
positive view of bilinguals’ potential. First, Peal and Lambert, who ‘saved’
bilingualism by their study (1962, already mentioned); Vygotsky (1962, but
written some thirty years earlier), who said that knowing two languages led
69
How the fields of bilingualism and SLA can guide good practice
to awareness of linguistic options; Clark (1978), who wrote that learning
two languages might heighten awareness of linguistic devices in both
languages; Leopold (1961), who discovered that understanding the nature
of the relationship between words and meanings is superior in bilingual
children; Cummins (1984), who found that bilinguals have greater exibility
in grasping concepts and solve problems faster than monolinguals, and who
also developed the ‘threshold hypothesis’, which posited that a minimal
level of bilingual competence is necessary to avoid decits and enjoy the
advantages of bilingualism: the context of each bilingual’s community
of practice is paramount here. Bialystok’s conclusion is that bilingualism
makes it easier for students to master skills, though she leaves open the
matter of their overall achievement, in comparison to other researchers who
point, for example, to metalinguistic advantages for bilinguals.
Each bilingual community is unique
Another tenet to bear in mind when discussing bilingualism is that ‘any
meaningful discussion must be attempted within a specic context, and for
specic purposes’ (J. Edwards, 2004: 8), a point elaborated on by Baker and
Prys Jones, who conclude:
there can be no preferred term that is capable of summing up
all the complexity, dynamism and color of bilinguals existing in
groups. Simple labels hide complex realities. What is needed is an
awareness of the limitations of these simple terms [and] of the
many dimensions underneath them.
(Baker and Prys Jones, 1998: 99)
Or, as Sharp (1973: 11, quoted in Romaine, 2004: 387) has it, ‘each
bilingual community is unique’. This shows that bilingualism has come
to be seen in a positive instead of a negative light, and that denitions
of bilingualism will depend on each separate community. This has clear
implications for international schools, which each have a unique bilingual
community. Parents come from all around the world, their children are at
school for differing lengths of time, and families have varying linguistic
needs and repertoires. Many of them have developed some understanding
of the situation they nd themselves in, but some are entranced by promises
of English in which it is seen as the language of success, and do not realize
the hurdles their children may face.
A further comment on this important point is made by Auer, who
concludes that the impasse of dening bilingualism can only be overcome
if it is:
Maurice Carder
70
no longer regarded as ‘something inside speakers’ heads’, that
is, a mental ability, but as a displayed feature of participants’
everyday linguistic behaviour. Bilingualism must be looked upon
primarily as a set of complex linguistic activities, and only in
a ‘derived’ sense as a cognitive ability. Consequently there is
no one denition of bilingualism: bilingualism becomes an
interactionally constructed predicate.
(Auer, 2009: 491)
The issue of a ‘multilingual ethos’, of considerable relevance in our setting,
is discussed by various researchers, e.g. Crawford, 2000; Ferguson, 2006;
Graddol, 2006; Shohamy, 2006; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000. V. Edwards
(2004) addresses broader issues of bilingualism and how it benets the
wider community. Edwards suggested that such policies ‘create a disruption’
and ‘feelings of alienation and inadequacy’ (ibid.: 163); these words were
spoken by the judge at a hearing investigating policies of English-only in the
workplace in the USA, and quoted by Susan Berk-Seligson, an expert witness
at that hearing. Edwards also quotes former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre
Trudeau, who commented: ‘Of course, a bilingual state is more expensive
than a unilingual one, but it is a richer state’ (ibid.: 49), which leads to
further important concepts concerning bilingualism, outlined below.
Those interested in the economic factors surrounding issues of
bilingualism are referred to Hogan-Brun’s 2017 book Linguanomics: What
is the market potential of multilingualism? To give one example which
shows the economic importance of multilingualism:
‘One in four UK and one in six US businesses [is] losing out due to
lack of language skills and cultural awareness in their workforce’
[(IDMP Europe, 2015)]. Corporations with international
ambitions need multilingual employees to sell their goods and
services. Many other organizations also require among their
workforce people skilled in at least one non-native language. This
need is reected in today’s hiring strategies.
(Hogan-Brun, 2017: 1)
Factors involved in academic success: Additive and subtractive
bilingualism
Maintaining literacy in the mother tongue, or rst language (L1), has been
shown to confer considerable benets relating to the academic and social
aspects of each student’s life, including better performance in the second
language (L2, usually English); this is additive bilingualism. In this situation,
71
How the fields of bilingualism and SLA can guide good practice
the second language and culture are unlikely to replace the rst language
and culture. Cummins stated:
Educators who see their role as adding a second language and
cultural afliation to students’ repertoire are likely to empower
students more than those who see their role as replacing or
subtracting students’ primary language and culture.
(Cummins, 2001f: 182)
There are other recognized benets on a variety of cognitive and
metacognitive tasks:
Their performance on tasks such as counting the number of
words in sentences and judging the grammaticality of anomalous
sentences suggests that they have higher levels of metalinguistic
awareness, allowing them to focus on the form rather than the
meaning of language. There is also evidence of greater sensitivity
to the social nature and communicative functions of language.
Finally, psychologists point to the greater mental exibility of
bilinguals.
(V. Edwards, 2009: 19–20)
Conversely, not maintaining literacy in the mother tongue has been shown
to have negative effects, leading often to poor performance in the second
language; this is subtractive bilingualism. Schools which ignore children’s
mother tongue and provide education only in the second language, usually
English, are increasing the likelihood that children will become academically
‘disabled’ (Baker, 2006: 415). When literacy is attempted only through the
second language, a child’s oracy in English may be insufciently developed
for such literacy acquisition to occur (Baker, 2006: 332). These terms were
proposed in the model devised by Lambert (1974). The model is valuable as
it combines the individual and societal elements of bilingualism.
The European Schools offer a well-developed model of bilingual
education. These schools were set up for the relatively elite workers of the
European Community, are largely subsidized by the EU and have up to
eleven different language sections. C. Baker (2006: 252–3) writes, ‘Younger
children use their native language as the medium of learning but also receive
second language instruction (English, French, or German) in the primary
school years.’
The vehicular language of instruction, one of the three in brackets,
is used for giving classes to mixed language groups in history, geography
and economics from the third year of secondary education. This second
Maurice Carder
72
language – that used for instruction – is also taught as a subject before
students begin studying through the language. The result is that students
gain very good results in the European Baccalaureate.
The work of Cummins on bilingual issues
The threshold hypothesis and the developmental interdependence
hypothesis
Cummins has had a great impact on the eld of bilingual studies; a
comprehensive collection of his writings is to be found in Cummins (2001a).
In 1976 Cummins rst postulated that ‘there may be threshold levels of
linguistic competence which bilingual children must attain both in order
to avoid cognitive decits and to allow the potentially benecial aspects
of becoming bilingual to inuence their cognitive growth’ (Cummins,
2001b: 71). He elaborated on this in 1979 (2001c) with his developmental
interdependence hypothesis, in which he suggested that a child’s second
language competence is partly dependent on the level of competence already
achieved in the rst language, implying that the more developed the rst
language, the easier it could be to develop the second language:
To the extent that instruction in Lx is effective in promoting
cognitive/academic prociency in Lx, transfer of this prociency
to Ly will occur provided there is adequate exposure to Ly (either
in school or environment) and adequate motivation to learn Ly.
(Cummins, 2001g: 122)
Thus if the rst language is at a lower stage of development it will be
more difcult to achieve prociency in the second language. Cummins
acknowledged (2001c: 75) that the basic idea had ‘been previously expressed
by Toukomaa and Skutnabb-Kangas (1977)’. He then reviewed research
evidence by Toukomaa and Skutnabb-Kangas (1977: 76), who found that
the extent to which the mother tongue had been developed by Finnish-
speaking children before they had contact with Swedish was strongly related
to how well they learned Swedish. Skutnabb-Kangas and Toukomaa also
reported that mother-tongue development is especially important in school
subjects that require abstract modes of thought:
Subjects such as biology, chemistry and physics also require
conceptual thinking, and in these subjects migrant children with
a good mastery of their mother tongue succeeded signicantly
better than those who knew their mother tongue poorly.
(Skutnabb-Kangas and Toukomaa, 1976: 69)
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How the fields of bilingualism and SLA can guide good practice
Cummins comments on studies by Hébert (1976) and A.G. Ramírez and
Politzer (1976) that:
The major educational implication of these hypotheses [on time
spent learning L1 and L2] is that if optimal development of a
minority language child’s cognitive and academic potential is a
goal, then the school program must aim to promote an additive
form of bilingualism involving literacy in both L1 and L2.
(Cummins, 2001b: 91)
Although developed for students in national systems, Cummins’s research is
directly relevant to the international school context.
BICS and CALP
Two concepts that have become well known to teachers involved with
bilingual children are basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS) and
cognitive and academic language prociency (CALP). These terms, dened
by Cummins (2001d: 112), refer to the types of language that children
acquire, and require for school. He showed in his ‘iceberg’ representation
of language prociency how children acquire, ‘above the water’, basic
interpersonal communication skills in their rst language by natural
processes of communicating with their family and peers. The literacy skills
acquired in decontextualized academic situations are ‘below the water’, and
are comprised in cognitive and academic language prociency. This is a
simplied description of a student’s language ability, but it does point out
the fundamental differences between the language most used for everyday
discourse and that required for higher-level thinking skills. The BICS skills
are acquired rapidly in the rst ve years, after which they develop more
slowly. The CALP skills follow a steady curve similar to that of overall
cognitive development, beginning to atten out around mid-adolescence.
Development in each area also depends on the context of each child’s
learning environment.
Cummins writes that he dened the terms BICS and CALP because he
intended to draw educators’ attention to these data and to warn
against [the] premature exit of ELL students (in the United States)
from bilingual to mainstream English-only programs on the basis
of attainment of surface level uency in English. In other words,
the distinction highlighted the fact that educators’ conating of
these aspects of prociency was a major factor in the creation of
academic difculties for bilingual students.
(Cummins, 2000: 58)
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Along with this hypothesis, Cummins proposed a Common Underlying
Prociency hypothesis, by which:
experience with either language can, theoretically, promote the
development of the prociency underlying both languages, given
adequate motivation and exposure to both, either in school or
wider environment.
(Cummins, 2001d: 131)
This model thus rejects the Separate Underlying Prociency model of
bilingualism which ‘involves the misconception that a bilingual’s two …
sets of linguistic abilities are separate’ (and was used as a pretext for moving
children out of bilingual programmes into English-only programmes ‘in
order to learn English’) (ibid.: 130).
Cummins further elaborated on the differences between the language
prociency required in face-to-face communication and that involved in
most academic tasks by showing schematically (in Cummins, 2001e: 144)
the relationship between them as two continua, consisting of two types of
prociency: context-embedded and context-reduced. The former refers to
language embedded in meaningful contexts and supported by situational
props, as happens for example in experiments in a science class, whereas
in the latter a student has few or no such props, for example if a teacher is
simply talking, with no overheads or other aid, or a student is reading a text
or writing, again with no supporting material. Cummins points out that
ESL students quickly develop context-embedded skills, whereas gaining
prociency in context-reduced aspects of English takes much longer.
Time needed for second language learners
Cummins refers to his own studies of immigrant students’ learning of
English in successful bilingual programmes, which substantiate that it takes
‘from ve to seven years, on the average, for minority language students
to approach grade norms in academic (context-reduced) aspects of English
prociency’ (2001e: 145). This nding was conrmed by the work of
Thomas and Collier, discussed later in this chapter. Cummins makes a
further point, reinforced by Thomas and Collier, namely the ‘moving target’
analogy: ‘a major reason for this is that native English-speaking students are
not standing still waiting for minority language students to catch up with
them’ (ibid.). ESL learners need two years to reach the same level in ‘face-
to-face’ prociency as native English speakers, whereas for more ‘academic’
work, which is typically required in schools and for which grades are given,
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How the fields of bilingualism and SLA can guide good practice
it takes seven years for second language learners to ‘catch up’ with native
English speakers.
In other words, ESL students are aiming at a moving target: as native
English speakers make academic gains routinely every year, ESL students
have to learn not only the academic content of the curriculum, but also the
language needed to understand and use that language (Cummins, 1979).
These are facts which need to be continually reiterated to colleagues,
parents and school management. Such communications also reinforce the
fact that SL learners simply need time and appropriate programmes and
should not be compared to learners with special educational needs.
Empowered versus disabled students
Cummins moved on to look at the situation within schools, and how the
relationships between teachers and students affected the development of
students; he believes there is a difference in how students develop that
depends on the extent to which educators redene their roles with respect to
second language students. In his 1986 paper he states: ‘Implementation of
change is dependent upon the extent to which educators, both collectively
and individually, redene their roles with respect to minority students and
communities’ (Cummins, 2001f: 175).
He lays out three sets of power relations, the daily interactions between
teachers and students, the overall relationship between the school and the
local community, and the power relations between groups within society
as a whole. There is no reason for these power relations to be any different
in the international school context, as the same groups exist, though there
is the added complication of having an extra community: the international
community. Cummins reports that sociological and anthropological
research, based on that of Fishman (1970) and Paulston (1980), suggests
that status and power relations between groups make up an important part
of the account of minority students’ failure in school. The main tenet of
his theory is that minority students are either ‘empowered’ or ‘disabled’ as
a direct result of interactions with teachers in school, and that the degree
of empowerment or disablement will depend on four characteristics of the
institution of the school: how much the minority language and student
are integrated into the school; how much each minority community is
encouraged to join in the affairs of the school; how much the pedagogy
encourages intrinsic motivation in students to use language to develop
their own knowledge base; how much educators involved in assessment
use it to encourage students rather than put them in a failing box. In most
international schools second language students are not a minority, and
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the international community occupies a different type of space from local
communities, being transient.
Research evidence for the effect that ‘disablement’ can have on
students is presented by two World Bank economists, Hoff and Pandey
(2004), who reported the results of a remarkable experiment:
They took 321 high-caste and 321 low-caste 11- to 12-year-old
boys from scattered rural villages in India, and set them the task
of solving mazes. First, the boys did the puzzles without being
aware of each other’s caste. Under this condition the low-caste
boys did just as well with the mazes as the high-caste boys, indeed
slightly better. Then, the experiment was repeated, but this time
each boy was asked to conrm an announcement of his name, and
caste. After this public announcement of caste, the boys did more
mazes, and this time there was a large caste gap in how well they
did – the performance of the low-caste boys dropped signicantly.
This is striking evidence that performance and behaviour in an
educational task can be profoundly affected by the way we feel
we are seen and judged by others. When we expect to be viewed
as inferior, our abilities seem to be diminished.
(Hoff and Pandey, 2004, quoted in
Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010: 94)
Cummins goes on to posit that, though theorists have shown that academic
failure can be attributed to a lack of cultural identication (Cummins, 1984)
or the disruption of intergenerational transmission processes (Feuerstein,
1979), school failure does not generally occur when minority groups are
positively oriented towards both their own and the dominant culture. This
is particularly relevant in international schools, where there are so many
nations and languages. Clearly it will be necessary for each individual
language community to recognize that it is a part of the ‘international
community’ and, as such, is equal to, not above or below, any other one.
An example of how much the attitude to a language and culture can affect
a student is given by Troike (1978), who points out the academic failure of
Finnish students in Sweden, where such students are ‘low-status’, and then
compares this situation with their academic success in Australia, where they
are seen as a ‘high-status’ group.
The cultural values of the predominant school nationalities, the
culture of the school rules of discipline and expected behaviour, the cultural
style and content of the lessons, and the teaching styles and attitude of
the staff, all form a framework within which less dominant nationalities
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How the fields of bilingualism and SLA can guide good practice
interact. All of these factors can impact negatively on the motivation of
other national groups.
Cummins devised a framework to show how schools can provide a
model which aims to provide equity across the curriculum. In this framework
there is a cultural and linguistic pedagogical model in which ESL students
are nurtured in an additive rather than a subtractive approach, community
participation will be collaborative rather than exclusionary, pedagogy will
be reciprocal and interaction-oriented rather than transmission-oriented,
and assessment will be advocacy-oriented rather than legitimization-
oriented. Cummins stresses the enhanced metalinguistic development found
in association with additive bilingualism, which is also reported by Hakuta
and Diaz (1985) and McLaughlin (1984). The more second-language
students’ parents are involved in their children’s education, the more the
parents will feel that they understand and can contribute, for example by
encouraging reading in the mother tongue at home and providing a book-
rich environment, with positive academic results. The pedagogical model
is vital, and this is where CPD for all staff plays a key role. Informing
and involving parents are important factors in the process of ensuring
that children can benet appropriately from their two or more languages.
All new parents can be engaged in discussion of what is at stake, given
information booklets about the importance of literacy in the mother tongue,
referred to websites, and told about the possibility of having mother-tongue
lessons. The crucial time of arrival at an international school can be seized
on by those responsible for the MT programme in order to establish a rm
foundation for each child in their mother tongue, which can be maintained
and built on.
Cummins (2000) points to the model that is most unhelpful to ESL
students, and terms it a ‘banking’ model; in it students are the passive
receivers of knowledge, which is ‘banked’ in their brains by a transmission
model of pedagogy. More successfully, a ‘reciprocal/interactiove’ model
will encourage students to enter into discussion, dialogue and continual
exchange with teacher and other students, which will encourage feedback in
both content and form (Wong Fillmore, 1983). Haynes (2002: 2) comments:
‘Critical thinking in schools is limited by the boundaries of a system where
teachers not only teach but also control the behaviour of pupils through
regimes of discipline.’ However, developing a climate of self-discipline in
which students can be involved in productive critical thinking is not only
possible, in my experience, but vital to meaningful education.
Finally, assessment is a key factor in how ESL students are judged, and
thus how they value themselves in the school environment. A grading system
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that sees only their insufciencies in language will fail them and ‘disable’
them, resulting in many being classied as having special educational needs.
Schools could develop alternative methods of assessing ESL students’ true
knowledge and abilities through suitable training of all staff, and also by
offering portfolio assessment tasks, and modied grades in content-subject
material. The latter involves each subject teacher making allowances for ESL
students’ developing prociency in English and giving a grade based on the
teacher’s perception of the student’s real prociency in that subject rather
than on that revealed by their knowledge of English, which, supercially,
may look awed. It will require a whole-school language policy (see the
example in Carder, 2007a: 173–81).
It is the daily approach to SLLs by teachers that leads them to
succeed or fail. Mainstream teachers and administrators who refer to ‘the
ESL students’ are instantly classifying them, and this may, depending on
a school ethos, disable them. ESL students do not need to be isolated as
a group, any more than any other group of students: this is a sensitive
issue, but one which could be included in teacher training. Having an SEN
department, separate from the ESL and MT department, is a solution. To
transcend ‘disablement’ Cummins proposes the solutions outlined in the
next section.
Societal agendas
Convincing, in this section on the work of Cummins, is his suggestion in a
paper published in 1993, and reinforced through his 2000 book Language,
Power and Pedagogy, that in some countries at least, particularly in North
America, there is an agenda of producing students who will follow the
societal power structure, and not giving students enough critical literacy ‘to
deconstruct disinformation and challenge structures of control and social
justice’ (Cummins, 1993a: 270). The importance of critical literacy has
also been discussed by Wallace (2003: 200), who makes the point that,
in a world of globalization in which English is the language of power, ‘[a]
critically nuanced, elaborated English offers learners a potentially powerful
identity outside the classroom, as well as within it’. V. Edwards (2009:
2) writes: ‘reading is not only about decoding the word from the page;
it is also about the ways in which literacy can be used to empower and
disempower people’.
It is therefore important for educators to select curricular topics that
relate to societal power relations, and then give students the opportunity to
analyse such topics from multiple perspectives. At international schools this
is crucial as students come from so many different parts of the world, which
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How the fields of bilingualism and SLA can guide good practice
may have different outlooks on any number of topics. Nieto (1992) also
urges a focus on critical pedagogy. However, Hedges believes that:
most elite schools … do only a mediocre job of teaching students
to question and think. They focus instead … on creating hordes
of competent systems managers. Responsibility for the collapse
of the global economy runs in a direct line from the manicured
quadrangles and academic halls … to the nancial and political
centers of power.
(Hedges, 2009: 89)
It is easy to see international schools, with their clientele of wealthy students
and their spacious, well-equipped facilities, as a successful model of
education, and many parents seem entranced by this supercial impression.
However, my experience of visiting similar schools throughout the world
has revealed that SLLs are often treated in just the ways that researchers
have shown to be inadequate, with no MT programme, an approach to
pedagogy that may not encourage critical, interactional teaching, and in
which testing has become valued above all other projects, often to the
disadvantage of SL students.
Another area of concern is attitudes towards bilingualism; Baetens
Beardsmore (2003), for example, quotes comments on the politico-
ideological fears of many people concerning bilingualism: ‘Unease about
language is almost always symptomatic of a larger unease. … The issues
in question, I would suggest, are much more likely to be such things as
dominance, elitism, ethnicity, economic control, social status and group
security’ (McArthur, 1986: 87, 88, quoted in Baetens Beardsmore, 2003:
20). Calvet characterizes the situation: ‘derrière cette guerre des langues,
se prole une lutte pour le pouvoir’ [‘Behind this war of languages looms
a struggle for power’] (Calvet, 1987: 181, quoted in Dewaele, Housen and
Li, 2003: 21).
Edwards brings together the issues of racism hiding behind linguistic
discrimination when she writes:
While it is no longer politically acceptable to express deep-
seated fear and mistrust of minorities in direct terms, the same
restrictions do not apply to opinions about language. It has
become increasingly clear, however, that debates which on the
surface focus on language are actually about culture, identity,
power and control.
(V. Edwards, 2004: 216)
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This makes it all the more important to make a determined effort to
demystify bilingualism and consistently strive for the best models.
The work of Collier and Thomas on bilingual issues
Models of good practice
Two key researchers on second language learners are Collier and Thomas.
They carried out various studies, published in Thomas and Collier (1995,
1997, 2002), and Collier and Thomas (1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 2007). Collier
also wrote about many aspects of providing appropriate provision for ESL
students in Collier (1989, 1992, 1995a, 1995b, 1995c). A comprehensive
overview of their research is given in Collier and Thomas (2017).
They related, on the basis of their research,
● the amount of time needed by second language learners to reach the
same level of prociency as native speakers of English (Collier, 1989;
Thomas and Collier, 1997), and
● the best models for achieving prociency in English (Thomas and
Collier, 1997; Collier and Thomas, 2007).
Their main conclusion is that maintaining and improving literacy in the
mother tongue has been conrmed as a key variable in their studies on the
‘how long?’ question. Other researchers have reached a similar conclusion
(e.g. Baker, 2006; Cummins, 1991, 1996; Genesee, 1987, 1994; Hakuta,
1986), and in a newspaper article de Lotbinière (2009) writes: ‘Developing
countries are unlikely to meet UN targets for improving education because
of the widespread marginalisation of students’ rst languages, which results
in teaching being delivered in languages that children struggle to understand
or to use effectively.’
International school students are in many ways privileged, but some
SL speakers are in the same situation as students in developing countries
in this regard. Thomas and Collier devised a model for ensuring that SL
learners could be treated equitably.
The Prism model
Thomas and Collier developed their Prism model to portray a holistic
paradigm for the successful education of second language learners. It has
four components that drive language acquisition: sociocultural, linguistic,
academic and cognitive processes. The components are equally important,
and the prism should be imagined as complex and multidimensional, like a
triangular pyramid viewed from above, with the student in the centre, i.e. a
3-D image, so the point of the pyramid rises, and the sides are seen sloping
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How the fields of bilingualism and SLA can guide good practice
down. The model can be seen diagrammatically at http://brittanychansen.
weebly.com/uploads/2/5/2/8/25282281/prism_model.pdf.
Sociocultural proceSSeS
This is the central area of the prism. Collier and Thomas state:
Central to [the] student’s acquisition of language are all of the
surrounding social and cultural processes occurring in everyday
life … – home, school, community, and the broader society. For
example, sociocultural processes at work in SLA may include
individual students’ emotional responses to school such as self-
esteem or anxiety or other affective factors.
(Collier and Thomas, 2007: 335)
language development
Emphasized under this heading, is: ‘To assure cognitive and academic
success in the L2, a student’s L1 system, oral and written, must be
developed to a high cognitive level at least throughout the elementary
school years’ (ibid.). The authors also clarify that ‘Linguistic processes …
consist of the subconscious aspects of language development …, as well as
the metalinguistic, conscious, formal teaching of language in school’ (ibid.).
There is a wealth of literature on ways of giving students the language
skills they need. A good entry point to this area is scaffolding, written about
by Gibbons (2002, 2006). She describes how to give students structures and
frameworks around which they can develop their learning. Scaffolding is
an instructional technique in which teachers model learning strategies and
build up students’ abilities to perform tasks themselves. One scaffolding
strategy is for teachers to model working skills in the classroom which
help children learn to operate in the school culture. When faced with an
unfamiliar problem, they can construct a similar but simpler problem; in
this way students manage their own gradual self-regulation and can carry
out new tasks successfully.
academic development
This includes all school work in all subjects, for each grade level. Since
academic work transfers from the rst to the second language, Collier
and Thomas argue that it is best if academic work is developed in the
rst language, while the second language is taught through meaningful
academic content. The authors state that ‘research [their own] has shown
that postponing or interrupting academic development while students work
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on acquiring the L2 is likely to lead to academic failure in the long-term’
(Collier and Thomas, 2007: 335–6).
cognitive development
Collier and Thomas argue that this is a natural process, as when an infant
builds thought processes through interacting with loved ones at home, which
they then bring with them to school. They again emphasize the importance
of this development continuing through a child’s L1 at least through the
elementary school years:
Extensive research has demonstrated that children who reach
full cognitive development in two languages … enjoy cognitive
advantages over monolinguals. … Too often neglected was the
crucial role of cognitive development in the L1. Now we know
from the growing research base that educators must address
linguistic, cognitive, and academic development equally through
both rst and second languages if they are to assure students’
academic success in the L2. This is especially necessary if English
language learners are ever to reach full parity in all curricular
areas with L1 English speakers.
(ibid.: 336)
Finally, it is again emphasized by Collier and Thomas that all four
components are interdependent, and that it is crucial for educators to
provide ‘a socioculturally supportive school environment, allowing natural
language, academic, and cognitive development to ourish in both L1 and
L2’ (ibid.).
Other research
More recently, the neuro-scientists Petitto and Dunbar (2009: 188) found
that early bilingual exposure (before age three) had a positive effect, with
language and reading comparable to those of monolinguals. The research
also showed (from imaging studies of adults who had themselves been
bilinguals at an early age) that their brains showed the same overlapping
regions as those of monolinguals. In contrast, adults who had become
bilingual at a later age had a more bilateral pattern. Petitto and Dunbar’s
research has demonstrated that early bilinguals appear to have cognitive
advantages in terms of linguistic exibility and multi-tasking. It is also clear
that children nurtured at home in one or two languages will nd it less
challenging to embark on a further language in school, as they will be able
to connect familiar words and concepts from one language to another.
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How the fields of bilingualism and SLA can guide good practice
Professional models of practice for ESL in
international schools
Sheltered instruction
An effective professional pedagogical model is that of ‘sheltered instruction’:
Sheltered subject-matter teaching is a form of communication-
based ESL instruction in which the focus is on academic content
– science, math, history, and so forth – taught in a way that is
comprehensible for students with limited English. The goal in the
minds of both the students and the teacher is mastering subject
matter, not particular rules of grammar or vocabulary. In this
way, students absorb academic English naturally and incidentally,
while they are learning useful knowledge. If students are tested,
they are tested on subject matter, not language.
(Crawford and Krashen, 2007: 24)
It is included as part of the training for content teachers of ESL students in
the USA in the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) teacher-
training courses.
As Crawford and Krashen relate:
At rst, subjects such as science or math are chosen because they can
be more easily contextualized, and thereby made comprehensible
through the use of realia and pictures. Beginners in the second
language are not included in sheltered classes, because the input
will not be comprehensible for them. Fluent English speakers are
not included either, because their interactions with the teacher and
with each other may be incomprehensible to the other students.
… Studies with intermediate, literate foreign-language students
have consistently demonstrated the effectiveness of sheltered
subject-matter teaching. Students in these classes acquire as
much or more language as those in regular intermediate classes,
and they learn impressive amounts of subject matter at the same
time. Moreover, the kind of language they acquire is academic
language, the cognitively challenging competencies needed for
school success.
(Crawford and Krashen, 2007: 25)
A further description is given by Collier and Crawford:
At the secondary school level, students attend classes in subjects
that they need to graduate from high school …. Sheltered
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instruction refers to a content subject (science, math, or social
studies) taught to ESL students by a teacher who has certication
in the content area being taught.
(Collier and Crawford, 1998: 56)
The Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) Model is a research-
based and validated instructional model … [for] addressing the academic
needs of English learners throughout the United States. The SIOP Model
consists of eight interrelated components: Lesson Preparation, Building
Background, Comprehensible Input, Strategies, Interaction, Practice/
Application, Lesson Delivery, Review and Assessment’ (www.cal.org/
siop/about, accessed 13 February 2018). ‘The SIOP Model can be applied
successfully in any context where English language learners are learning
content and language simultaneously. It is most frequently implemented in
content-based or thematic ESL classes, secondary content classes …, [and]
specically designed sheltered content courses’ (www.cal.org/siop/faqs/
(accessed 13 February 2018).
All evidence points to the need for ESL students to have content-
related instruction in a paradigm of separate classes for ESL beginners,
gradually segueing into a programme of partial separation and some
integration, parallel classes of selected and adapted content (described
in full in Carder, 2007a). Crawford and Krashen (2007: 44) state: ‘For
diverse schools, a program of communication-based ESL and sheltered
subject-matter instruction, combined with native-language support by
paraprofessionals, is often the best solution’, and Janzen (2008: 1030,
quoted in Scanlan and López, 2012: 601–2), writes, ‘The academic uses of
language as well as the meaning of individual words need to be explicitly
taught for students to fulll the genre or discourse requirements privileged
in academic settings and to understand the material they encounter.’
CLIL: Content and language integrated learning
A comparable model is CLIL – Content and language integrated learning
(Wolff, 2003; Nikula et al., 2016; Bentley, 2010; Coyle et al., 2012; Dale
and Tanner, 2012) – in which the focus is on academic content – science,
maths, social sciences – taught in ways adapted to the linguistic abilities of
ESL students. Above all, different modes of assessment are required for ESL
students.
An effective ESL programme in the middle-school years will have
an ESL class for beginners in which, over the year, students may exit in
controlled stages to sheltered instruction classes in maths and possibly
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How the fields of bilingualism and SLA can guide good practice
science. Intermediate students will require sheltered instruction in maths,
science, social studies/humanities and English (literature) for a longer period.
ESL students (beginners excepted) need to be assessed on ‘sheltered
content’, i.e. the quality of the content, not the language. How long students
remain in the sheltered ESL class is an important issue: many schools ‘rush’
the exit process in order to respond to parental demands, or those of
administration. The weakness of many ESL programmes is that students
are transferred to the mainstream before they have acquired enough ‘second
language instructional competence’ (SLIC) to do well in content classes.
Five to eight years is the time shown by research for ESL students to score
at the 50th percentile level on tests of reading comprehension in English
(Thomas and Collier, 1997). This is a high level of achievement, and a SLIC
level may be acquired in a shorter time. Rolstad (2017: 497) has suggested
that there there is a need for ‘attention given to how SLIC, rather than the
BICS/CALP dichotomy, might usefully guide effective teaching for second
language learners’. Crawford and Krashen (2007: 22, 23) point out that it
is a mistake to exit the SLIC class before the students have enough English
to do well in the subject-content classroom. They add that there is often an
urgency to exit which may be misplaced.
SLIC is the level of language prociency required for ESL students
to learn in English-language classrooms. Crawford and Krashen (ibid.) also
write that it will vary according to students’ background knowledge of
subject-matter; for example, young children are quicker to develop SLIC in
mathematics than in social sciences, namely geography and history. This is
because maths is easier to contextualize using non-linguistic means, and the
humanities involve abstract concepts that are harder to clarify.
Ovando elaborates further on this:
Content ESL is based on two important linguistic concepts.
The rst one is Krashen’s (1982) familiar concept that language
acquisition occurs when students, in an interesting, low-anxiety
context, are provided with comprehensible input which is slightly
above the students’ level of understanding. The second one is that
second language prociency entails control not only of social
but also of academic language … [A]cademic language tends to
be more abstract and complex, and thus more challenging for
students. It takes more years to master than social language.
This is the type of language that is present in math and science
classrooms, and by integrating these subjects with linguistically
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86
appropriate support in L2 development, the student has a better
opportunity to develop academic language.
(Ovando, 1998: 185)
And:
According to Crandall (1987: 7): ‘Many content-based
ESL programs have developed to provide students with an
opportunity to learn CALP [academic language], as well as to
provide a less abrupt transition from the ESL classroom to an all-
English-medium academic program. Content-based ESL courses
… provide direct instruction in the special language of the subject
matter, while focusing attention as much or more on the subject
matter itself.’
(ibid.)
The following strategies are identied for use in sheltered classes:
● promoting collaboration between teachers and among students
● modifying language
● increasing the relevancy of [content] lessons to students’ everyday lives
● adapting [content] materials; and
● using language teaching techniques in presenting [content] concepts.
(Fathman, Quinn and Kessler, 1992: 4,
quoted in Ovando, 1998: 185)
Conclusions
However, there are schools in which practitioners have built up programmes
that recognize students’ multilingual identities, and provide programmes
for their cognitive, academic language growth. As Genesee writes (2004:
550–1), ‘The success of bilingual education, like general education, depends
on the day-to-day quality of instruction (including materials), continuity
in program delivery, competence of instructional personnel, class size and
composition, etc.’ This may sound self-evident, but in fact it is these factors
which will make or break a successful programme, and which are so difcult
to institute and keep running.
3
Part Three
The human factor
88
Chapter 5
The reality of teacher
relationships, their
implications for teachers
and pedagogy, and the
consequences of a decit
model for SLLs
Teacher relationships
The bland statement that ‘all content teachers are also teachers of language’
is one that resonates throughout schools today, without any rigour to ensure
that content teachers know anything at all about teaching ‘language’. A
further requirement that is imposed by managerial diktat is for ESL teachers,
in whatever capacity, to have successful interchanges of ideas with content
teachers, without the management having any knowledge of the complexity
of teacher–teacher relationships in schools, or providing any training or
advice on the subject. In the absence of such knowledge or training this is
like saying, ‘The role I envision is one where the principal is not the expert
with all the answers but the head learner and teacher who guides his or her
colleagues through example’ (Shaw, 2003: 110), without taking any steps to
ensure that such practice ensues. As Shaw, himself a school principal, notes:
Almost every study on successful schools acknowledges the
important role of collegiality among teachers. Notwithstanding
the rhetoric, in my own research I have found little evidence
of teachers working collegially. Indeed, I have found that the
traditions of professional privacy and teacher isolation are alive
and well.
(Shaw, 2003: 104–5)
This does not bode well for a supposed successful interaction between
content teachers and ESL teachers.
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The reality of teacher relationships
Many academics have not worked in schools and are not in any way
cognizant of the daily tensions in school life, especially in secondary schools.
Block, for example, writes (2003: 11) that there is ‘a sneaking tendency in the
eld [of research] to disengage from practical teaching matters’. Fortunately,
some researchers have looked into the issue of relations between ESL and
content teachers, and their results are revealing.
Contrived collegiality
Arkoudis and Creese write about ‘Teacher–teacher talk’ exposing the
potential pitfalls of ESL teacher/subject teacher collaboration. They note that:
Central to teacher collaboration is the relationship between the
ESL and content teacher. Within policy documents this has been
represented as a simple relationship, where ideas are shared
in planning for the ESL students within mainstream classes
(Arkoudis, 2003; Creese, 2002; Leung, 2004). Yet within the
same policy documents we have a framing of ESL curriculum
as adjunct to the mainstream curriculum. The ESL curriculum is
offered as a strategy-based methodology. It is used to supplement
the mainstream curriculum, but is not considered to have a
content area of its own (Arkoudis, 2003). … The subjects do
not have equal status, and ESL is in effect an adjunct to the
mainstream curriculum.
(Arkoudis and Creese, 2006: 411)
Furthermore, Davison writes:
Teacher collaboration is promoted as a panacea for many ills,
from breaking down the professional isolation of the classroom to
compensating for inadequate professional development to salving
the wounds wrought by overly ambitious curriculum reform
(Corrie, 1995; Hargreaves, 1994; Hargreaves and McMillan,
1994; Little, 1990). To some critics teacher collaboration is yet
another poorly conceived but increasingly popular imposition
on teachers from above, a contrived collegiality (Hargreaves,
1994: 208):
In contrived collegiality, collaboration amongst teachers was
compulsory, not voluntary; bounded and xed in space and
time; implementation- rather than development-orientated;
and meant to be predictable rather than unpredictable in its
outcomes.
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90
The literature suggests, however, that effective collaboration
between teachers is not only rare, but extremely difcult to
sustain. As Little (1990: 180) comments:
The closer one gets to the classroom and to the central
questions of curriculum and instruction, the fewer are the
recorded instances of meaningful, rigorous collaboration.
(Davison, 2006: 458)
This robust description of the reality in schools is a pre-eminent justication
for having experts in their eld – qualied SL teachers – be responsible for
‘all things ESL’ in international schools.
Implications for relationships
Arkoudis and Creese (2006) go on to point out that many researchers have
indicated that discourse between content teachers and ESL teachers is a key
element in developing appropriate ‘linguistically responsive’ teaching for
ESL students. However, anyone who has worked in an international school
knows that more time for discussion of important pedagogical matters
is frequently at the top of teachers’ priority lists and is just as frequently
rejected by directors.
As Arkoudis writes (2006: 417), ‘Educational policy on collaboration
between ESL and mainstream teachers has assumed that the professional
relationship is unproblematic and uncomplicated.’ She continues:
ESL as pedagogy has claims to content such as knowledge about
the English language, knowledge about rst- and second-language
development, and knowledge of relevant language-teaching
methodologies (Hammond, 1999: 33 [untraced]). These are
substantial areas of expertise, yet within the institutional context
of secondary school education, ESL is positioned as strategy-
driven and does not have the same authority as subjects such
as mathematics and science within the secondary curriculum.
Therefore ESL is perceived as being lower in the subject hierarchy
of the school. This institutionalised positioning of the subject has
an impact on developing collaborative practices between ESL
and mainstream teachers.
(Arkoudis, 2006: 417)
This sums up precisely the status of ESL in schools and the effect it has
on ESL staff, and is why it has to be completely turned on its head in
international schools with the same type of positive discrimination that has
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The reality of teacher relationships
been seen in the ght for race, gender and sexual equality. Davison (2006:
472) summarizes: ‘Among the many conclusions that can be drawn from
this study is that partnership between ESL and classroom teachers is neither
easy nor unproblematic.’
Arkoudis (2006: 429) goes on to write about her research in schools,
and to document the relationship between an ESL teacher and a science
teacher. The ESL teacher, she explains, does not have the epistemological
authority in the school to force the science teacher to reposition the science
curriculum in ways more appropriate for ESL students, whereas the
science teacher has a high-status subject. Arkoudis then writes that after
many conversations the ESL teacher makes some headway. However, in
international schools there is a constant ux of staff, and for every ESL
teacher to devote much time and energy to persuading individual content
teachers might be beyond their powers, and in any case possibly wasted as
either teacher might soon leave the school.
Creese exemplies the lower status of the ESL teacher in relation to
the subject teacher in the lived reality of the classroom in this conversation
between a student (S1) and a subject teacher (T):
S1: Miss, what have you got that for [referring to the tape
recorder]?
T: Because she [the researcher] wants to record what I am saying
and what Miss Smith [the language specialist] is saying and
then she can play it back and she can see if there is a difference
between the two of us.
S1: There is.
…
T: Why?
S1: Miss, you’re the better teacher, aren’t you?
…
But you’re the proper teacher, aren’t you?
T: Well, no. We are both proper teachers.
S1: She’s like a help.
(Creese, 2002: 605, quoted in Monaghan, 2010: 20)
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We know from Cummins’s work (2000) that ESL students’ perception of
their teachers’ status reects on their own status, then on their self-esteem
and ultimately on their potential.
Arkoudis’s comments about the science teacher leaving the school
are all too true for international schools. ESL teachers spend much time
developing worksheets on content-area materials for ESL students and for
specic teachers, then the teachers leave, the curriculum changes, the new
head of school does not understand the process, or the number of ESL
teachers is reduced as they are ‘support’, therefore peripheral, therefore the
rst to be subject to budget cuts.
Davison also writes:
There are a number of essential elements for effective
collaboration between language and content-area teachers,
which have been discussed elsewhere (see, for example, Davison,
1992; Hurst and Davison, 2005), including the need to establish
a clear conceptualisation of the task, the incorporation of explicit
goals for ESL development into curriculum and assessment
planning processes, the negotiation of a shared understanding of
ESL and mainstream teachers’ roles/responsibilities, the adoption
of common curriculum planning proformas and processes,
experimentation with diversity as a resource to promote effective
learning for all students, the development of articulated and
exible pathways for ESL learning support, and the establishment
of systematic mechanisms for monitoring, evaluation and
feedback.
(Davison, 2006: 456)
This is a wealth of advice for school leaders to take on board.
Implications for pedagogy
The long-term degrading of ESL as a subject has profound implications
for pedagogy, as the entire subject area – one of extreme complexity – has
been sidelined to the status of support, taught by non-professionals. In
England it is:
no longer regarded as a distinct subject area, and ESL and the needs
of ESL students are subsumed in the mainstream curriculum. ESL
teachers and the mainstream class teacher ‘should work together’.
ESL has no distinct discipline status; there are no ESL curriculum
specications and no national ESL scales for assessment. Funding
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The reality of teacher relationships
for ESL has been reduced repeatedly, giving the impression that
ESL has no academic status or curriculum value. Mainstream
teachers now have some awareness of the specic needs of second
language learners, but ESL may well disappear as a distinct
professional practice.
(Leung and Franson, 2001a: 163)
This paints a bleak picture for ESL students in England (where many
teachers and international school leaders come from); they no longer
have any informed professionals to receive instruction from, or to turn to
for advice.
Franson comments on the realities of what has happened to SLLs in
the wake of mainstreaming in England:
[O]ne might argue that the National Curriculum programmes of
study and assessment, which are continually being advocated as
applicable to all learners, have absolved the teacher from taking
responsibility for the distinct and separate learning needs of EAL
pupils. And perhaps one result of this continued reliance on the
EAL teacher to take responsibility for EAL learning is that the
issues are not articulated or debated within the professional remit
of the class teacher, nor are they present in initial teacher training.
(Franson, 1999: 68)
It must be emphasized that the ‘EAL’ teacher referred to is probably an
assistant and may have no training or qualication.
In another extract, Franson comments on interviews that have taken
place with class teachers:
One interesting aspect of the three interviews could be simply
described as a perception of ‘resentment’ or ‘resistance’ about the
responsibility placed upon the class teacher of an EAL pupil. One
teacher spoke at length about the parents’ responsibilities for
their children’s language learning. ‘I wonder sometimes whether
they know exactly what it is we’re trying to teach them or
whether they actually think that they’re going to come here and
just learn English … and if I had children and suddenly wanted
to take them to another country and send them to school there I
don’t think I’d just suddenly put them into a school with no …
language and expect them to get on with it …’.
(Franson, 1999: 69)
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94
This is an issue which is more complicated for international school parents.
In my discussions with them about why they choose a particular school,
the response is always the same: ‘We had no choice. We arrived in this
country and this is the school which our [embassy, organization, agency]
recommended.’ This puts the responsibility entirely on the school to provide
a professional ESL and mother-tongue programme, which it should now
be in a position to do after so much experience of the international school
network over the last four decades.
Here Franson understates the effects of ‘mainstreaming’ on teachers
and students:
Teaching EAL learners continues to be a daunting responsibility
for teachers who, in the past decade, have been subject to
signicant and demanding innovations in the education system.
Asked how they felt about this responsibility, one teacher
commented, ‘apprehension and fear that one won’t be able to
… that it will be an overwhelming task’. Another spoke of her
colleagues feeling ‘very frustrated and de-skilled in a way …’.
And the new pupils? ‘Overwhelming for them … it’s quite hard,
it’s quite hard’.
The teacher takes a predominant role in ensuring the inclusion
of EAL pupils in shared classroom practices. However, in light of
these interviews with class teachers, and despite their expressed
good intentions, one might suggest that mainstreaming EAL
pupils may have granted EAL pupils equality of presence, but has
not necessarily secured equality of participation and achievement.
(Franson, 1999: 69–70)
‘Not necessarily’ can probably be taken as meaning that most ‘EAL
pupils’ are not receiving an instructional programme appropriate to their
linguistic needs.
The grim reality for ESL students in England is that:
Unfortunately, in England at the moment, there is no consensus
on an appropriate EAL pedagogical framework, although there
are often advice and materials produced at a local level, nor are
there programmes of work that a class teacher can access, nor
is there an agreed framework of EAL development that will
help teachers to monitor and evaluate the progress of their EAL
learners. … [I]t would seem that one of the key issues vital to
effective practice, that of teachers’ personal and professional
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The reality of teacher relationships
beliefs (Richards and Lockhart, 1994; Day, 1987; Diamond,
1991), has not been sufciently addressed.
(Franson, 1999: 68, 69)
As far as it has been possible to ascertain, teachers doing a year’s training
for a PGCE in England spend just half a day of that year on second language
issues. As Leung and Franson state (2001b: 169), ‘Sometimes this lack of
recognised and recognisable training has led to difculties in establishing
the credibility of the ESL teacher among school staff.’ This also seems like a
considerable understatement.
Most poignant, and extraordinarily negative as regards the approach
of the government, is this statement:
In England language support teachers may end up mediating
between the class teacher and the pupils often in hushed voices
at the back of the classroom. Even in well-managed classes the
ESL support teacher role, under such circumstances, is reduced
to a teaching assistant. In lessons where the teaching and
learning activities and the work materials are disorganized, the
contribution of the ESL support teacher may be reduced further.
(Leung and Franson, 2001b: 170)
This is the pedagogical framework that ESL teachers and, of more concern,
school leaders and decision makers come from before embarking on a
career in international schools. The implications for pedagogy are clear:
international schools should take note.
Teachers’ professional lives
Goodson and Hargreaves point out that:
The aspiration for teachers to have professional lives is not a
given phenomenon but a contested one. It marks a struggle to
redene the work of teaching by governments, administrators,
business and teachers themselves. Achieving the actuality of
professional lives in teaching is not easy. Nor is it totally clear
what this aspiration for professional lives might mean, or entail,
even if it could be realized.
(Goodson and Hargreaves, 1996: 4)
They then give descriptions of various types of professionalism,
summarized below:
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96
● Classical professionalism denes the practices of law and medicine
as the traditional professions which fullled basic criteria for having
specialized knowledge, professional ethics and internal regulation.
● Flexible professionalism describes our present world, characterized by
manufactured uncertainty and where postmodern chaos, complexity
and uncertainty are not merely contingent or unintended, but also
to some extent the results of wilful acts by governmental, corporate
and nancial powers which seek to maximize their own interests by
keeping everything exible, interest groups fragmented and everyone
off-balance.
● Practical professionalism is an attempt to give dignity and status to
teachers’ lives and work. It shows how teachers’ personal practical
knowledge allows us to talk about teachers as knowledgeable and
knowing people. It gives them status as practitioners but not the power
to inuence the system of values that education is based on.
● In extended professionalism teachers look beyond the classroom
to visualize the wider social context of education. All pedagogical
practices – work in the classroom, methodology – are seen as rational
rather than intuitive. This may lead to distended professionalism,
in which teachers overstretch themselves as they attempt to manage
other workers, write new curricula and plan staff development, and
thus short-change their students.
● Complex professionalism describes the situation in a world of
accelerating changes in global economics, where teachers have more
administration to do and are often overloaded. Schoolwork is highly
complex and becoming more so, and teachers are expected to be
knowledgeable, experienced, thoughtful, committed and energetic.
This expectation may lead to long-term damage to their health, lives
and staying power.
(ibid.: 4–19)
Goodson and Hargreaves go on to recommend that in the current atmosphere
of increasing demands for technical competency and subject knowledge,
professionalism should be dened under a new heading, postmodern
professionalism, with seven areas:
1. Increased opportunity and responsibility to exercise discretionary
judgement over the issues of teaching, curriculum and care that affect
one’s students.
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The reality of teacher relationships
2. Opportunities and expectations to engage with the moral and social
purposes and value of what teachers teach, along with major curriculum
and assessment matters in which these purposes are embedded.
3. Commitment to working with colleagues in collaborative cultures of
help and support as a way of using shared expertise to solve the ongoing
problems of professional practice, rather than engaging in joint work as
a motivational device to implement the external mandates of others.
4. Occupational heteronomy rather than self-protective autonomy, in
which teachers work authoritatively yet openly and collaboratively with
partners in the wider community (especially parents and the students
themselves), who have a signicant stake in the students’ learning.
5. A commitment to active care and not just anodyne service for
students. Professionalism must in this sense acknowledge and embrace
the emotional as well as the cognitive dimensions of teaching, and
recognize the skills and dispositions that are essential to committed and
effective caring.
6. A self-directed search and struggle for continuous learning related to
one’s own expertise and standards of practice, rather than compliance
with the enervating obligations of endless change demanded by others
(often under the guise of continuous learning or improvement).
7. The creation and recognition of high task complexity, with levels of
status and reward appropriate to such complexity.
(ibid.: 20–1)
Leung (2013) also discusses two kinds of professionalism, which he
labels ‘sponsored professionalism’ and ‘independent professionalism’. By
sponsored professionalism he means the qualied status that any teacher
needs to obtain in order to practise in a national system. He notes elsewhere:
By independent professionalism is meant a commitment to
reexive and critical examination of the educational values,
pedagogic assumptions, knowledge bases and curriculum
practices built into sponsored professionalism, and to take
initiative and action to open up debates and to effect change
where appropriate.
(Leung and Creese, 2010: 126)
In the current book this is our aim: to effect change. For teachers in schools
it is not so easy: in the private sector of international education criticism of
established ways can be unwelcome and lead to non-renewal of contract.
The authors are continually receiving emails from distressed ESL teachers
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98
about how their programmes are being downgraded, merged with SEN
departments, forced to accept teaching assistants, and how they are told
not to contact outside experts on ESL: they add that they are worried about
losing their jobs.
The consequences for teachers of decisions taken by school leaders
or educational agencies without consultation may be severe, as recounted
by Stringer:
People sometimes tell lies deliberately to misinform others. The
issue of ‘truth’ is much broader than this, however. Truth is brought
to question when information is distorted or misrepresented
in attempts to persuade or deceive. Inated estimates of costs
and unwarranted promises of the benets of particular projects
are but two ways in which practitioners can distort truth and
damage communicative action. …
Manipulation through the use of distorted information or
failure to make covert agendas explicit is so common that it is
often accepted as an unfortunate but necessary part of social,
organizational, and political life. Damage to communicative
action through untruthfulness, however, often leads to more
general problems. When people have been tricked or duped, they
are frequently unable to continue to work harmoniously with
those they feel have cheated them, and the chances of productive
and effective work taking place are diminished accordingly.
(Stringer, 1999: 33)
He continues:
A feature of modern life is the concentration of power in the
hands of small groups of people. … [M]anagers are given decision-
making power over large groups to enable them to control and
organize activities. … Management is greatly affected by the
needs to play off the agendas of the various client groups and to
deal with political machinations that often arise. … All too often,
supercial solutions provide the semblance of immediate action
but in effect can actually exacerbate the situation.
(Stringer, 1999: 39–40)
Barnett discusses the complexities of managing universities in a ‘super-
complex age’. He notes the advantage of forming a distinction between
leadership and management:
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The reality of teacher relationships
It would take the general form of the following: the task of
leadership is that of bringing into view new frameworks; the
challenge of management is that of producing an environment
in which such frameworks can be given a fair hearing; and
the achievement of leadership/management lies in developing
institutional processes such that new frameworks are
spontaneously sought. In other words, the concepts of leadership
and management both do worthwhile work (Middlehurst, 1993)
but, in an age of super-complexity, they overlap each other.
Effective leadership requires effective management (we might
speak of leadership-in-action) and effective management requires
effective leadership (having the intellectual generosity to envisage
new frameworks of understanding).
(Barnett, 2001: 31)
This framework provides denitions of management that involve more
responsibility towards the teacher as professional. International school
providers need to wake up to the need for a re-professionalization of ESL
programmes and skilled and qualied ESL teachers in international schools,
where ESL teachers are seen as the key to success for the SL learners
who are now a majority in international schools. In middle schools ESL
departments will be seen as centres of expertise, serving to spread awareness
of second language issues throughout the school for content teachers and
management.
The consequences of a decit model for students
Harper and de Jong write:
If ESL teachers’ specialized knowledge and skills are not
recognized in their schools it is unlikely that they will be called
upon to represent or advocate for ELLs’ curricular or assessment
needs, provide professional development for teacher colleagues
or assume roles as equal partners in collaborative team settings
(Davison, 1992, 2006; Hurst and Davison, 2005). As a result,
ESL students will continue to nd themselves in classrooms
with teachers who are unprepared to meet their linguistic and
cultural needs or who are not willing or motivated to alter their
instruction signicantly because they believe that good teaching
for uent English speakers is good teaching for all students.
(Harper and de Jong, 2009: 144)
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100
This reects the conclusion reached by Leung, who explains how a
phenomenon of inclusion (mainstreaming) of ESL students was justied in
education policy in England following the 1985 Swann Report: ‘In other
words, mainstreaming ESL students takes priority over the adapting and
extending the mainstream curriculum for ESL students’ (Leung, 2007: 258).
Everything these researchers have written is borne out by the present author’s
own experience. The well-intentioned research of academics has been
watered down and politicized by school authorities, school heads, middle
management, curriculum agencies and accreditation bodies to provide a
bland ‘ESL students should be integrated into the mainstream: deal with it’,
without any serious reckoning with the implications or consequences. As
Fukuyama explains:
[E]lite groups have a stake in existing institutional arrangements
and will defend the status quo as long as they continue to remain
cohesive. Even when the society as a whole would benet from
an institutional change … well-organized groups will be able to
veto change because for them the net gain is negative.
(Fukuyama, 2011: 454)
In summary, various factors in the elds of research have led to new ways of
looking at the potential of ESL students: different models are recommended
for various situations. Bilingual models are seen as the most successful, but
these are only possible where two languages are involved. It is necessary to
search in depth to nd references to appropriate provision for ESL students
in places where there is the wide diversity of mother tongues found in
international schools, and such references are often dismissive and rarely
come up with viable solutions.
4
Part Four
The role of external
curriculum and
accreditation bodies:
Pitfalls and alternatives
102
Chapter 6
The role of external bodies,
such as the Council of
International Schools and the
International Baccalaureate,
in international schools:
The erosion of the
acknowledgement of SLL
needs and potential
Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and
speak different languages, the united public opinion necessary to the
working of representative government cannot exist.
(John Stuart Mill, 1861, chapter 7)
‘Expediency,’ Izzie said …, ‘generally trumps ethics, I’ve noticed.’
(Atkinson, 2013: 157)
Accreditation
International schools can choose their route to being accredited, and which
curriculum they follow. Carder and Mertin have had extensive experience
with the CIS for accreditation, and with the IB for curriculum and assessment;
these will be reviewed in depth in this chapter. The world of international
education has been described as a small one. Once on the circuit, teachers
and administrators become known to each other to a degree that may
appear surprising to those not involved. The intricate workings of the IB
curriculum, and accreditation processes, are quite familiar to those working
with these frameworks. Readers not familiar with these matters are advised
to peruse the websites www.cois.org, www.ecis.org and www.ibo.org (all
accessed 13 February 2018).
Each organization will be reviewed to evaluate its provision for ESL
students, as will other agencies involved with international education.
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The role of external bodies
The ECIS and the CIS began as one (i.e. ECIS) and remained so until
June 2003, when the CIS split off from the ECIS. The ECIS was formerly
known as the European Council of International Schools. The CIS is now
the body responsible for accreditation, teacher and executive recruitment,
and higher education recruitment, all offered worldwide, whereas the ECIS
continues to devote itself to services such as professional development in
Europe, awards, fellowships, advice on student and programme assessment,
and curriculum development. The CIS has 700 afliated schools, 320 of
them accredited. It is based in Leiden. The ECIS website (www.ecis.org),
with its new name, ‘The Educational Collaborative for International
Schools’, states: ‘ECIS … is a non-prot global membership organisation
that provides professional learning, research, advocacy, and grants and
awards for the benet of its members.’ It is currently based in London.
ESL and mother tongues in the CIS and the ECIS
In 1983 at the ECIS autumn conference in Rome a group of teachers,
including myself, saw the need for a committee to address the needs of SLLs,
and the ECIS ESL committee was born. The rst subject-specic conference
took place at the Vienna International School in 1987, with keynote speaker
Professor Jim Cummins, who has done so much to highlight the potential
of ESL students, and the need for recognition of their pedagogical needs.
In the 1980s and 1990s the committee staged conferences every
two years from 1987 to 1993, with keynote speaker Dr Virginia Collier,
and again in 1995, 2000 and 2002. Committee members were active in
working with the ECIS and giving valued input to the ESL section of the
accreditation guidelines. Conferences were subsequently scheduled every
three years, with increasing numbers of participants – 500 at the 2005 venue
in Rome, the 2008 venue in Geneva, in Düsseldorf in 2011 on the theme
‘Promoting linguistic human rights in internationals schools: From theory
to the classroom’, then in Amsterdam in 2014, and in Copenhagen in 2017.
When the CIS split off from the ECIS in June 2003, the CIS published
a new ‘Guide to Accreditation’ in which ESL was placed at the end of the
guide under ‘Learning Support Services’, and ESL was grouped together
with SEN as a non-curriculum subject. The committee, which by this time
had renamed itself the ‘ECIS ESL and Mother Tongue Committee’ in order
to reect the importance of the maintenance of students’ mother tongues,
protested vigorously about the new placement of ESL in the Guide and had
meetings with the head of CIS accreditation services at that time, but to no
avail. (In March 2017 the ‘ESL and Mother Tongue Committee’ renamed
itself the ‘Multilingual Learning in International Education Committee’
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104
(MLIE).) In future there would be no input from subject committees. Thus
a comprehensive listing of best possible practice for ESL students was no
longer written by ESL educators, and the section for ESL was relabelled as
learning support, placed under student support services, and was relegated
to the back section of the Accreditation document: twenty years of consistent
professional input on ESL matters was swept away by managerial edict
(Carder, 2014a). The CIS has rewritten the relevant wording in the 8th
edition of the guide as ‘Effective language support programmes shall assist
learners to access the school’s formal curriculum and other activities’,
which is now in ‘Section E: Access to teaching and learning’. This shows
the continued use of the term ‘support’, which puts such programmes in the
peripheral box and rst in the line of re to cut spending on.
An experienced accrediting teacher commented:
The accreditation process is simply too bland. Schools can
have minimum ESL programmes, taught peripherally, and such
schools can be re-accredited, accreditation team members saying
‘they can only make suggestions’. CIS accreditation has no teeth,
and schools can do what they like. In any case probably only a
small percentage of international schools are accredited, leaving
many schools free to ignore professional ESL provision.
The New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC), which
frequently co-accredits schools with the CIS, actually states, ‘NEASC
Accreditation does not guarantee the quality of specic programs’
(www.neasc.org/overview/faq, accessed 13 August 2018).
Since then the status of ESL has progressively declined, and incoming
leadership, new to international education, simply takes it as a given that
ESL, which is labelled ‘Language Support’, is in its rightful place, as can be
seen from the following sections of the CIS accreditation guide:
PART TWO – SECTION E
ACCESS TO TEACHING & LEARNING
INTRODUCTION
Students’ opportunities to access teaching and learning are
inuenced by the quality of school support programmes. These
incorporate provisions for addressing learner needs including
identied learning challenges or special talents, language support
and counselling, guidance and health services. The nature and
level of services should be determined by the school’s Guiding
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The role of external bodies
Statements, the learning and well being needs of the student
body, and the age range of those enrolled.
(CIS/NEASC, 2014: 31; emphasis added)
A glossary in the guide denes support staff thus:
Support Staff: this term is used in the broad sense of school
employees who contribute to school life by means other than the
directly academic. These include classroom assistants, ofce staff,
and employees involved in auxiliary services (canteen, cleaning,
transport, security, etc.).
(ibid.: 5)
The status of those who support SLLs is made quite clear here, and the
students themselves will no doubt be aware of their own status, which will
impact on their self-esteem, and thus their potential.
The fact that the ‘language support’ standard comes immediately
after the standard (E2) for ‘Children with learning differences or specic
needs’ gives a green light for school heads to justify their decision to place
the two areas in the same box, to the detriment of ESL students who need
their own curriculum and programme of instruction. School heads from
Britain will immediately place ESL under the supervision of a SEN head of
department as this is the standard procedure in England, where ESL has no
professional status. Evidence of this is constantly presenting itself as ESL
teachers contact me (through my website) to ask for advice.
It is evident that the CIS and the NEASC urgently need to produce an
entirely separate protocol for international schools.
Mother tongues in accreditation documents
For mother-tongue learning the accreditation document has only a bland
‘Standard E3d: The school encourages parents to continue development of
the student’s home language(s)’.
The vital role of mother tongues in contributing to success in a second
language has been conrmed by research studies:
The key nding … is the crucial role that … L1 plays in schooling
English learners. Along with fellow researchers across the world,
we continue to nd in each study that we conduct that the
most powerful predictor of LM [language minority] student
achievement in second language is nonstop development of
students’ L1 through the school curriculum (including schooling
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through the second language, usually the dominant language of
the host country).
(Collier and Thomas, 2017: 2)
They then give an extensive list of references that back up their ndings:
Research syntheses from other countries on the importance
of bilingual schooling for LM groups include, for example:
[C.] Baker, 2011; [C.] Baker & Prys Jones, 1998; Christian &
Genesee, 2001; Cummins, 2000; Cummins & Hornberger, 2008;
Dutcher, 2001; [O.] García, Skutnabb-Kangas & Torres-Guzmán,
2006; Hélot & de Mejía, 2008; May & Hill, 2005; Skutnabb-
Kangas, Phillipson, Mohanty & Panda, 2009; and Tucker, 1999.
Meta-analyses and research syntheses of U.S. studies examining
long-term English learner achievement in bilingual schooling
and the importance of L1 development for success in L2 are
summarized and/or analyzed in Collier, [1992]; Dolson, 1985;
Greene, 1998; Krashen and Biber, 1988; Lindholm-Leary, 2001;
Lindholm-Leary & Borsato, 2006; Lindholm-Leary & Genesee,
2010; Lindholm-Leary & Howard, 2008; [J.D.] Ramírez, 1992;
Rolstad, Mahoney and Glass, 2005; Thomas, 1992; Troike,
1978; and Willig, 1985.
(Collier and Thomas, 2017: 2)
Further evidence comes from Umansky and Reardon:
Our ndings support theory and research on second language
acquisition and bilingual instruction. Transfer theory and
underlying prociency theory both suggest that acquiring
a solid foundation in one’s native language supports one’s
ability to acquire prociency in a second language (Cummins,
1991; Goldenberg & Coleman, 2010). Studies have found a
transfer effect of home language to English in areas including
phonological awareness (López & Greeneld, 2004), vocabulary
(Ordóñez, Carlo, Snow, & McLaughlin, 2002), and reading (Páez
& Rinaldi, 2006).
(Umansky and Reardon, 2014: 904–5)
However, this major contributory factor to students’ learning potential gets
a mere footnote in the accreditation process.
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The role of external bodies
The elephant in the room
I have been on many school accreditation visits as a team member and
co-chair, taken part in three accreditation processes at my former school,
and attended CIS workshops for accreditation team leaders. The emphasis
in CIS accreditations is on openness, transparency, the space for teachers
to raise concerns, and the chance to engage in debate for improvement in
many spheres. But the elephant is still in the room. As long as ESL is not
given a massive boost in its status and standing in international schools, and
that central status is not enshrined in the accreditation process, ESL issues
will continue to be peripheral and linked to SEN under support services.
As an example, at one large international school the leadership
decided to put SEN and ESL in one department under a new position
called Head of Learning Support, as this is the scheme laid down by the
CIS accreditation process. This was against the wishes of the ESL staff,
who proposed a head of IBPYP ESL and a head of IBMYP/DP ESL. The
leadership response to the concerns of these ESL teachers was:
The Head of Learning Support Services’ role will be to identify
the curriculum philosophy and principles together with any
systems and structures for a more coordinated provision of
learning and language support to students who require the means
to successfully access teaching and learning at our school.
This implies that the person selected will have professional training and
qualications in both SEN and ESL. However, it is extremely unlikely that
any head of department would have expertise in and experience of both
elds. This argument also overlooks the fundamental importance of both
the mother tongue and CPD to issues related to bilingualism and second
language development for all members of staff.
It has become clear that the accreditation agencies – the CIS and
the NEASC – are determined that ESL shall remain under ‘support’. This
will have the deleterious effects on both ESL students and their teachers
already documented. It is vital that these two institutions go back to
the drawing board and put the ESL programme where it belongs: at the
centre of the curriculum. It should be situated under Section B, Teaching
and Learning, at the beginning, with clear instructions as to its crucial
role in international schools, which increasingly have 75 per cent or more
ESL students. Fukuyama notes that ‘Human beings can rarely plan for
unintended consequences and missing information, but the fact that they
can plan means that the variance in institutional forms they create is more
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108
likely to produce adaptive solutions than simple randomness’ (Fukuyama,
2011: 446–7). Also, ‘An adaptable organization can evaluate a changing
external environment and modify its own internal procedures in response.
Adaptable institutions are the ones that survive, since environments always
change’ (Fukuyama, 2011: 450). It is time for an adaptive solution.
Other international agencies that provide alternatives
to EAL, and their impact on ESL programmes in
international schools
Two agencies that offer short courses to equip principals and teachers to
manage the teaching of SLLs in international schools are the International
Schools Services – World Language Initiative (ISS WLI; www.iss.edu/
Professional-Learning/World-Language-Initiative/Courses/Course3,
accessed 13 February 2018), and the Principals’ Training Center (PTC;
www.theptc.org/, accessed 13 February 2018). The ISS is a ‘private, non-
prot organization serving American international schoolsoverseas’
(www.iss.edu/, accessed 13 February 2018).
A long-time ESL teacher wrote:
Just heard today that one of our new incredibly competentEAL
colleagues has been told to do all push-in (i.e. in-class
support) or move on, by the school head who has done a WLI
course. This online certicate course is constructed to train
teachers and administrators toadopt wholly push-in teaching as
a one-size-ts-allsolution to addressing ELL needs. Any deviation
from the narrow party line is frowned upon.
Reports have come to me over many years of entire, successful ESL
departments being wiped out after an in-service visit by the programme
designer.
The incident referred to earlier, in which ‘in an international school
an ESL teacher, along with her entire class of ESL students, was physically
pushed by the director into the mainstream classroom’ came about as a
result of that principal recently having completed a WLI course.
As recommended later in this book, valid in-service training for ESL
must be ‘[c]onsistent, long-term training in ESL pedagogy and methodology.
… Quick and dirty 1-day, or 1-hour, in-service sessions simply cannot
provide enough preparation and training for teachers expected to help ELLs
succeed in their mainstream content classes in a new language’ (Hansen-
Thomas and Cavagnetto, 2010: 263).
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The role of external bodies
There have been many extremely effective ESL departments in
international schools throughout the world, often struggling for stafng
and higher levels of professionalism in the face of cuts brought about
specically by school leaders unaware of the different histories of second
language provision in national and international systems. An experienced,
long-serving ESL department head has written:
I’m convinced that it’s simply the fact that administrators want
to economize as much as possible and this model of push-in as
opposed to offering legitimate English-language instruction is
simply easier and cheaper, and ultimately they aren’t concerned
that it does not meet the needs of the students.
It needs repeating: in no other subject would a four- or ve-day course
qualify a teacher or a principal to make far-reaching decisions about a
highly complex and sensitive subject area, or give the trainee the condence
to return to their school and threaten a dedicated teacher with dismissal for
not submitting to the principal’s injunction.
A further organization providing educational services for international
schools, specically in East Asia, is the East Asia Regional Council of
Schools (EARCOS; www.earcos.org/, accessed 13 February 2018).
A working ESL model in the IBPYP
What follows is a description of the ESL programme at a large primary
division in an international school which runs the IBPYP. It shows how a
balance can be achieved by dedicated ESL teachers:
● For ESL Intermediate we have a exible approach re: in-class support
and out-of-class instruction (push-in and pull-out). This works partly
because we are one ESL teacher per Grade Level (GL) and can really
belong to the team, thus taking part in the weekly planning meetings
(which are 3–4 periods of 40 min/week), planning days for Units of
Inquiry (UoI), trips, etc. We help modify material for ESL students
and so on.
● ESL Intensive (Beginners) teachers liaise with the ESL Intermediate
teacher of the Grade Levels they work with and perhaps occasionally
attend the meetings. So, I will liaise with X and Y for information re:
Maths, UoI concepts/vocab, special items like outings and such.
● The ESL Intensive program is of course separate and ‘pull-out’. What
wedo in the ESL Intensive lessons depends on the level of the kids
year-to-year. This is the rst time that there aren’t combined ESL
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110
Intensive groups. With the Grade 4 group, four kids have BICS so
with them I’ve started doing UoI work on a healthy lifestyle, choices,
balance, etc. The two who are complete beginners from Russia are
joining in for the more basic parts of UoI and, otherwise, engaged in
learning about food, expressing their likes/dislikes, number, etc.
● Doing all push-in is denitely a false approach! I believe our former
principal wanted that and he managed to get the visiting expert to
focus on co-teaching during her 3rd and last consultancy visit. He
wanted everything to turn into co-teaching between class T[eacher] and
ESL T[eacher]. I feared too that with our Language Policy expressing
strong statements like those below that the Director would eventually
justify getting rid of ESL specialists. What’s mentioned below is the
ideal world we should be striving towards but that this school and I’m
sure every int’l school is far from:
● ‘All teachers are teachers of language’
● ‘The curriculum enables students to be multilingual and to develop
multiliteracies’.
This brief summary gives a clear picture of how ESL professionals should
be working, but also of the attempts of the administration to get rid of
them, often by bringing in a well-paid expert. Again there is the ‘All
teachers are teachers of language’ jingle, which is meaningless without
a programme of CPD for all staff and leadership over extended periods.
‘The curriculum enables students to be multilingual and to develop
multiliteracies’ says nothing meaningful. ‘The curriculum’ cannot enable
students to be multilingual and multiliterate: rather the qualications,
training and experience of the staff will enable such a development if the
right conditions are available, chief among these being the attitude and
support of the school head. Shaw emphasizes the need to ‘turn top-down
mandates into bottom-up commitment in order to benet all students’
(Shaw, 2003: 99).
ESL in the IB, especially the MYP, in
international schools
The IB has become a franchised commodity, and thus is very
much part of the hypercapitalist transition of society. … The IB
has an image, evident in articles in the popular press, of being a
curriculum for ‘high yers’. This entrenched perception now looks
difcult to reverse, and is a moot point for many international
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The role of external bodies
educators. … The education of the global elite … [contrasts]
strikingly with the inclusive notion of global citizenship.
(Bunnell, 2008: 158)
The IB curriculum is a common feature in international schools and is well
known to educators working in such schools, for whom it is an integral part
of their daily lives. The middle years of schooling, grades 6–10, are crucial
for second language students as they develop the language skills necessary
for success in the various content areas. A large number of international
schools follow the IBMYP, and its failure to provide a credible programme
for SL students, or valid in-service training for SL teachers, is documented
below. It is suggested that those who are not familiar with this programme
visit the IB website, www.ibo.org (accessed 13 February 2018), in order to
become acquainted with this component of international education.
IB structure for languages
The IB began as a two-year course for the nal years of the upper school.
Two of the six subjects studied were languages, dened as language A and
language B. Language A was ‘mother tongue’; language B was ‘foreign
language’. The IB set up a working group in the late 1980s to revise the
Diploma Programme language A/language B model; its efforts came to
fruition in 1996 with the introduction of language A2, which gave more
choice to bilingual students, and the new system was taught successfully by
many enlightened teachers.
The basis of the argument for the change is given in the following
declaration:
For the purpose of assessing language competence in international
schools, a fundamental distinction needs to be enforced between
the notion of second language academic prociency and that of
knowledge of a foreign language. The rst notion relates specically
to the academic use of a non-native language which is practised
through the study of curriculum subjects. The second notion
refers to an ability to function in communication with speakers of
another language outside the school. The emphases are different.
In the case of a second language prociency, the emphasis is on the
high levels of competence required for academic use. In the case of
the knowledge of a foreign language, the linguistic competence is
expected to be conned to basic communicative tasks rather than
sophisticated cognitive operations.
(Tosi, 1991: 93)
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112
This is a lucid statement on the fundamental distinction between foreign
and second language. Thus the new scheme was language A1 for native
speakers, language A2 for procient bilinguals, and language B as a foreign
language.
In the 1990s the IB expanded its curriculum downwards, introducing
the MYP in 1994 and the PYP in 1997. In the MYP, which produced guides
for language A and language B, there was also an initiative and working
group to devise a guide for ‘Second Language Acquisition and Mother
Tongue Development’ (SLA and MTD), of which I was a member. By this
means, the MYP would mirror the DP; the SLA and MTD component
would be the approximate equivalent of language A2. It appeared in 2004;
professional development materials were developed to go with it and
teachers, including myself, were trained to pass these on at workshops.
However, a change of structure, with a more corporate image, was to
envelop the IB. In 2005 the IB board of governors decided to restructure the
entire IB. For the rst time a businessman (American), not an educationalist,
was appointed as director general, and three new IB centres were established
in the wealthiest or most inuential parts of the globe (Bethesda, MD in the
USA, Singapore in Asia, in Europe The Hague), superseding the old ones.
Language A2 was phased out in the Diploma Programme, with a reversion to
language A and language B. In the MYP the ‘SLA and MTD Guide’ was not
updated in line with other subject guides and was apparently intentionally
sidelined, along with the training materials: they are no longer available. At
workshops, ESL teachers were directed to language B (reclassied in 2014
as ‘language acquisition’; see below), which was meaningless to them as it
was for ‘foreign language’, and the IB resolutely stated that ‘there would
never be separate provision for SL students’ (Carder, 2013b).
Second language students in the MYP: Reviewing the path
of the IB
The SLA and MTD Guide is little known, no longer appears on IB websites
alongside the language A and language B guides, and has not been revised
since 2004. It is an extremely useful guide, and the IB’s ‘disappearance’ of it
speaks volumes about the IB agenda on SL students. An email enquiry to the
IB in March 2017 regarding the status of the SLA and MTD Guide received
the reply that ‘the email would be forwarded to a colleague for a response’,
but no more was heard.
As one of the contributors to the guide I can afrm that the working
group intended to develop and expand the guide as the SL programme
progressed in MYP schools. It was an excellent curriculum document,
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The role of external bodies
and formed a basis for sound, constructive practice for SL learners and
teachers, including advice and examples for content teachers on how to
adapt materials in each subject for SLLs. (I am in possession of the pdf.)
At workshops for MYP language B teachers (now language
acquisition), to which teachers of ESL students are now directed, workshop
leaders are continually reported by participants to have little knowledge of
the needs of ESL students, and ESL teachers leave wondering where they
should turn for appropriate IB training. Those developing the SLA and
MTD guide started work on producing a whole package of materials for
training, and teachers were trained to pass these on at workshops. However,
these materials have never been used and were intentionally ‘disappeared’.
Nevertheless, they show conclusively that the IB was and is well aware of the
separate role of a second language, and the need for a dedicated programme
of instruction with its own materials, assessment and in-service training,
because in the Introduction to the materials the following appeared:
For a group of beginners (i.e. teachers), it is recommended to focus
on the importance of providing second language and mother
tongue programmes within the school and the reasons behind
the IBO’s advice to do this. It needs to be emphasized that MYP
schools should be following the guidance provided by the IBO in
Second language Acquisition and Mother Tongue Development:
a guide for schools that was published in 2004. Activities could
also be designed to give participants a basic awareness of what
they can do within their classrooms and schools to complement
second language and mother tongue programmes.
Various slides were prepared, and slide 13 states: ‘For the purposes of the
MYP, “second language” describes the language learned by students, for
whom the LoI (Language of Instruction) is not their mother tongue, in order
to follow the curriculum of the school.’ Slide 21 states: ‘Needs of second
language learners: Second language learners need a well-planned and well-
delivered curriculum enabling them to access, take part, and achieve success
in the academic, social, and cultural life of the school.’ Slide 25 states: ‘An
effective second language programme includes: Admissions policy; Provision
for SL programme entry/exit and transition assistance; Integration of MYP
objectives; Provision for varying prociency levels; Inclusion of SL teachers
in planning; Programme of communicative language learning (core and
generic language skills); Reporting processes.’
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Thus a comprehensive SL programme and documentation were all
prepared, but never launched. No information was given to those who had
participated in the scheme about its demise.
I wrote an article in which two and a half pages are devoted to the
SLA and MTD Guide. The article points out:
[The Guide] contains a statement on page 7 which says the Guide
is ‘a document reective of the educational beliefs and values of
the IBO and the principles of the MYP’. There follows: ‘The IBO
bases its guidance and recommendations on current academic
research related to the particular issue of students acquiring the
language of instruction in schools, and the importance of mother
tongue maintenance and development’.
(Carder, 2006: 117)
Then follows:
Most importantly, there is a statement in bold type which reads
that ‘without such a second language programme, these students
cannot participate fully in the social and cultural aspects of
school life nor will they be able to reach their potential in the
academic use of language in the curriculum.’
(ibid.: 118)
This is a statement of conrmation by the IB that there should be a dedicated
SL programme in the IBMYP, a policy that was dropped and denied without
any ofcial announcement.
As regards certication, it is emphasized that:
Students must take both a language A and a language B to gain
full MYP certication. The result could be that ESL students
will not gain full certication. It is important that the IBO take
a robust line on this matter, ensuring when accrediting MYP
schools that progress is being made as regards the situation of
ESL students, and that they are being given the opportunity to
take their mother tongue as language A.
(ibid.: 119)
Under ‘Recommendations’ (ibid.: 120) is written, ‘Ensure that the Second
Language Acquisition and Mother Tongue Development Guide is an integral
part of the MYP programme.’ None of these recommendations was carried
out: instead, the SLA and MTD Guide was shunted into obscurity, along
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The role of external bodies
with the very recognition of SLLs as a body of learners who had specic,
separate curriculum requirements.
Foreign language and second language: Essential pedagogical
differences
It appears that there has been a misunderstanding on the part of the IB
and others as regards how researchers approach the labelling of languages
for research purposes, and how appropriate designs for pedagogical
programmes provide a clear distinction between ‘second’ and ‘foreign’
language. Happily, the distinctions have been elucidated by Ortega (2013:
5), who writes that ‘the term “L2” or “second/additional language” may
mean the third, fourth, tenth and so on language learned later in life’, but
adds (ibid.: 6), ‘it is important to realize that in SLA the term “second” (or
“L2”) is often used to mean “either a second or a foreign language” and
often “both”’. Then, crucially, Ortega writes, ‘distinguishing among specic
contexts for L2 learning is in fact important. In such cases, SLA researchers
make three (rather than only two) key contextual distinctions: foreign,
second and heritage language learning contexts’ (ibid.). Thus in 2013 an
American researcher is reiterating the conclusion of Tosi in 1991, namely
that there is a clear distinction between foreign and second language.
At present, SLLs – largely ESL students in international schools, as
English is the language of instruction in some 90 per cent of these schools
– are not given any special status or programme in the MYP as regards
curriculum or assessment, the two prime areas that the IB delivers for its
clientele. They are referred to the language B – now Language Acquisition –
programme, one of the eight curriculum areas on the MYP octagon.
Language B students are those who are studying a foreign language.
Typically they begin the language in Year 1 of the MYP (grade 6) and
progress to Year 5 (grade 10), where they gain certication. MYP students
are required to take a language B – now language acquisition – and follow
the designated programme. Language B foreign-language students usually
have three or four lessons a week throughout their ve years, and the
assessment criteria focus on their language competence as foreign-language
speakers. Language B students do not require the language for use in
school. They learn the language as one subject of many. The MYP provides
a Guide for language B which is obligatory. When language B students
leave the classroom they will often not use the language again until the next
language lesson.
Second language students, on the other hand, come to a school with
varying degrees of competence in the language, usually English, which will
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116
be required for academic use in all school subjects, in social use, and in
almost every aspect of their lives, and will thus involve their emotional
and cognitive selves. It may eventually become their best language and
be used for academic advancement, leading to career choice and general
usage. They can be described as ‘developing language A students’. They
need the language all day, every day for learning. Their goal is to develop
native speaker-level, academic competence for success in the IBDP. Three or
four lessons a week are totally inadequate. In addition, the rubrics used for
grading language B in the MYP are totally unsuitable for students learning
through the language of study.
The following comments by Cruickshank about schools in New
Zealand reect the stance adopted by the IB:
[S]chools … seem to have found it much easier to deal with
‘multiculturalism’ in broad brushstroke terms rather than the
complexity and challenges of ‘multilingualism’ and the changes
happening in communities. It still seems the case that if an Anglo-
background student has access to travel and study overseas and
has access to gaining language practices in other languages this
would be construed as of benet to school learning; for young
people of bilingual/bicultural backgrounds these skills and
experiences are constructed problematically or ignored.
(Cruickshank, 2014: 60)
This could have been written for so many international schools, where
proud parents focus on their children learning French as a foreign language,
but allow their mother tongue(s) to wither, and are unaware of the many
factors that would contribute to their children improving their academic
knowledge of English in a professional ESL programme.
Ortega points out that over a period of ve years, students learning
a foreign language experience 540 hours of exposure to the FL, SL learners
experience 7,000 hours of exposure to the SL, and native speakers experience
14,000 hours of exposure to their L1 (Ortega, 2013: 17).
Simply stating that ‘all schools are expected to cater for SL/MT and
all teachers are expected to implement SL teaching strategies’ is naive. We
know very well that many school leaders come from national systems in
which SLLs are marginalized and ‘supported’ by untrained and unqualied
teachers, and these leaders are often ignorant of the huge potential of ESL
students in a well-planned programme.
To say that creating an entirely separate programme (a parallel MYP)
would be an enormous undertaking, as a former IB source insinuated, makes
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The role of external bodies
it appear that ESL students would be totally segregated, whereas it is rather
a question of communicating to schools that ESL students are in a different
category from language B students as they have different and more urgent
linguistic needs. They need above all recognition that they are in a separate
category from foreign language students, and to be given an appropriate
programme, which was, in fact, provided by the SLA and MTD guide.
International schools and national systems in the IB
In the IB Programme Standards and Practices (International Baccalaureate
Organization, 2014), Standard C3:7 states: ‘Teaching and learning addresses
the diversity of student language needs, including those for students learning
in a language(s) other than mother tongue’; this statement constitutes the
entire IBMYP ESL programme – which can simply be ignored with little fear
of IB sanctions. The IB appears to have bent to the demands of a national
system, that of the US, and placed the international schools network low on
its list of priorities. Cambridge (2013: 174) notes that ‘about 300 IB schools
were international schools in 2004. This gure has fallen dramatically as a
proportion from … 58% in 1979 … and is expected to be just 5% by 2020.’
He goes on more forcefully to question:
To what extent does an organization such as the IB, as it is
currently constituted, continue to serve the needs of international
schools and their students? As the IB continues to penetrate
national systems, and adapts its distributive, recontextualizing
and evaluative practices in order to accommodate the demands
of local, national, ofcial, pedagogic recontextualization elds, a
critical question needs to be asked: Will the programmes of the
IB continue to be t for the purpose of international education,
as practised in international schools?
(Cambridge, 2013: 201)
The answer for the ESL community of students and teachers is a
resounding ‘no’.
The need for a dedicated ESL programme of instruction
in the MYP
All evidence points to the need for ESL students to have content-related
instruction. Crawford and Krashen (2007: 44) state: ‘For diverse schools,
a program of communication-based ESL and sheltered subject-matter
instruction, combined with native-language support by paraprofessionals,
is often the best solution’. Janzen (2008: 1030, quoted in Scanlan and
López, 2012: 601–2) writes, ‘The academic uses of language as well as the
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118
meaning of individual words need to be explicitly taught for students to
full the genre or discourse requirements privileged in academic settings
and to understand the material they encounter’ (emphasis added). This is a
strong statement of the need for professional ESL instruction. Above all, a
different mode of assessment is required for ESL students in the MYP, and
ESL teachers need separate training workshops from those for language B/
Acquisition.
Another issue is that, to qualify for full certication at the end of
MYP Year 5, students must have completed study in language A. For
ESL students this means their mother tongue. Most international schools
(regrettably) do not offer such courses. This means that ESL students would
not qualify for full certication – after working diligently at their English
language skills. This once again peripheralizes, stigmatizes and demotivates
ESL students – the very students who are at the core of international schools
– by making them the only ones not to qualify for full MYP certication.
International schools, though they provided the original inspiration
for the IB, made up only 12 per cent of the IB clientele in 2009 (Matthews,
2009), and this is falling. However, it has been suggested (V. Edwards,
2009) that we live in an age of ‘superdiversity’, implying that ESL students
are on the increase in national systems as much as in international schools.
Crawford and Krashen (2007: 13) estimate that 33 per cent of students
in the USA will be ELLs by 2043. Therefore it may be thought to be in
the interests of the IB to devise a specic response to the curriculum and
assessment needs of ESL students – but it should be borne in mind that ESL
students in national systems may not be in the same socioeconomic bracket.
The IB and critical thinking
One much-vaunted educational aim of the IB is to encourage critical thinking
in students: ‘The IB has always championed a stance of critical engagement
with challenging ideas’ (International Baccalaureate Organization, 2015:
1). This is a commendable and valid aim, but for those who do not have the
language of instruction, usually English, at an advanced level, it will remain
an often unachievable one. Monaghan writes:
[S]chooling is fundamentally a linguistic process with students
needing to be able (and to be enabled) to deploy linguistic resources
that grow ever more complex alongside the increasing cognitive
demands of ever-expanding specialized subject knowledge. In
fact, a case can be made that it is the linguistic complexity of
how ideas are expressed within subject disciplines rather than
the nature of those ideas themselves that presents the greater
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The role of external bodies
source of difculty for students. As Schleppergrell (2004: 2)
argues: ‘Students’ difculties in “reasoning”, for example, may
be due to their lack of familiarity with the linguistic properties
of the language through which the reasoning is expected to be
presented, rather than to the inherent difculty of the cognitive
processes involved.’
This is especially true of bilingual students, who may already be
familiar with the concepts in their rst language.
(Monaghan, 2010: 24)
The IB has produced some interesting papers that make it clear that IB
students in all their diversity are multilingual and that multilingualism is a
resource for the IB vision (International Baccalaureate Organization, 2006,
2008a, 2008b, 2011, 2014, 2015). However, it is the daily routine and
specic programmes that are the lifeblood of teachers’ and students’ lives in
schools, and, comprehensive as stance papers may be, the reality in schools
is not driven by distant rhetoric. A distinct curriculum and assessment are
needed for ESL students in the MYP. Any policy will depend on its detail,
its relevance, and above all its obligatory implementation in a school as a
programme: otherwise it is simply one more piece of paper to add to the
administrator’s le and ticked during the ten-yearly authorization visit.
A review of journal articles about the IB provides useful insights into
why such a separate area may not be being instituted. Doherty writes:
I do not want to diminish what the IB may offer its students,
but I do want to highlight how its current appeal stems not so
much from its internal design as from its opportunistic fullment
of a number of current political agendas. … Parents will be
buying the gift-wrapped promise constructed in the media before
sampling the actual product, and having invested in that choice
will carefully protect and promote their chosen brand and their
high-stakes investment in its forms of distinction.
(Doherty, 2009: 85–6)
Bunnell (2011) also notes, with reference to the huge, rapid expansion of the
IB, that since late 2008, a new phenomenon has appeared – a willingness by
IB insiders (mainly head teachers in international schools, such as Toze and
Matthews) to openly voice concern about the growth, and their perception
of quality being compromised.
It is possible to conclude from these insights that, since the IB
is focusing more on a particular type of clientele, the majority of whom
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are now middle-class and in North America, having a set curriculum and
programme for ESL students would diminish the marketing potential of the
IB in the USA context, where ESL students are seen as immigrants.
The reality of ESL in practice in the MYP
An ESL teacher in a large international school in Asia summarizes the reality
of working with ESL students in the MYP context, in answer to questions
submitted by me:
Why does the IB not provide separate programmes for second
language students in the MYP?
Having worked now in the IB in three different international
schools, I believe the IB does not distinguish language differences
of ESL and Language Acquisition/B students because although
there is a clearly dened difference in pedagogy, there is not one
acknowledged in the IB that would create an existence for ESL.
It does not t the octagon (the MYP scheme of subjects) and
with the mantra ‘all teachers are language teachers’ the IB also
allows for disjointed exibility because the job does not fall on
one subject, but on all. This is an ideology I agree with, but along
with an ESL department and ESL teachers to engage in dialog
with subject teachers to enhance the learning of ESL students.
The change of name in 2014 reinforced this trend. To take the title
Language B and change it to Language Acquisition (LA) ticks off
the box in terms of ESL support in the program. The course is now
seen as ‘having aligned goals’ like that of any ESL/EAL program
because the denition of LA is ‘one acquiring a language’. No
longer is there a focus on which language is studied and for what
purpose,so again the IB allows for individual schools to set up
ESL support/programs that are using language acquisition as the
framework with which to guide the curriculum.
Oddly, semantics plays a bigger part now in the argument of
whether ESL should stand alone as a separate group within the
IB: they use it to argue that it does not interfere with the policy
that all teachers teach language, the terminology – Language
Acquisition – and the fact that most schools do not dispute the
use of Language Acquisition along with Foreign Language as two
opposing subjects with differing objectives in their schools.
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The role of external bodies
The creation of ‘Language Acquisition’ by the IB as a stand-alone term
is interesting. It echoes ‘Second Language Acquisition’, but since the
IB does not want to recognize the separate status of ESL students it has
manufactured its own terminology, which sounds credible. There is a eld
of First Language Acquisition, which researches children’s mother tongues,
and one of Second Language Acquisition, already discussed. In most
cases, ‘Language acquisition’ is a general term which covers all aspects of
learning a language. However, Krashen (1982) makes a distinction between
‘language learning’ and ‘language acquisition’, declaring that acquisition
is a subconscious process, while learning is conscious. He believes that
acquisition is more important, as the competence developed through it
is responsible for generating language and thereby accounts for language
uency. He proposes that language acquisition develops exclusively through
‘comprehensible input’, by which he implies that SLLs acquire language
competence by exposure to language that is at the same time understandable
and meaningful. How this takes place is summarized in Krashen’s formula
of i + 1, where i is the student’s current level of competence. ‘Language
acquisition’ therefore can be understood in two senses, either as a general
term to cover language learning, or in the specic sense of Krashen’s
terminology. The IB avoids the issue in order not to have to recognize the
fundamental differences in pedagogy and student needs between second
and foreign language. Using ‘Language Acquisition’ sounds progressive and
non-divisive: who could argue against not discriminating about how one is
learning a new language? But the reality is that it is a contested term, and
SL learners are meanwhile left in a morass of specialized language for the
various content subjects which they cannot surmount effectively.
The same teacher continues:
My question would be: are they using titles like Language
Acquisition – Language and Literature – and the fact that all
teachers are language teachers in the IB to justify an inferred
support of ESL students within the programmes?
We use the Language Acquisition rubrics for both English (ESL)
and Foreign Language,and in all discussions admin sees the two
as the same as far as subjects are concerned: in Grading and
Accreditation especially. They are all in one subject group and
evaluated together. This is not disputed by anyone anymore.
With all of the vague terminologies oating around the
responsibility then becomes that of the individual schools and how
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they interpret and initiate their ESL programmes based on the IB
framework and philosophy. As long as it looks complimentary to
the IBMYP/DP, it is a go for schools and they can create anything
they want, or not.
Teachers make it work because they have to get on with the job
of educating these students and arguing that ESL and FL are
not the same gets you nowhere. ESL teachers may create ESL
programmes in spite of the numerous hurdles set in front of
them. If the IB cannot see the value in a separate ESL programme
in the IB, then the teachers must create the value and curriculum
from the MYP framework and make it work.
Any created programme, of course, will not be an approved IB programme
so it once again puts ESL students and their teachers in the peripheral box;
and many ESL teachers will not ‘create ESL programmes in spite of the
numerous hurdles set in front of them’, as their directors may not allow
them to. The teacher continues:
Also, the IB does not look at ESL as a subject group – primarily
because it seems they feel these students are ‘on the journey to
Language and Literature’ [the terminology of language A in the
Diploma Programme] – and again the distinction of A and B
no longer applies as the new title suggests the continuation of
Language Learning within a classroom setting. It could be argued
that this then is a program for second language students – but
in reality it is a foreign language program adjusted to meet the
expectations of the ESL students.
For example, my school has done the following:
– Foreign Languages uses Phases 1–3
– EAL Phases 3–4
– Language Acquisition Phases 4–6;
‘4’ being the transition for EAL students to enter into Lang
Acquisition [the IBMYP has given six levels of achievement
or ‘phases’ within ‘Language Acquisition’, 1–6, beginners to
uent]; the oddity about this set-up is that the students who
have achieved Phase 4 status are then taken out of EAL and are
Language Acquisition students of the MYP, thus they receive no
EAL support at this point. The students do not have an identity as
ESL students once they hit Phase 4. They are seen as mainstream
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The role of external bodies
students and are expected to do the same work. If you take a
look at the expected MYP skills of a phase 4 student one has to
ask if the level of prociency corresponds with the programme’s
academic expectations? Is this all the students need in English to
succeed as a fully enrolled MYP student? For me, the evidence is
in the writing as our students are across the board weak academic
writers and the EAL students who oat year to year are not really
prepared for the expectations of the MYP by the time they reach
Phase 4,or the DP as they enter 11thgrade, but they are assessed
as if they were. No modications; no altered assessments: they
are MYP students and sit in classes with this understanding.
This is where the failure of the MYP to provide a second language
programme is shown to have profoundly negative consequences for ESL
students, affecting their potential in the entire school curriculum, and
perhaps their entire lives.
Why is there no separate assessment for second language students?
Having been in three international schools now with all
three programmes: it is not about separate assessments, but
differentiation and modication and whether this is applicable
in the classroom environment. If provided, ESL students can
work to achieve grades that sustain motivation; if not, they are
demotivated by low marks.
The interesting challenge with this is that differentiation seems
to mean various things to teachers and admin. We spent a good
amount of time one semester in P[rofessional] D[evelopment]
meetings trying to dene the following terms: differentiation,
inclusion, and modication. It was enlightening to see the various
denitions and the various ways with which teachers used the
terms in their classrooms, if at all.
Another issue that arises is the use of modication or better yet,
the lack of it in assessments. In recent years, the mere mention
of the word gets an awkward reaction. If teachers were to work
with a framework that excludes separate assessment would it not
be benecial to modify assessments to meet the needs of the ESL
students? And why is this a scary concept when discussed? What
does modication mean to teachers/administration and students?
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124
Why has the IB downplayed the SLA and MTD Guide mentioned
above? Why is there no separate in-service training for ESL
teachers?
This also addresses the question with regard to the IBMYP ‘Second
Language Acquisition and Mother Tongue Development Guide’.
This guide supports and promotes modication in all subjects
and even gives examples as to how to do this. No workshop in the
last four years that I have attended has mentioned this guide or
its use in the MYP or DP. [These comments were made in 2015.]
Again, every IBMYP international school should have a
curriculum that follows the MYP framework, but also is
intertwined with a scope and sequence that may not have ESL
students in mind. For teachers, this is a challenge as they must
adhere to the MYP framework, and the scope and sequence
(whatever it may be), as well as differentiate for ESL and SEN,
usually in the same classroom. At times, it gets blurry. It can be
argued that this allows for better differentiation, but this depends
on the development of the MYP planners and the intricacy of the
ESL/differentiation section of the MYP planner.
What is the response of the IB to those criticisms of poor
certication for ESL students with regard to both ESL and MT?
These are my impressions of the IB in MYP: I do not believe
the IB even addresses this issue – do they even feel it deserves
discussion? Most schools today just manipulate the framework
to make it work as best it can for the sake of the ESL students
in their school. So why would the IB acknowledge it as an issue?
Everyone teaches with it, and without viable data from ESL
communities how does one go about proving the framework
excludes students who are at this very moment in programs in
the MYP in ESL?
These comments are from a highly qualied and experienced ESL teacher,
and give a true insight into the reality of provision (mostly lack of) for ESL
students in the MYP in international schools in every aspect: pedagogy,
programme provision, assessment, and in-service training for teachers.
Some contributors to these vignettes have complained that ESL colleagues
‘back down at the slightest hint of confrontation’. While one appreciates the
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The role of external bodies
frustration that goes into such a statement, so many ESL teachers seem to
have been threatened that it is understandable why they would back down.
The language competences of students confused with appropriate
pedagogical instruction
At a conference for ESL teachers in 2014 an IB spokesperson said that the IB
was not in a position to differentiate between foreign language and second
language as ‘the IB was a global organization and such differentiation was
not appropriate’. However, the IB nds it appropriate to distinguish between
language A and language B in the Diploma Programme so the somewhat
bizarre argument is awed; globalization now has a new trend, apparently,
namely deciding how to dene languages. The IB seems to be confused about
the difference between the repertoires of students, and the types of pedagogy
they are best served by. Of course, seen as a whole, a cohort of students in
any international school will have a range of language competencies from
almost no knowledge of English to a high level of literacy. But this does
not reduce the need to provide appropriate programmes of instruction for
the various types of learners. It is one thing for students to have different
levels of competence in a language; it is quite another thing for them to
receive appropriate pedagogical instruction in each language according to
their needs. The most important factor in any school is the structure of the
programme students are taught in. This needs to be clearly identied. The IB
has failed in the MYP to provide any programme structure at all for second
language learners, who need it more urgently than any other students.
It should by now be common knowledge that ‘Teachers must provide
ESL students with content-specic academic language instruction to support
their performance on content area assessments’ (Kieffer et al., 2009, quoted
in Scanlan and López, 2012: 597). However, the MYP proffers the model
noted by Cummins:
The typical picture is that assessment regimens are initially
mandated by the central authority with vague directions
regarding the criteria for exemption of certain students or for
accommodations of various kinds for students who might be
unable to participate in the assessment without support, for
example some ELL students.
(Cummins, 2000: 145)
This statement is echoed by V. Edwards, who writes, ‘policy-makers
have repeatedly failed to predict the resources and the strategies required
to deal with new demands, responding in piecemeal fashion with
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126
bolt-on “solutions”’, which may ‘pathologize language learners’ (Edwards,
2010: xiii).
SLLs and the IBMYP: Examples of how the programme
impacts on them
In the MYP all students have to reect on all tasks and in all subject areas,
and even for maths assignments grades are given for their depth of reection.
Thus ESL students with good maths skills but as yet undeveloped English
language skills get dragged down by the ‘reection’ grade. ESL students
have difculties even understanding the language of the criteria descriptions.
Teachers at one school commented:
The problem with MYP for ESL students, really, is the fact that
they need to write reections in every single subject, even PE,
IT, and cooking. With all the different criteria the amount of
assessments has increased a lot, and ESL students are adversely
affected. They also have to write a reection for everything.
And:
My 10th grade Japanese ESL students are seriously good at math
but get lower grades because they can’t write a reection. I tried
to modify the criteria for the math reection, and then sat down
with the head of math to talk it through. It soon became clear
that I had not understood what was required; my simplication
had lost the original meaning (which it took quite a while for
the head of math to get me to understand). I went off to re-write
the simplied criteria and now cannot remember what the thing
really means. I did ‘A’ level math, I am a native speaker – and I
don’t get it.
A teacher at another school observed:
The language of MYP ‘ideas’ is a major source of difculty for ESL
students. One quick look at the language makes it clear that for
an ESL student the IT Design Cycle presents a linguistic challenge.
The cycle revolves around the four key ideas: ‘Investigate – plan
– create – evaluate’. The command words alone are a challenge:
‘identify, develop, formulate, design, create and evaluate’ are all
words which need careful, simplied explanations, together with
the corresponding mother tongue translations.
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The role of external bodies
Another teacher at the same school remarked:
A good example of how only supplying a dictionary denition
can confuse ESL students is this: the denition of access is ‘being
able to get into something’. The MYP visual supplied for the ESL
students was a key to open a door, but the topic being studied
was ‘Access to Water’, so that not only the denition but also the
visual was misleading.
Another commented:
A great number of subject teachers, for instance maths teachers,
don’t realize that students are being bombarded with lots of new
words every day, not just in their subject.The solution is for ESL
Beginners not to get grades in their mainstream subjects. They
should not be punished by getting lower grades for not knowing
vocabulary or for not being able to deal with the reections.
An MYP ESL teacher commented: ‘I saw all the IT jargon in my students’
booklets and even I had problems understanding what the design brief and
the specications were. How do you explain this to a beginner?’ Another
reported: ‘In PE students have to write hockey tests, so if a student doesn’t
have good language skills, especially beginners, they get low grades in PE, a
subject where ESL beginners could easily get good grades and feel proud of
themselves.’ Her conclusion was:
I think that more schools should give the MYP critical feedback.
Our school is trying to deal with the problems but not with the
source of them. We’re expected to incorporate into our teaching
whatever the MYP expects from us, but this is not in the best
interests of the ESL students.
Meier (2014: 135) notes that ‘Clearly, curricula need to be evaluated,
reviewed and adjusted.’
IB terminology on language as a contributor to
misdirected programmes
Terminology in the eld of language learning and linguistics is vast and
complex (a prime reason, it has to be emphasized again, for having people
who are qualied in this area teach ESL students). The IB has chosen one
term, ‘language acquisition’, as the umbrella term for all matters concerning
the learning of languages, foreign or second, and as the replacement term
for language B in the MYP, as shown here:
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128
Language acquisition
The study of additional languages in the Middle Years Programme
(MYP) provides students with the opportunity to develop insights
into the features, processes and craft of language and the concept
of culture, and to realize that there are diverse ways of living,
viewing and behaving in the world.
MYP language acquisition is a compulsory component of the
MYP in every year of the programme. Schools must provide
sustained language learning in at least two languages for each
year of the MYP.
(http://ibo.org/en/programmes/middle-years-programme/curriculum/
language-acquisition/, accessed 13 February 2018)
There is no distinction between foreign and second language learning,
while the wording of the rst paragraph above is clearly geared to foreign-
language learning. SL learners need more precisely determined goals or
curriculum objectives, not insights.
Thus, by using the umbrella term ‘language acquisition’, and
ignoring the vast literature which has laid down separate paths for rst
language acquisition (MT), second language acquisition, and foreign-
language learning, the IB not only shows its lack of understanding of what
the term implies, i.e. picking up a language through usage rather than
learning it through instruction, but has also failed to provide an appropriate
programme for SL students, or provide assessment geared to their needs.
Correspondence continues to ood in from distressed ESL teachers
in MYP schools around the world. For example: ‘I cannot manage to make
people understand that EAL is not English B. In my opinion, it is a different
subject.’
The following information was sent from a large international school:
Mother Tongues
We have established ten home languages (MTs) under the MYP
Language Literature programme. All languages taught in MYP5
go through the moderation process and the students have IB
Approved on their certicate.
However, The Next Chapter, an IB communication which is
now working towards the e-assessment/portfolio arrangement
for MYP5, has now dictated that only specic languages can
be assessed. We are now in a position that we have to inform
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The role of external bodies
parents, who have committed to our home language programme,
that the language doesn’t count and they have to reconsider their
child’s package. The students must have an A and B language and
some students just don’t have both because they are SL Learners.
In a nutshell we now have ve out of nine languages that are
impacted by this decision so this completely contradicts any IB
statements about promoting the maintenance of home languages.
This is a crystal-clear description of how ESL students are disadvantaged –
the very students who need more encouragement because of the huge task
that faces them of learning an entire curriculum in a second language. It
reveals the complete lack of understanding that the curriculum providers
have of the context of international schools, where most students have
English as a second language and are actively maintaining literacy in their
mother tongue.
The MYP Language Acquisition Guide can be seen at www.csdecou.
qc.ca/ecolesecondairerochebelle/les/2014/05/Language-acquisition-guide-
For-use-from-September-2014.pdf (accessed 13 February 2018). It gives
detailed instructions on the six phases that can be followed in language
acquisition. The language that describes the progression through these
levels is carefully modulated to present a continuous ow, as if students
naturally swim majestically from phase 1 in MYP Language Acquisition to
language A in the Diploma. There is no indication of the need for carefully
structured courses, or of the difference between learning a foreign language
a few times a week and learning a second language for every content area.
In addition it is acceptable to differentiate between A and B at Diploma
level, but not at MYP level. On page 4 this Guide states again that language
is central to critical thinking. This needs to be emphasized to the writers of
the Guide: how can second language learners achieve a level of language in
English that will enable them to be critical thinkers when they do not have
an instructional programme that is geared to their linguistic needs?
Another teacher writes:
Throughout the year the MYP has been the thorn in our side
when it comes to meeting the language needs of our students. The
MYP Language Acquisition phases are geared towards the holy
grail of literature and seem to neglect the real journey of language
learning with its many variables and need for time.
It is safe to say we have endured the MYP and fullled tasks such
as unit planning and MYP5 moderation as a mere administrative
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exercise. Behind the scenes we have dug our heels in and stayed
true to the real needs of the ELL students. I cannot believe that
we are having to ght for the needs of our students because our
programme provider has no understanding of the complexities
and nature of acquiring the language of instruction at an
international school.
The above extract best sums up the failure of the MYP to either understand
or provide appropriate programmes for ESL students in international
schools. Conteh and Meier comment (2014: 3), citing Trowler (2003: 96),
‘There is often a conict between those who make policy and those who put
it into practice.’
Many more such communications have been received, but the senders
have requested that their comments are not published as they fear reprisals.
By sowing the seeds of doubt about SL issues, educational
organizations can claim that ‘there is no consensus on the best method’,
thereby laying the ground for whatever suits their needs best; in the case
of the CIS and the NEASC, accreditation services for international schools,
this means putting ESL students under ‘support services’, and in the case of
the IBMYP they are included under the catch-all of ‘language acquisition’.
Concluding statement
Until about 2004 the input of ESL professionals was welcomed by both
the CIS and the IB. How could the advice of these experts, nurtured and
respected to a fault up to that time, have then been so comprehensively
ignored and emphatically discarded? The answers seem to come from the
nature of neoliberal economics and its bedfellow managerialism, which
have dominated institutions since the 1970s and have been embraced and
promoted by the corporations. It shifted the right to make many decisions
about the world away from the people who were involved with the
fundamental knowledge of each profession and towards unelected bodies.
The market orientation of the IB can be demonstrated easily enough
simply by looking at its establishment of the three global IB centres:
Bethesda, MD, Singapore, and The Hague. The absorption of the IB by
American leadership has allowed it to distort debate on educational matters
by narrowing the discussion of issues to the technical problem-solving level,
thereby denying the possibility of major conicts in problem denition
and pedagogical values. Thus the way the IB has established methods of
communication undermines the very preconditions for communicatively
rational queries. There is simply no way in which implicit validity claims
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The role of external bodies
pertaining to the truth, appropriateness or sincerity of statements made by
the IB can be challenged, as communication goes almost entirely in one
direction, from the IB website to school directors, to leaders, to teachers;
students bear the consequences – though of course there is always the
opportunity to chat on the websites.
The IB encourages critical thinking for its students: ‘The IB has
always championed a stance of critical engagement with challenging ideas’
(International Baccalaureate Organization, 2015: 1). Iain McGilchrist has
written interestingly about this area from the point of view of a humanist
scholar and psychiatrist (McGilchrist, 2009). He traces the history of
philosophy and relates it to the left and right hemispheres of the brain. He
concludes that the right hemisphere, which governs how we see the world
and feel empathy, and was originally the basis of humanity, is being taken
over by the left hemisphere, which seeks control and power – and systems.
The world of education is already rubbing shoulders with the people
who, in the words of Noam Chomsky, ‘manufacture consent’ (Herman
and Chomsky, 2002). Children in schools are already working from
multinational media companies’ digital worksheets disguised as ‘innovative
learning’, and education has ever less need for qualied teachers as students
will need no more than a minder to check that the student in question is
glued to a tablet. The IB claims to be something better, encouraging a critical
approach to what is learned. John Stuart Mill (1869: 94) pointed out that
truths that were not subject to continual challenge eventually ‘[cease] to
have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood’.
As will be related in the following chapter, a viable alternative for
SLLs and their teachers can be found in the ESL examinations offered by
Cambridge International.
5
Part Five
The current situation in an
international school
133
Chapter 7
How one international school
is implementing the model
proposed in this book
Sarah Porter
Bringing the issues alive
When I arrived at my present school in August 2013, I was not a likely
candidate to implement change in an EAL department. I had trained as a
Secondary MFL (Modern Foreign Languages) teacher, not in EAL, and the
only experience I had of ESL learners at that time was a year and a half
spent teaching English in a school in Russia. However, when I joined this
school there was no room for me in the MFL department and I was offered
a job teaching secondary EAL. ‘As long as you think I can do it’ was my
nervous response. This turned out to be one of the best career choices I have
ever made, as I fell in love with EAL teaching as soon as I started it.
As much as I was inspired by EAL, though, I sometimes felt that
what I was teaching, and how I was teaching it, was not enough. From the
perspective of teaching English grammar and vocabulary, things seemed OK
and the students were progressing. However, I was often asked by subject
teachers to give an EAL student ‘help with her science/history/geography’
and so on. I assumed that the student would turn up to my room with her
textbook, and that I could read through the information with her and try to
clarify the parts that she found tricky. This did help, to an extent, but having
had no experience of ESL content support, though I knew that I could do
more, I was not sure what that ‘more’ was. The other issue that I faced was
one that is experienced by EAL teachers worldwide: because of timetabling
issues I often had lessons with a group of Year 7 students, a Year 9 student
and two Year 11s, all at different levels, all studying different topics and
all in the same forty-minute lesson. Trying to teach anybody anything in
lessons like these was a real challenge and was immensely frustrating for
all concerned.
I was then fortunate enough to attend the ECIS ESL and Mother
Tongue Conference in Amsterdam in 2014. I gained a wealth of information
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about content language teaching and was determined to take as much of
it as possible back to my school. In a highly informative session, Patricia
Mertin advised that I try to teach just one year group per lesson in order
to focus on content support. Fortunately, back at school an EAL teaching
assistant was allocated some EAL lessons on her timetable, and this enabled
us to mostly split lessons into separate year groups.
The ECIS conference also helped me realize that when it came to
content language teaching, what our EAL students really needed, and were
not getting, was proper, structured and targeted content language teaching.
Such lessons involve, among other things: strategies for memorizing and
practising key words, phrases and denitions; learning general academic
language; deconstructing exam-style questions; and learning to structure
sentences and paragraphs in a logical way in order to answer written
questions fully and effectively. In this way, our school has transformed ‘a
bit of help with history’ into structured content language teaching, which is
a key responsibility for us as EAL teachers.
The benets of having NNESTs
As a native English speaker myself, I attended secondary school in the 1980s
when English grammar was not taught explicitly. Like many other native
speakers of my generation, I therefore had no idea how to explain tense
use, adverb phrases or comparatives – I used them correctly automatically,
but could never have taught them to a non-native English speaker. In
international schools where many EAL teachers do not have a specic ESL
qualication, teachers like myself are often consigned to learning English
grammar and vocabulary rules ‘on the job’. Is this how our ESL students
should be taught?
In his presentation to the Council of British International Schools
(COBIS) EAL Conference in February 2017, Maurice Carder discussed
‘the myth of the native speaker’ (Carder, 2017a). For me, this raised two
important points: rst, the perceived ‘necessity’ for international schools
to employ native English speakers as ESL/EAL teachers; second, the fact
that some international schools boast ‘native-speaker teachers’ in order to
market the school. ‘There is a monolingual bias in research and practice on
language learning and teaching which has deeply negative consequences’
(Ortega, 2014: 32, quoted in Carder, 2017a: 32). As a result, parents and
students alike become convinced that ESL teachers especially must be native
speakers, thus perpetuating the ‘myth’.
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One school’s implementation of the model
My present school is fortunate enough not to be propagating the
native-speaker myth, as we recognize that there is a wealth of superb EAL
teachers whose rst language is not English. In my time at the school alone,
I have worked closely with three non-native teachers, all of whom are uent
English speakers and all of whom are excellent EAL classroom practitioners.
So what are the benets of having NNESTs teaching ESL? It has
become clear at this school that they are abundant. First, having studied
English to such a high level, our teachers have a clear grasp of the structure
of English grammar and vocabulary, far clearer than the average native
speaker’s. In addition, many hold a specialized ESL teaching qualication
such as the Certicate in English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA) –
as is the case at this school – which ensures clear and effective teaching of
English grammar and vocabulary rules. Moreover, being already bilingual,
our NNESTs have rst-hand knowledge of second language acquisition and
are therefore well equipped to understand our students’ learning journey,
being able to foresee and empathize with any pitfalls they may come across.
In today’s global society, the number of people in the world who
speak English as a second language is far greater than the number of
native English speakers, and I believe that our non-native-speaker EAL
teachers serve as excellent examples for our students, demonstrating that
bi- and multilingualism are not only possible, but also benecial and indeed
necessary. Furthermore, they show students that you do not necessarily
need to aspire to being a quasi-‘native’; you can achieve an exceptional
standard of English as a second language while still preserving the mother
tongue, culture and identity.
This is, of course, not to say that native English speakers have no
place in ESL teaching. But it is a dangerous fallacy to assume that a native
speaker has a knowledge of English superior to a non-native speaker’s, or
indeed has the necessary skills to teach it. For me, whether they are native
speakers or not, all ESL teachers should hold a specialist qualication and
ideally have experience of learning another language to a high level. There
are too many teachers in international schools who have taught ‘a bit of
EAL’ at some point, in addition to their completely different specialist
subject: the schools rely purely on the fact that they are native English
speakers and ll gaps in the EAL timetable with inexperienced, unqualied
(but native-speaker!) staff. If EAL departments are to become centres of
excellence in international schools, as they should be, the native-speaker
myth needs to stop now, and schools must focus on establishing specialist
ESL departments lled with specialist ESL teachers.
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Building up content materials for the upper school, and
sharing them worldwide with other international schools
One of the key issues facing secondary EAL content teachers is a real dearth
of published resources. In a webinar I delivered for COBIS in September
2017, I stated that it can sometimes be difcult for EAL teachers not to
cross over from content language support into actually trying to teach
the content itself. It has certainly happened to me when, in the middle of
an EAL science lesson, I have suddenly found myself trying to explain a
scientic concept to the students (badly!). We are not content teachers, we
are language teachers, but there is a distinct lack of available resources to
help us to deliver effective content support lessons.
This school has responded to the above challenge by developing a
range of content language resources, covering the different secondary year
groups, academic subjects and subtopics. Of course, syllabuses change,
teaching materials change, and students’ needs change, but having a central
bank of resources as a starting point is extremely useful – and we are adding
to it year by year. However, the next issue that needs addressing is that there
are EAL teachers in international schools all over the world ‘reinventing
the wheel’, all creating similar resources which only their school will use.
I recently created a resource to support students with key words for the
topic of ‘Roman life’ in Year 7 history, and it can be guaranteed that EAL
teachers in other schools have done exactly the same. There is a wealth of
expertly produced resources out there, and EAL teachers need to be able to
share and access them.
As a partial solution to this, the COBIS EAL Facebook group was
established in the autumn of 2017. The group is intended to be a place where
EAL teachers in COBIS schools can connect with each other, offer advice and
suggestions, and upload and download resources. The group is very much in
its infancy at the time of writing, but my hope is that this little community
will attract more members and become a hub of EAL advice and teaching
resources. That said, however, the ideal solution would be for ESL to be
recognized as a valid, routine part of the curriculum, which would open the
door to a properly structured syllabus with readily available resources.
The benets of the Cambridge IGCSE: The importance
of equal status for ESL students
In my third year at this school, I was offered a new challenge: teaching
an ESL IGCSE class (www.cambridgeinternational.org/programmes-
and-qualifications/cambridge-secondary-2/cambridge-igcse/, accessed
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One school’s implementation of the model
13 February 2018). Although I jumped at the chance, I did not have much to
go on except a brief scheme of work and possibly the most tedious textbook
I had ever seen. As this course had previously been taught solely by our
school’s English department, I had never seen an ESL examination paper
before and so had to brush up quickly on the skills I was expected to teach.
We rejected the textbook and used other resources to teach the
necessary vocabulary, grammar and skills, and the students seemed to both
enjoy and benet from the course. What was surprising were the similarities
between the skills taught in the IGCSE course and the techniques that students
need to learn when preparing for the International English Language Testing
System (IELTS) test (www.ielts.org, accessed 13 February 2018). Granted,
the IGCSE is broader than and not as specialized or advanced as IELTS, but
the foundations are there: developing students’ awareness of synonyms and
paraphrases to help identify a missing word in a text or a multiple-choice
answer; teaching formal, academic language to write a discursive article or
essay, and so on. It became clear to me that the skills taught in this course
were of key importance to our ESL students as they moved on to Key Stage
5 (the nal stage of the English secondary school system), the IELTS test
and higher education.
Having now taught this course for the last three years, I have become
convinced that the ESL IGCSE should come permanently under an ESL
department’s teaching remit. What are the reasons for this? First, as stated
above, there are numerous parallels between the skills needed for IGCSE
and for the IELTS test, which many ESL students are nowadays required
to take for university entrance purposes in the UK. Since IELTS is usually
taught by an ESL teacher, it makes complete sense to bring the IGCSE under
the same umbrella rather than allocating the course to an English ‘rst-
language’ teacher who may well never have taught the course before and
may never have to teach it again. ESL teachers can, by building up year
after year of experience, training and resources, turn the ESL department
into a specialized ‘centre of expertise’ for delivering both the IGCSE and
IELTS courses.
Second, it would appear that many rst-language English teachers
view the IGCSE Second Language as a less desirable option and would
rather not teach it, preferring to focus on literature. After all, English
teachers’ specialism is English as a rst language and English literature;
they generally do not receive training in ESL and they are expected to teach
the IGCSE Second Language solely because of the word ‘English’ in the title.
ESL teachers, however, are generally much more used to teaching the skills
required, can identify particular vocabulary or grammar areas which may
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come up or cause problems, and have a range of tried and tested strategies
for targeted vocabulary and grammar practice. Above all, we want to
teach it!
Finally, moving the IGCSE Second Language away from the
English department into ESL may help prevent it from becoming a ‘sink
group’. In my experience, rather than being put in a lower-ability First
Language set, lower-ability students are placed in the English as a Second
Language group, regardless of their actual level of English. By doing this,
are we not short-changing both our lower-ability students and our ESL
learners? Surely students of lower academic ability should have access to
a differentiated English as a rst language course which focuses on both
language and literature, while ESL students should benet from a course
that is specically aimed at non-native speaker students of all abilities,
including A* candidates?
The overriding necessity of CALP and academic language
acquisition, and the need for all teachers to have
CPD in these
A key tenet of Mertin’s (2013) book Breaking through the Language Barrier
is the need for subject teachers to simplify the language rather than the
content when teaching EAL students. It is imperative for teachers to simplify
CALP-level words so that EAL students can understand their meaning and
therefore access the lesson more easily, without dumbing down the content.
Both EAL and content teachers then need to take this one step further.
What we try to do at my school is to simplify the word, but once a student
has understood the meaning, they are asked to learn the original word and
encouraged to use it actively in their writing, whether this be a piece of
homework from the subject that the word rst appeared in, or something
completely different, such as a piece of creative writing in English. The key
point here is that practice makes perfect, and if our EAL students use new
academic vocabulary in as many ways as they can, these words will be
established in their long-term memory. In this way, we are bridging the
gap between BICS and CALP right from the start, and this will, hopefully,
pave the way to greater success later. After all, our EAL students will sit
the same IGCSE examinations as their native-speaker friends, and have to
understand the same CALP-level vocabulary. Gradually building on our
students’ academic vocabulary from as early as possible is, I believe, one
way to ensure a solid transition from BICS to CALP.
A story to illustrate the above point comes from the head of
humanities. He realized the importance of reinforcing the ‘proper’ word
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One school’s implementation of the model
when he was reading a story to his young daughter. He saw the word
‘enchantress’, decided against saying it and instead used the simpler
word ‘witch’. However, he then turned the page, and there was the word
‘enchanted’! His daughter didn’t understand it, and my colleague wished
that he had said the correct word in the rst place and explained that it
meant ‘witch’, so that his little girl could have made the connection between
‘enchanted’ and ‘enchantress’.
My colleague did say at the time of telling me this, ‘It’s not really
such a big deal – after all, she’s only four!’ But the point is that our 11-year-
old secondary EAL students do not have this luxury of time. This is why, as
EAL teachers, we need to know how to turn enchantresses into witches, but
to then quickly turn them back into enchantresses.
The need to make an EAL department a centre of
expertise
In a recent speech to the CIS (Carder, 2017b), Carder called for ESL
departments to be ‘centres of expertise’, a theme that the authors return
to in this book. I have heard stories of international schools with EAL
departments that are anything but centres of expertise. This is partly
because there are no PGCE courses for EAL teachers, and trainee teachers
can spend as little as half a day out of a one-year course focusing on EAL;
as Carder states, ‘To gain QTS (Qualied Teacher Status) a knowledge of
bilingualism and applied linguistics are totally missing from the standards,
and no national standards and qualications are required for EAL teachers.’
It is, in my view, crucial for an ESL department to be a ‘centre
of expertise’, arguably even more important than for other academic
departments because of its overarching role in an international school. It
is the job of ESL departments and international school leaders to make
this happen.
But what does being ‘a centre of expertise’ actually involve? At my
school we still have a long way to go, but one major step forwards has been
the establishment of a largely content-based secondary EAL programme,
and most importantly the widespread acceptance and enthusiasm for the
programme from our content-teacher colleagues. Such support has paved
the way for effective liaison between the EAL teachers and academic
departments, and with the content teachers regularly providing us with the
resources, vocabulary and exam-style tasks that they will be working on our
department has been able to create a large bank of EAL resources divided
into topics, subjects and year groups. Content teachers have commented
that they can see their EAL students progressing more quickly with this
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approach, and additionally the acquisition of this academic-level language
enables the students themselves to reach CALP level earlier.
As Janzen writes, ‘The academic uses of language as well as the
meaning of individual words need to be explicitly taught for students to
fulll the genre or discourse requirements privileged in academic settings
and to understand the material they encounter’ (Janzen, 2008: 1030, quoted
in Scanlan and López, 2012: 601).
A further step that must be taken on the road towards becoming a
‘centre of expertise’ is the realization by international schools that EAL
teachers must have, or obtain, an appropriate qualication. A school would
never employ a maths teacher without a maths degree, but somehow ESL is
viewed as a subject that anyone can ‘do a bit of’ as long as they are a native
English speaker. As Carder has asserted in the past, ‘To be a Maths teacher, a
Science teacher, a Geography teacher, it is necessary to follow a professional
course of study, do teaching practice in the subject, and if successful, gain a
qualication. … [I]t is enough just to be in an international school to be an
EAL teacher, which is qualication by osmosis.’ Such an approach devalues
the ESL department and relegates what it provides to ‘support’ rather than
properly structured, properly functioning academic teaching.
Immediate and long-term benets of the model
As stated already, this school is still very much on the way to fully rolling out
the ESL programme proposed in this book, but even in its early stages the
benets have been evident. With the change from ‘EFL’ to a more content-
based programme, students have reported feeling more condent when
they arrive at content lessons, having previously worked on key language
and structures in EAL lessons. It was most rewarding recently when a Year
7 student bounced into his EAL lesson saying, ‘We just did the types of
energy in science but I knew all the words already’. Just seeing the happy
condence in his face, coupled with his own awareness that he was making
progress, summed up clearly for me why a content-based ESL programme
is the way forward.
The assimilation of the IGCSE ESL course into the EAL department
has, in my view, provided our students with a clearer sense of progression
through ESL now that they can see the obvious links between the IGCSE
and IELTS, as both courses are taught by the same department. Both our
secondary EAL teachers will attend training courses for the IGCSE this
year, which will pave the way for this course to become truly one of the
EAL department’s areas of expertise.
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One school’s implementation of the model
The immediate strengths of the ESL programme have also been
recognized by the school’s academic content teachers. It is true, as Carder
states in chapter 5, that there is often an expectation ‘for ESL teachers, in
whatever capacity, to have successful interchanges of ideas with content
teachers, without the management having any knowledge of the complexity
of teacher–teacher relationships in schools’, and for ESL teachers to nd
keeping such interchanges going fairly difcult. Fortunately, at this school
our teachers have seen the benets of a content-based ESL programme with
their own eyes and are extremely helpful and forthcoming when asked to
collaborate, be it by sending key vocabulary, pointing the ESL teachers
towards resources, or simply providing feedback. It is my hope that this
level of interaction will become second nature to all EAL and subject-
content staff, however high or low the staff turnover.
What of the longer-term advantages? When our ESL programme has
been rmly in place for some years, it is envisaged that there will be a fully
resourced ESL scheme of work for every year group, specially created to
practise language from the syllabuses taught at the school. With many of
these resources already in place, it will, hopefully, not seem so daunting for
new EAL teachers to continue what has been started. Although, of course,
a worldwide ESL scheme of work for use among all international schools
would be the ideal.
In the second place, all being well, it will become clear to school
leaders that in order for content-based courses to be taught, coupled with
the teaching of IGCSE and IELTS by the EAL department, it is absolutely
crucial for teachers trained in ESL to be leading and delivering these
courses. It is my hope, at this school anyway, that future EAL teachers will
all be qualied ESL teachers, and the phrase ‘I do a bit of EAL’ will become
obsolete.
The need for ongoing training in subject content support
As Patricia Mertin states in chapter 9 of this book, ‘The days when it was
sufcient to train as a teacher and then continue on the same path until
retirement are long gone’. Although this, of course, applies to all areas of
education, her statement rings particularly true for ESL. There is currently
no ESL scheme of work that is taught in international schools worldwide,
and it is therefore very easy for an ESL department to change tack completely
when one member of staff leaves and a new teacher arrives. All too often,
because there is no approved syllabus, new teachers are unsure what to do,
feel apprehensive and out of their comfort zone when faced with delivering
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a content-based programme, and so revert to an area in which they feel
more condent: ‘TEFL’-style, stand-alone lessons.
Similarly, for academic content teachers, who may never have been
made aware of the potential issues when teaching ESL students, it is easy to
slip back into a rut, using tried-and-tested lessons which may have achieved
success with native-speaker students, but not necessarily with ESL students,
who in so many international schools nowadays make up the majority. At
my school this came about recently when a new Year 7 student arrived,
partway through the year, and with only basic English skills. The resulting
urry of worried emails that we received from the academic content staff
prompted me to re-examine how much training the EAL department are
giving our academic content teachers and just how regularly this needs
to be done.
In the absence of an internationally accepted ESL syllabus, it is vital,
therefore, both for ESL teachers to receive ongoing training in content
teaching and for academic subject staff to be well versed in teaching
methods which will help EAL students to achieve their full potential in their
classrooms.
Compared with the wealth of teaching materials dealing with
grammar and vocabulary, there are startlingly few materials focusing on
content support. Mertin’s 2013 book Breaking through the Language
Barrier has served as valuable reference material for our EAL department,
as it examines the typical language and structures which tend to come up in
the different academic subjects, enabling the EAL department to anticipate
such language and to incorporate it into our planning. Moreover, we have
used many of the strategies in the book as a basis for the INSET (in-service
training) days that the department has provided to academic content staff.
When one reads Mertin’s suggestions on how to make content lessons more
understandable to ESL students, it may seem obvious: speaking clearly
with your face towards the students, writing the homework in the same
place every time, limiting teacher talk time to ‘meaningful chunks’ followed
by paired or group discussions in any language and then feeding back in
English, and so on. However, teachers are often so passionate about the
subject matter they are teaching that the need to do all this often ies out of
the window: I know that I have been guilty of this at times when trying to
t everything I have planned into a forty-minute lesson. Consequently, the
above guidance needs to be reiterated regularly at this school to ensure that
this happens more often.
A further key resource for every Secondary ESL department should be
the Cambridge English TKT Course: CLIL Module book (Bentley, 2010),
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One school’s implementation of the model
which makes up part of the Cambridge ‘Teaching Knowledge Course’ but
can be taken as a stand-alone module. As well as providing information
on key ‘academic content language’ subject by subject, the book deals
with different types of writing (how to recount, discuss, persuade, etc.),
the use of classroom language with non-native-speaker students, advice on
scaffolding lessons, and so on. All ESL teachers could take a test in this
module and then train academic content staff, or, ideally, every academic
content teacher could work through the course themselves, thus gaining a
deeper knowledge of the language issues that our ESL students are facing
every day.
Tips for school leaders on putting the model into practice
My nal section focuses on tips for school leaders. We are fortunate in
my school to have had the support of our school leaders for a content-
based secondary EAL programme, and their recognition of the need for
content teachers to be trained in ESL; we now need to think about the next
steps. So much advice can be given to schools on setting up an effective ESL
programme, but if asked to provide another leadership team with the most
important tips, I would offer the following.
Keep students in ESL lessons for long enough
By recognizing that it can take between ve and seven years to get to CALP
level, schools will ensure that their ESL students are not just able to ‘speak
English’ with their friends, but also to use it successfully in an academic
context. As students move into Key Stages 4 and 5, they are required to
understand and use increasingly abstract language and concepts which
demand a high level of critical thinking. Exiting ESL lessons too early, for
many ESL students, means nding it difcult to progress further with their
academic language and being left in a situation in which, as Kusuma-Powell
writes, their mastery of language ‘is not sufciently robust in any language to
support highly conceptualised academic learning …. [T]heir actual thinking
remains “stuck” at a concrete level’ (Kusuma-Powell, 2004: 160, quoted
in Hayden, 2006: 62). ESL students who are at a more advanced level may
appear completely uent when they speak, but the gap between BICS and
CALP demonstrates that they need much more time learning English in
academic contexts, and if this means recruiting more ESL teachers, so be it!
Educating the parents of ESL students is of prime importance
Murphy (2003) writes that many parents of ESL students ‘hope that such
an education will equip their child with some knowledge of how the world
works, so that a measure of success may be ensured in the future. All the child
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has to do is learn English’ (Murphy, 2003: 26, quoted in Hayden, 2006: 61)
– as if ‘learning English’ were something that will happen magically within
the rst few months. While acting with the best of intentions, parents are
generally unaware of the level of academic English that is necessary for a
student to even begin to access the curriculum. Thus, students with low
levels of English who enter an international school from Year 7 upwards
will most likely need to attend ESL lessons for a signicant amount of their
school career. As some parents believe that their child is somehow ‘losing
out’ by attending ESL lessons, it is the job of the school leaders to educate
parents about the benets, and indeed the necessity, of keeping students in
ESL lessons for as long as necessary. The good news, though, is that with
the right amount of ESL, such students will be empowered to full as much
of their potential as they possibly can. Therefore, getting parents informed
and on side is of great importance in an international school.
Acknowledge the importance of an effective language policy
Having a language policy which clearly promotes both ESL and mother-
tongue maintenance is a categorical necessity for any school wishing to get
all staff on board and also to enlist parental support. An effective policy
will document the difference between BICS and CALP and the benets
of a mother-tongue programme, as well as clearly setting out the ESL
programme aims and structure. In this way, a school’s ESL programme will
automatically become more concrete and long-term.
Recognize the need for ongoing training for both ESL and subject
content teachers
Kusuma-Powell writes that all international school teachers, not just ESL
specialists, must ‘see it as part of their role to become knowledgeable about
expected progression of language development’ (Kusuma-Powell, 2004,
quoted in Hayden, 2006: 63); that is, ‘All teachers are ESL teachers.’ But
it is impossible for all teachers to be ESL teachers simply by working in an
international school. In these schools, where staff turnover is often high,
keeping teachers informed and trained in ESL issues is paramount. With
regular guidance, either from an external body such as Lexis Education
(https://lexised.com, accessed 13 February 2018) or by the ESL teachers
themselves, subject content staff will feel increased condence in employing
strategies with their ESL students, and the ESL department will gain
condence in delivering the training: after all, not many teachers relish the
prospect of delivering INSET to their colleagues! At the end of the day,
though, all teachers have a lot to learn from each other, and establishing
a mutual culture of staff–staff training in a range of specialist areas
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One school’s implementation of the model
(ESL, differentiation, SEN, effective marking, stretching the most able …
the list goes on) can only be a good thing.
Ensure that ESL staff are appropriately qualied, or willing to be
In writing my pieces for this book I have felt ambivalent at times when
stating that all ESL teachers must be suitably qualied. I am a qualied MFL
teacher and consequently have a sound understanding of how language
‘works’; however, I have no ESL qualications, and have therefore been
extremely lucky to have been given the chance to teach EAL at my present
school without one. However, I believe that had I not fallen in love with
EAL teaching and chosen to develop my skills in this area, I would eventually
have moved to a job in MFL once a space came up, and would have been
replaced with a similarly inexperienced EAL teacher, thus perpetuating the
‘I do a bit of EAL’ approach. As it is, I have recognized the signicant gaps
in my knowledge and am embarking on a master’s in applied linguistics
and TESOL shortly, something which I believe is necessary to lead an ESL
department. A deep understanding of second-language acquisition, grammar
and phonology, as well as specialist knowledge of the methodology behind
ESL teaching, are all vital, in my view, for an ESL department to provide
its students with the top-quality level of education that they deserve. In
order for the ‘bit of EAL’ practice to stop, school leaders must advertise for
qualied heads of ESL, as well as ensuring that ESL staff are encouraged to
further their professional development where necessary. Having qualied
ESL teachers teaching and leading in every international school will make
it easier for an internationally accepted programme to take shape, as well
as enabling the IGCSE ESL to be brought permanently under the umbrella
of ESL; the path to ESL departments becoming ‘centres of expertise’ will
consequently be smoother.
I believe that by putting the above advice into place, school leaders
will be well on their way to establishing successful ESL departments. It is
also true that, little by little, ESL is moving nearer to the fore of agencies
such as COBIS as its importance is recognized, and this can only be a
positive step on the path to a worldwide ESL programme. As Carder writes,
‘ESL students need to have an institutional backer for their cause, and this
department will be strongly “empowered” by accreditation agencies, and
curriculum bodies such as the IB …. School heads will be re-educated to
promote this model throughout the world of international education, with
the realization that the majority of international students are “emerging
bilinguals” and that there is a new paradigm in this increasingly globalised
world’ (Carder, 2017c: 39).
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It is my view that ESL is gaining in prominence in the world of
international schools, but there is still some way to go; this becomes clear
from reading Murphy’s 1990 publication ESL: A handbook for teachers
and administrators in international schools, which calls for steps to be
taken similar to the ones Carder and Mertin are calling for now, but which
was published thirty years ago. It is of prime importance, therefore, that
the current generation of ESL teachers take up the baton and continue to
push for ESL departments to become the ‘centres of expertise’ that they
deserve to be – and fast. An internationally recognized, content-based ESL
programme for international schools is possible, and today’s internet-based
society, where resources can be downloaded from a ‘cloud’ with the click of
a mouse, makes the prospect yet more achievable. We need to be the ones
to make it happen.
6
Part Six
Constructive solutions
that build consistently on
international students’
language trajectories:
Empowering ESL and MT
teachers as specialists
148
Chapter 8
Establishing a department
in the secondary school
as a ‘centre of expertise’
for all matters ESL and
mother tongue
Learning a language is a much deeper process than learning a somehow
‘neutral’ linguistic phenomenon enriched by some anecdotal cultural
knowledge. It is something that involves the whole person: ‘Nobody
acquires a language as he/she would do for any other subject: language
guides and lters our relationships, deeply questions what we have
achieved but also our affective, symbolic and imaginary references, as
well as our values’.
(Coïaniz, 2001: 248, quoted and translated in
Piccardo and Aden, 2014: 219)
Students are given approximately three years before they are
encouraged to be completely mainstreamed. This time limit implicitly
indicates that students are ready for non-sheltered English, both to
the mainstream teacher and the students themselves. As researchers
and ESL teachers, we know that [Cognitive and Academic Language
Prociency] usually takes anywhere from 5–7 years. Yet, are we
making this distinction clear to ESL students, mainstream teachers
and parents? It is quite possible that ESL students are leaving the ESL
classroom with false expectations of their own abilities, and when they
cannot live up to these expectations, anxieties increase, resulting in
withdrawal from interactions with others.
(Pappamihiel, 2001: 36–7)
Theoretical background
It should by now be clear that SL teachers’ input can easily be ignored. The
inspiring chapter above, written by Sarah Porter, is at the same time, for
me, shocking, as I encountered exactly the same situation in 1981, almost
40 years ago, when I commenced my career in ESL in international schools.
It serves as a rock-solid argument for following the proposals presented
in this book. The solution is to ensure that ESL and mother tongue
departments are seen as ‘centres of expertise’ in international schools and
are securely established throughout the global network, with appropriately
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Establishing a department in the secondary school
dened curricular objectives, assessment and accreditation. In an age of the
establishment of equal rights for women, for all races and for the LGBT
community, equity for languages is long overdue. Many schools have in
their mission statements clauses proclaiming their intention to have no
prejudice on the grounds of race, gender or sexual preference, but do not
mention equal access to languages, or the means to achieving such equality.
It seems to be a bridge too far even for international schools. In fact the
Independent Press Standards Organization, which covers discrimination,
does not include language in its code of practice. Clause 12, part one of
the editors’ code of practice states: ‘The press must avoid prejudicial or
pejorative reference to an individual’s race, colour, religion, sex, gender
identity, sexual orientation or to any physical or mental illness or disability’
(www.ipso.co.uk/editors-code-of-practice, accessed 13 February 2018).
Once again, ‘language’ falls outside the spectrum of equality or protection.
May (2014a) discusses the inability of certain disciplines to broaden
their scope. He writes about TESOL and SLA as being unwilling to extend
their remit to include aspects of bilingualism. He argues that the theories
of two prominent educational theorists, Bourdieu and Bernstein, are
useful in providing theoretical justication for the establishment of new
academic disciplines. ‘Bernstein was particularly interested in exploring
both the social organization and status hierarchies of academic subjects or
disciplines, as well as their participants (see, e.g., Bernstein 1990, 2000)’
(May, 2014a: 14). Bernstein used two terms: ‘classication’, which describes
the boundaries established within and between academic disciplines or
subjects, and ‘framing’, which refers to the locus of control over pedagogic
communication and its context (Bernstein, 2000: 6, quoted in May, 2014a:
14). Bernstein uses these conceptual tools to analyse how distinct academic
disciplines have been established from the nineteenth century until today,
and how they became organized into ‘singulars’, a term he dened as
‘bodies characterized by strong boundary maintenance (classication),
which are supported culturally (via professional associations, networks,
and writing) and psychologically (in students, teachers, and researchers). As
a result, “singulars develop strong autonomous self-sealing and narcissistic
identities” (Bernstein, 2000: p. 54)’ (May, 2014: 14). They have certain
‘rules’ that determine which research is acceptable, how teachers enact the
accepted research via textbooks, syllabuses and examinations, and what
count as legitimate texts, such as journal articles, books and theses. These
all reinforce the rubric of accepted and acceptable disciplinary knowledge
(ibid.: 14–15).
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Such ‘singulars’ describe the departments commonly encountered in
the middle and high levels of international schools: maths, science, English,
foreign languages, humanities/social sciences, art, music, drama, PE, IT,
and so on. Occasionally there are attempts to merge some disciplines: art,
music and drama may be brought together under the umbrella of ‘creative
arts’, for example. As the majority of international schools now host over
50 per cent of students who do not have English as their mother tongue it
is obvious which ‘singulars’ are singularly absent from the list: English as a
second language and mother tongues – bilingual studies.
The reason for their absence may be their relatively late arrival on
the scene: the disciplines listed above arose largely from subjects studied
in the nineteenth century, whereas the overturning of negative approaches
towards bilingualism began in the 1950s and 1960s, and an understanding
of the immense amount of time needed to become procient in academic
English in the 1980s and 1990s.
However, this is not true for IT – information technology – which
began its meteoric rise in the mid-1980s. IT can also be seen as a discipline
which crosses into other subject areas, but it usually has its own ‘singular’ in
schools. Moreover, in IT too there has been a spectacular rise in the number
of students being educated in a language which is not their own because of
globalization, migration and the ever-growing acceptance of English as the
world’s lingua franca.
As teachers who have worked in international secondary schools,
we can report that the ‘territorial’ elements of subject departments are very
much alive. Departments, each of which has its own specialist ‘language’,
jealously guard their boundaries, and indeed one department head
compared the situation to the rivalries between European countries in the
nineteenth century. There is a clear pecking order, and ESL and MT are
low down in it, unless there is on the one hand a separate department, and
on the other a head of department with the condence and integrity to
assert herself, and skilful enough to avoid being dismissed in the process.
Therefore only by establishing a ‘singular’ for the subject area of second
language teaching, with its partner mother-tongue teaching, will a school
have any chance of meeting the ESL students’ pedagogical needs. This is
particularly true because of the parlous state of the subject area in most
national systems. Moreover, this subject area department will not only have
to have equal status with other departments, but be continually boosted and
given prominence by all levels of school leadership.
Because of the years of ignorance and neglect that have surrounded
the subject, there will have to be extended periods of focus on the teachers
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Establishing a department in the secondary school
in the department, on their central role in the school, on their expertise in
ESL students’ many needs when learning social English, reading and writing
in each subject area, on the need to cooperate with subject teachers, and on
their invaluable role as sources of expertise in all matters related to second
language learning. The latter is a massive eld, with a huge literature, and
is immensely complex. It includes second language acquisition, theoretical
linguistics, rst language acquisition, language teaching, applied linguistics,
child language acquisition, bilingualism, psycholinguistics, anthropology,
sociolinguistics, ELT, sociocultural theory (which includes the role of the
learner’s culture in SLA), morphology, second language phonology, L2
semantics, pragmatics in second language acquisition, second language
reading skills, the acquisition of second language writing, second language
speech production, speaking and writing tasks and their effects on second
language performance, systemic functional linguistics, age effects in second
language learning, the role of educational level, literacy and orality in L2
learning, mother tongues and L2 learning, fossilization and SLA research,
to name but a few!
Second language learning also encompasses scholarly outlets such as
refereed journals, book series issued by international publishers, specialized
conferences, professional associations, and university-based postgraduate
programmes, at both master’s and doctoral levels. There is a specialized
vocabulary to discuss ‘language matters’ which acts as a shorthand for
experts in the eld. Critics snipe at this as ‘jargon’, but maths, science,
economics and IT all have their own specialized language. It is often
those who feel they have a right to own ESL students, typically English
departments, who weigh in most heavily with the ‘all that bilingualism stuff’
comments. This is a fundamental reason why teachers in the department
will need to be carefully selected as regards training, qualications and
experience: directors cannot afford to have any weak links in this area.
Unqualied ‘assistants’ in a ‘support’ role will certainly be unsatisfactory.
Only through the adoption of this model can the subtractive paradigm,
whereby students’ mother tongues are largely unnurtured and their English
language needs are relegated to support, be effectively challenged. It is
thought in many circles that international schools are leading the way:
perhaps they should be, given the clientele and the fee level, but such
aspirations leave a lot to be desired as regards second language matters.
At present the survival model for ESL students is paramount. It
has been labelled ‘support’, and this term has made the survival mode
acceptable, and even promoted as the best solution. See, for example, the
following extracts:
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In today’s classrooms, academic and social success often hinges
on a child’s language abilities. Children who need extra support
in second language acquisition have been mainstreamed into
classrooms where the teachers do not necessarily have the
resources or the support to meet their needs. Without this
support, the children who are struggling to acquire even basic
skills in their second language begin to fall behind academically,
creating an achievement gap that only widens over time (Harris,
2003). Providing teachers with adequate tools and techniques to
support these learners is essential. …
Teachers must research the way ELLs acquire their second
language and choose the appropriate strategies to support each
child as an individual. Research on this subject is constantly
emerging and changing. …
Any teacher working with ELL students should do research on
their own to nd out how all children acquire language.
(Facella et al., 2005: 209, 220)
These extracts advise teachers to ‘do their own research’; this is a tacit
acceptance that professional ESL teachers, or CPD for content teachers, do
not exist. We accept that content teachers do not have the resources to meet
their needs. It could be argued equally that they do not have the knowledge
or training. Teachers are advised to research the way that ELLs acquire their
second language: why was this not a basic part of their teacher training?
Then they have to choose the appropriate strategies to ‘support’ each
child as an individual. Many middle/high school teachers are sufciently
challenged by uent speakers of English, the demands of the curriculum,
the paperwork related to assessment, meetings with parents, staff meetings
and so forth not to have the time, energy or resources to follow this advice,
with the result that ESL students are left to struggle and survive as best they
can, which will create conditions in which they will indeed need support,
but perhaps not that intended by the authors.
Every good ESL teacher knows that a fundamental strategy in every
ESL class is to lower the affective barrier, that is, to create conditions for
learning in which the students can feel at home and not threatened. This
can bring remarkable results as ESL students learn to trust their teacher
and take more risks than they would in a large class of uent speakers who
already have the tools to forge ahead. However, the class teacher cannot
lower the affective barrier in a content class, as the native speakers will lose
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Establishing a department in the secondary school
interest. Lowering the affective barrier involves creating a class atmosphere
in which those who do not have a good knowledge of English, or have
cultural factors that inhibit them from contributing, can feel comfortable
making any sort of oral contribution, even if their level of English is low and
they fear feeling mortied if they make mistakes in front of uent speakers.
This simple fact is wilfully ignored by policy makers and politicians, who of
course are not in the classroom.
The nal comment, that teachers should do research on their own
to nd out how all children acquire language, reveals the depth to which
educational institutions have gone in abnegating responsibility for ESL
students. We live in an era of globalization, of the mass movement of
peoples around the globe, in which English has become a hyper-language,
the language of power (see Ostler, 2005, on the chequered history of what
languages that have power have gained from their relationship to empires),
and almost a necessity for the whole world. (There is a theory that there is a
language hierarchy in which languages range from peripheral or local, like
Flemish, to central languages, like English in India, to super-central, like
French, which is used in several countries for a limited range of subjects, to
hyper-central, like English, which is used globally for all purposes. English
is thus a hyper-language.) In this context the following facts stand out:
there is a need for all teachers to be trained in the factors surrounding the
education of ESL students, and a need for a radical reappraisal of disciplines
and departmental structure, as presented below.
The reason May explores Bernstein’s concept of singulars is to
analyse the somewhat frozen status of academic disciplines, and explain
why these, and
particular sub-disciplines such as SLA and TESOL, are so often
dened (and conned) by a narrowly derived set of research
assumptions, approaches, and related models of teaching and
learning. Such analyses also explain why such disciplines are
equally resistant to change. After all, fundamental changes in the
classication and framing of knowledge also necessarily involve
signicant shifts in the structure and distribution of power and in
principles of control – that is, in who controls, and what counts
as, disciplinary knowledge.
(May, 2014a: 15)
May’s argument, taken up by other researchers, for example Ortega (2013),
is for a broader base for SLA to include the bilingual repertoires of English
learners. Bernstein’s term for interdisciplinary elds is ‘regions’, which are
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‘created by a recontextualizing of singulars’ (Bernstein, 2000: 9). Regions
allow a much broader understanding of the origins and research principles
which form the basis of academic disciplines. This is exactly what the
establishment of ‘ESL and mother tongue departments’ can accomplish. The
professional teachers in these departments will have been trained not only
in the complex theories and practices of SLA and TESOL, but also in what
is involved for the students in this process. Teachers need to help students to
maintain and develop their mother tongue, and transfer academic knowledge
from the rst to the second language so that they can build on their funds
of knowledge. They also need to develop content language syllabuses in
liaison with other departments and enable ESL students to become biliterate
bilinguals. By also taking responsibility for the CPD of the remainder of
the staff and the school leadership, they will demonstrate their complete
dedication to their professional lives and pedagogical involvement.
Cummins (2000) has shown how important it is for ESL students to
be empowered in order to have a sense of self-esteem, which will provide
them with the drive to accomplish the momentous task of developing their
second language abilities to a high academic level, which involves an effort
far greater than that required of native English speakers. Leung et al. (1997:
544) point out that ESL students ‘actively construct their own patterns of
language use, ethnicity, and social identity’, which can sometimes be in
‘strong contradiction to the xed patterns and reied ethnicities attributed’
to the students. The situation of bilinguals can even reach the stage where
‘[n]umerous bilinguals do not feel fully accepted by either of the cultures in
question. There again, the cause is often not bilingualism/biculturalism so
much as “monolingualist” and “monoculturalist” ideologies dominant in
one or both of the communities’ (Lüdi and Py, 2009: 160).
ESL students need to have an institutional backer for their cause, and
this will be the region of the ESL and mother tongue department, strongly
empowered by international schools, accreditation agencies, and curriculum
bodies such as the IB. The failed model of support which has permeated
national systems and left ESL students labelled as learning-disabled, or
with severe bilingual problems, must be removed from the educational
vocabulary. School directors will be re-educated to promote this model
throughout the world of international education, along with the realization
that the majority of international students are emerging bilinguals and that
there is a new paradigm in this increasingly globalized world. The reform
will involve careful selection of staff for this new department, rigorous
training for school leaders and department heads, awareness sessions for
members of boards of governors that emphasize the equality of status of
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Establishing a department in the secondary school
the ESL and mother tongue staff, and screening of each new staff member
to ensure that they have professional training in linguistically responsive
teaching. As already noted, this must be ‘consistent, long-term training in
ESL pedagogy and methodology. … Quick and dirty 1-day, or 1-hour, in-
service sessions simply cannot provide enough preparation and training
for teachers expected to help ELLs succeed in their mainstream content
classes in a new language’ (Hansen-Thomas and Cavagnetto (2010: 263).
School directors will reap rewards: they will notice a steady improvement
in all ESL students, an interweaving of reading and writing processes
among departments, more understanding of bilingual processes throughout
the community, gratitude from parents, and improvement in grades and
examination results.
That the language of each subject in the secondary school is the basis
for second language students to make progress in the subject was pointed
out in 1975 – over forty years ago:
The core of the difculty in the mathematics classroom is that
the teacher often understands and takes for granted the whole
register of mathematics, and thinks only of the mathematical
aspects of these items …, whereas for the learner they may
also be unfamiliar language – they are ‘peculiar’ English. It is
therefore desirable that the mathematics teacher should be aware
of the register of mathematics as a sub-set of English …. To this
end, mathematics educators and the English language teachers
should collaborate in the production of guidelines, illustrative
descriptions and teaching materials concerned with this problem.
(UNESCO, 1975: 121–2)
What he writes about mathematics is of course equally and wholly applicable
to every subject in the middle and upper school.
How research supports the arguments for an independent
department responsible for teaching SLLs
We might do well … to recall John T. Bruer’s wise comment that one of
the dangers of focusing on maturational issues in discussing learning is
that it prompts us to pay too much attention to when learning occurs
and too little attention to the conditions of learning.
(Singleton, 2014: 32)
It is generally accepted that learning a second language can be a fairly
tough challenge, the demands of which no one is likely to take on
willingly unless he/she wants or needs to.
(Cook, 2014b: 102)
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This section contains a review of how the latest research on SLA and
bilingualism supports our arguments for an independent department of
professionals who will teach ESL in a sustainable framework. Many of the
quotes are self-explanatory and point to a clear need for separate, focused
instruction in the English language that ESL students need in order to study
all school subjects for the curriculum.
Lenneberg (1967: 176) wrote that ‘after puberty … automatic
acquisition from mere exposure to a given language seems to disappear ...,
and foreign languages have to be taught and learned through a conscious
and labored effort’; this is an indication that direct instruction is required
– not support.
Singleton (2014: 50) notes that ‘learners require constant attentiveness
to their comprehension problems, … and a generous supply of explicit
explanations’.
ESL students must above all develop their writing skills: written
work in all subjects is required at advanced levels in academic English.
Speaking the language passably does not lead to advanced writing skills, or,
as le Comte de Buffon said, ‘Those who write as they speak, even though
they speak well, write badly’ (Cook, 2014a: 74). Some of the mineelds of
learning English spelling are given below. How many content teachers will
be aware of these anomalies?
Sound correspondences for English vowel letters:
● a bait, wag, talkative, father, anaemia, daughter, many, aisle, boat,
aerial, beauty, cauliower, artistically (silent)
● e ten, cedar, be, kidney, offer, bureau, eight, lewd, pace (silent)
● i bit, bite, legible, auntie, sign, dirt, business (silent)
● o phone, dog, memoir, door, book, word, youth, ludicrous, cow,
tough, our, boy
● u but, fruit, burn, use, full, guest (silent)
● y yes, martyr, ratify, nylon, funny
(Cook, 2014a: 77)
When there is an ESL department, with fully trained professionals, these
enthusiasts will not only know all the above facts but actually enjoy
teaching them, as such matters are the life blood of applied linguistics; they
will regularly introduce, explicate, and give opportunities for practice of,
such English language quirks, perhaps also briey introducing the historical
reasons for them. In English, there are 26 letters in the alphabet to represent
44 phonemes, the basic units of the language’s phonology.
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Establishing a department in the secondary school
Wolf (2008: 128) points out the need for children to be actively
taught certain phonological and orthographic constituent parts of English.
She gives an excerpt that contains common words that include the vowel
pair ‘ea’ in its wide range of possible pronunciations: ‘There once was a
beautiful bear who sat on a seat near to breaking and read by the hearth
about how the earth was created. She smiled beatically, full of ideas for the
realm of her winter dreams.’
In an international school setting there are students from almost
every country in the world. They bring with them a variety of scripts, and
also writing conventions. For many of them, learning a new script and style
is a monumental task. As Cook points out (2014a: 80), ‘The problem of
recognising and writing the appropriate signs of the second writing system
is largely unappreciated’, to which I would add ‘except by those trained in
applied linguistics’.
Researchers describe the need for direct instruction
of language
Students acquiring English need a sound, age-appropriate, content-based
programme of SL instruction to a level which enables them to become
socially and academically successful as quickly as possible, alongside
a programme that enables them to maintain and develop their mother
tongue. Often it is mistakenly thought, by non-ESL-qualied teachers and
others, that a child who can communicate face to face has reached the level
required. It can take between ve and seven years for a second-language
learner to acquire the necessary level of academic English to succeed in an
English-medium school.
Davison writes:
ESL learners have to acquire a whole new sound system, a new
set of words and meanings, a new way of constructing sentences
and a new set of discourse patterns. They must learn to express
themselves clearly in a language that is appropriate for their age,
their situation and their purpose. … ESL students do not have a
sound oral base in English on which to build their literacy skills
and there are likely to be many gaps in their knowledge.
(Davison, 1994: 89)
What follows are quotes from researchers on the need for direct L2
instruction and the ensuring advantages as opposed to the dangers of sink-
or-swim policies:
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[K]nowing that young children may have a slow start when
acquiring an L2 can be an important research-based argument
against harmful attempts to promote so-called sink-or-swim
educational policies that attempt to reduce or even completely
withdraw the rst and second language support that is to be
provided to language minority children by schools. Such policies
have been dangerously gaining ground … for some time now.
(Ortega, 2013: 28)
This extract points out the laissez-faire attitude to SL learners in many schools.
‘For successful grammar acquisition, attention to form is probably
necessary. This attentional focus on form can be externally achieved by
instruction’ (Ortega, 2013: 79). This is another call for direct instruction,
particularly of grammar. ‘Cognitive-interactionist researchers agree that
negative feedback (or the implicit or explicit indication that some part of an
utterance is ungrammatical) is better overall than entirely ignoring errors’
(Ortega, 2013: 79–80). Here is an intervention that calls for mistakes to be
corrected, not glossed over.
Grammatical competence appears to evolve in ways that are
less amenable to incidental benets from the environment than
other aspects of the language to be learned, such as vocabulary,
discourse competence, and so on. It also seems to hold a special
status in language acquisition. Specically, grammar (a) requires
more interest, attention and hard work than other aspects of
the language to be learned; (b) may even require more time to
simmer and deploy than the learning of other aspects of an L2;
and (c) can act as a gatekeeper to development in other areas of
the L2 beyond formulaic repertoires, particularly sociolinguistic
competence.
(Ortega, 2013: 80)
This is another call for grammar to be specically taught to SL learners,
and the following quote contains the same message as regards other aspects
of language: ‘Schmidt also proposes that nothing is free in L2 learning:
“in order to acquire phonology, one must attend to phonology; in order
to acquire pragmatics, one must attend to both linguistic forms and the
relevant contextual features; and so forth” (1995, p. 17)’ (Ortega, 2013:
96). The following three quotes all contain the same message, that SL
learners need direct instruction, not ‘support’: ‘L2 instruction has value. If
instruction targets implicit processes, … it can boost bottom-up induction
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Establishing a department in the secondary school
of constructions by making exemplars in teaching materials more frequent,
salient and consistent (Robinson and Ellis, 2008b)’ (Ortega, 2013: 137);
‘Instruction cannot override development, but it has been shown to result
in clear benets in the areas of accuracy and rate of learning for both syntax
and morphology’ (Ortega, 2013: 143); ‘[M]ost learners may benet from
external help via explanations and guided practice, provided these are well
designed’ (Ortega, 2013: 160). This last one emphasizes the need for a
professionally drawn-up plan of study – a curriculum.
The following extracts point up the need for professional SL teachers:
[I]nclusive pedagogies, unless properly resourced with appropriate
teacher expertise and knowledge[,] may fail the very students
they set out to support. Mismatches between the rhetoric of
inclusion and the sometimes excluding practices of classroom life
illustrate how linguistically diverse students learning English as
an additional language might suffer.
(Leung and Creese, 2010: xxi)
Language at school has been described as the ‘hidden curriculum’
(Christie, 1985) as teachers and curriculum and assessment
statements seldom make their expectations of language use
explicit (Schleppegrell, 2004).
(Monaghan, 2010: 24)
The extract below goes into the deeper aspects of language learning, showing
that the lack of a well-taught language may lead to general difculties with
reasoning:
As Schleppegrell (2004: 2) argues[,] ‘Students’ difculties in
“reasoning”, for example, may be due to their lack of familiarity
with the linguistic properties of the language through which the
reasoning is expected to be presented, rather than to the inherent
difculty of the cognitive processes involved’.
(ibid.)
Harper et al. (2010: 75) add, ‘EAL students often need language-sensitive
content instruction to facilitate their conceptual learning through academic
English. They also need content-based language instruction to assist their
development of the new language’ (emphasis original). Once again, the
basic requirements for an ESL programme are laid out.
Teachers [need to] set objectives for English language and culture
learning for their EAL students. The process includes identifying
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and teaching the grammar and discourse structures that students
need to understand and communicate important ideas in the
content areas. It also means identifying and teaching key words
and phrases that EAL students will need to learn in addition
to the technical, content-specic words that will be new to all
students.
(Echevarria et al., 2004, quoted in Harper et al., 2010: 77)
The above text is a further iteration of the basic needs of an SL programme.
[F]luent English speakers often hesitate to question or correct
EAL speakers unless their meaning is unclear. Therefore, EAL
learners at intermediate and higher levels of English prociency
typically receive insufcient feedback on their errors and have
limited opportunities for English language development.
(Harper et al., 2010: 84)
This is conrmation of a quote given above by Ortega on the need for
feedback on errors.
Although many new words are learned through multiple
exposures in everyday social settings outside schools, technical
terms and their associated patterns of use in academic content
areas are much less common and require more focused attention.
(ibid.: 85)
This extract requires a comment: a major difference between SLLs in
national settings and those in international schools is that the latter usually
have no exposure to English outside the school – another compelling reason
for direct instruction of English.
[T]he placement of EAL students in mainstream classes without
specialized EAL classes to support their English language
development makes it extremely difcult for them to receive
either the sheltered content instruction or the focused, content-
based language and culture support that many need to succeed in
school. In fact, we doubt that any individual teacher can provide
sufcient support, and we believe that the old adage, ‘It takes a
whole village to raise a child’, applies particularly well to EAL
learners: ‘It takes a whole school to educate a student.’ This implies
that all teachers (not just EAL specialists) must understand how
language and culture inuence learning in school.
(ibid.: 90)
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Establishing a department in the secondary school
Here we see evidence of the need for CPD for all staff on SL matters.
The following quote reinforces the essential need for direct, professional
instruction: ‘Both rst and second language vocabulary acquisition proceed
in a context of input tuning of various kinds and are characterised by “special
teaching” in the form of ostensive [clearly demonstrative] denitions’ (Cook
and Singleton, 2014: 50).
[M]onolingualism is taken as the implicit norm, the reality of
bi/multilingualism is made invisible, and linguistic ownership by
birth and monolingual upbringing is elevated to an inalienable
right and advantage …. Thus, the very goals of the discipline are
led astray by the monolingual bias, and a subtractive bilingualism
approach is uncritically embraced by SLA researchers.
(Ortega, 2014: 36)
This shows how bi/multilingualism is sidelined, and even made ‘invisible’,
which leads not only researchers but teachers and leadership to accept a
subtractive bilingualism.
If children have a limited command of the language of instruction,
and of literacy, and no efforts are made to welcome them on
their own terms, social stigma can be constructed, based on
the ‘implicit association between how well individuals express
themselves and their intelligence’ (Torres-Guzmán, 2002: 6).
(Auleear Owodally, 2014: 4)
This quote reveals how SL learners can be relegated to the category of SEN
without caring procedures.
These exceptional learners [post-pubertal learners whose
accents are not recognized as foreign even under close scrutiny
in the laboratory] shared two features. They had all received
considerable amounts of high-quality L2 instruction and they
all self-reported high levels of motivation and concern to sound
native-like.
(Ortega, 2013: 23; emphasis added)
Another denitive argument for providing a good SL programme.
Finally, a clinching argument for the need for a designated ESL
department with professional teachers comes from Ortega, who writes:
While the value of language instruction regularly becomes the
object of heated debates in scholarly and public policy circles,
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supporters and sceptics often fail to pay sufcient attention to the
fact that the accumulated evidence clearly shows accuracy and
rate advantages for instruction. Simply put, instructed learners
progress at a faster rate, they are likely to develop more elaborate
language repertoires and they typically become more accurate
than uninstructed learners.
(Ortega, 2013: 139)
Furthermore, ‘Evidence of clear rate and accuracy advantages of instruction
is also available for L2 morphology’ (ibid.).
The above extracts from researchers present convincing evidence that
L2 students benet immensely from a professionally designed programme
of instruction tailored to their needs, in addition to the evidence given by
prominent researchers such as Cummins, Krashen, and Collier and Thomas
discussed in previous chapters. They show the overwhelming arguments
in favour of professional instruction by qualied teachers as opposed to
support given by unqualied teaching assistants.
It is so obvious to ESL professionals that ESL students require all
the trappings of programme delivery, curriculum and assessment geared
to their needs that it is frustrating in the extreme to have to continually
present arguments for their existence. Long-term stress is said to be the most
debilitating, and in an already stressful (though rewarding) occupation, ESL
teachers would be well served by international schools acknowledging their
expertise and ensuring that optimal conditions are established for the healthy
operation of their profession: a department structure, and recognition as a
subject in its own right by curriculum and accreditation agencies.
The professionalization of ESL would also open career paths in
the discipline. In the current support role, where ESL teachers are often
teaching assistants, there is a permanent reinforcement of low expectations.
Even good ESL teachers become disenchanted and demotivated, many
changing discipline or even profession. I have seen excellent ESL teachers,
well qualied, who in spite of being dedicated to their students have become
unable to tolerate the steady downgrading of their profession and have
moved into other areas. This is a huge loss for international education.
Length of time in the ESL programme
A key theme … is the importance of adopting an explicitly positive
view of bilingual learners, and their multiple linguistic repertoires, as
the basis for their long-term educational success.
(May, 2014b: 24)
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Establishing a department in the secondary school
A particular focus needs to be on the length of time ESL students remain
in the ESL programme; there is often undue haste in exiting them to the
‘mainstream’. As Umansky and Reardon point out:
In research and practice there is an implicit assumption that the
more quickly students are reclassied, the better the academic
and linguistic outcome. Faster reclassication, according to this
underlying belief, implies more effective instruction and better-
served English learners. This study shows that the speed with
which students are reclassied is not necessarily a good indicator
of how well students progress linguistically or academically. …
If exiting EL status is a de facto requirement for quality instruction
and access to content, then EL students will continue to struggle
in school with large achievement gaps between themselves and
their non-EL counterparts (Callahan, 2005; Fry, 2007; Gándara
& Contreras, 2009; Kanno & Kangas, 2014; Reardon & Galindo,
2009; Valdés, 1998). If, instead, EL students are ensured quality
instruction and full access to content, longer periods spent in the
EL classication could actually result in higher linguistic and
academic outcomes by the end of high school.
(Umansky and Reardon, 2014: 908)
Professional ESL teachers will be all too aware of the constant pressure
from some parents and school leadership to move the ESL students out of
the ESL programme; the above quote reinforces the arguments of why that
is not a long-term solution.
Appropriate assessment models for SLLs
L2 users and L2 learners need to be assessed against successful L2
users, not against native speakers, as reected in many contemporary
examination systems.
(Cook, 2014c: 139)
A key problem of assessment … stems from … benchmarking
performances in relation to inadequate or inappropriate descriptors. In
the mainstream education context, the problems arise from using rst
language descriptors for assessing second language performance.
(Leung and Lewkowicz, 2008: 314)
The above statements raise many questions about the assessment of ESL
students. Teachers in the Anglosphere and in international schools are
familiar with a schedule of testing which appears to be being made more
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simplied, just as the level of diversity in student language repertoires
becomes more varied and complex. Piccardo and Aden point out:
[W]e can observe that, while on the one hand, new theoretical
frameworks like complexity and sociocultural theory are
increasingly being used for investigating the process of second
language acquisition (Lantolf, 2000; Larsen-Freeman, 2002;
Swain et al., 2011; van Lier, 2004, among others), on the
other hand the idea that language prociency can be described
exclusively as a series of separate competences and organized in
the form of lists of discrete items one can tick on a grid is more and
more widespread, as shown by the multiplications of frameworks
in all domains (above all in assessment but also competence
specication, curriculum planning and quality assurance). This
oversimplication is extended to all language features, including
the cultural ones.
(Piccardo and Aden, 2014: 236)
The process of simplication of assessment in the IBMYP is investigated
by Hughes (2014), who makes the key point that when both grades and
comments are given as feedback, comments are seen as more useful and
constructive, but when a grade is given this is immediately seen as more
‘important’ and negates the value of the comment. He does not specically
mention ESL students – a notable omission – but their needs are especially
well served by comments and ill served by grades, above all when these
are given within the same scale as those for other students or subjects: in
the case of the MYP this is foreign-language learners, not second language
learners. Assessment needs to be adjusted for ESL students to ensure they
are not demotivated by low grades. For ESL beginners, low grades can be
almost automatically a result of combining ESL with Foreign Language,
where there is an urgent need for reclassication.
ESL students require specic modes of assessment. The most suitable
models are those which make use of multiple measures, including classroom
grades, projects, and portfolios of student work. As pointed out by Boyle
and Charles:
The effectiveness of marks or written comments has also been
investigated. There is evidence that providing written comments
is more effective than providing grades ([R.] Butler, 1988; Crooks,
1988). Butler’s research demonstrated that feedback through
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Establishing a department in the secondary school
comments alone led to learning gains whereas marks alone or
comments accompanied by marks or giving praise, did not.
(Boyle and Charles, 2014: 111)
Formative assessment is the ideal solution for ESL students; it is also
known as ‘assessment for learning’ (AfL). A denition given by Popham
states, ‘Formative assessment is not a test but a process that produces
not so much a score but a qualitative insight into student understanding’
(Popham, 2008: 6). In a comprehensive review of the subject, useful for
both researchers and practitioners, Boyle and Charles write, of the situation
in England:
Formative assessment was legitimised and became part of the
education policy makers’ and teaching fraternity’s lexicon
through the seminal Task Group on Assessment and Testing
report (DES 1988) which developed the assessment system for
the National Curriculum encompassed by the 1988 Education
Reform Act (DES, 1988). However, with the commencement of
paper and pencil testing of the National Curriculum (the ‘sats’)
in 1991, soon the only form of ‘assessment’ which mattered was
summative and this was embodied in the end of key stage tests.
These quickly became a ‘high stakes’ priority for schools who felt
pressured by both Ofsted (Ofce for Standards in Education) and
the government who used the test results as the principal (often,
it appeared to teachers, the sole) measure of national standards
and each school’s success or failure.
(Boyle and Charles, 2014: 8–9)
Thus formative assessment was sidelined in England, and summative
assessment has become the deciding factor for education internationally:
[I]nternationally assessment has become almost universally
equated with high stakes scoring and testing (Hall et al. 2004;
Shepard 2000, 2005; Twing et al. 2010) and teaching has
consequently been reduced to servicing that metric (Guinier, 2003).
(Boyle and Charles, 2014: 10)
Some benets of summative assessment are given by Sternberg, but the
accompanying negative effects are plain to see:
IQs increased by about 30 points in the 20th century. Part of this
increase may have been the result of increased standardized testing
because testing improves the skills on which students are tested.
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But although these practices may increase general intelligence,
they may impede the development of creativity and wisdom.
As a result, our society may be achieving short-term increases
in well-being at the expense of long-term ones. Instruction and
assessment need to better balance the development of intelligence,
creativity, and wisdom.
(Sternberg, 2016: 66)
That assessment is not used to further the learning process but only to see
‘whether change has occurred’ is apparent from the following quote:
Assessment should always be feedback instruments that
are integrated with and integral to teaching and learning –
assessments are not ‘add-ons’ which ‘round off’ the process with
a neat label or grade for the pupil. It is the feedback information
and interpretations of children’s learning locations, not the scores,
levels and grades, that are important in the learning process. In
too many cases, assessment is used synonymously with testing ‘as
the measure to judge whether change has occurred rather than
as a mechanism to further enhance and consolidate learning by
teachers and pupils’ (Hattie and Timperley 2007, p. 104).
(Boyle and Charles, 2014: 114)
A clear summary of how assessment practices have developed is given below:
Paradigm one is the accountancy model, beloved of policy makers
and at the core of the school effectiveness debate (Gorard 2010).
It is best dened as ‘teach to be measured’, in which the sole
purpose of teaching is to deliver or cover material that will later
be tested; there is no involvement of the pupil in that learning
process. Paradigm two is the banking model (Freire 1970) in
which the teacher teaches and the pupils are taught and those are
the xed and immutable roles; there is no deregulation of the role
(Allal & [Pelgrims] Ducrey 2000; Perrenoud 1998; Zimmerman
2000). In ‘olden days’ this was known as the ‘topping up’ model
in which the child was the empty vessel and was topped up or
lled up with knowledge, which she recited back to the teacher
to prove that learning had taken place (Alexander 200[4], 2008;
Tharp & Gallimore 1991 in Smith et al. 2004). Paradigm three
is the ‘testocracy’ in which the metric is laid down and the
teaching and learning process conforms to that testing metric. Its
limitations and the humanistic and social implications … are not
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Establishing a department in the secondary school
even considered as aws in the system: ‘test scores correlate with
parental income (and even grandparents’ socio-economic status)
rather than actual student performance …’ (Guinier & Torres
2003, p. 68). The fact that the testocracy reduces merit and a
meritocracy to a meaningless predestined ordination is ignored.
‘Test-centred techniques are used to ration access to elite higher
education as appropriate measures of merit’ (Guinier and Torres,
2003: 69) and ‘… at no point was any attempt made to reconcile
this with an elitist rationing process’ (p. 69).
(Boyle and Charles, 2014: 203–4)
This paints a bleak picture of assessment today, and one which needs to be
understood and rejected above all by the ESL community:
At four or ve key points in the year (to be selected by the
teacher without external interference) the teacher will carry out
an analysis and write a detailed commentary on a piece of the
child’s assessed work. This commentary identies the learning
that the child has demonstrated in this specic piece of work
and the further support or new learning which is required for the
child’s next step in the learning journey.
(ibid.: 99)
This claries both how the formative assessment process can be carried out,
and how it contributes to students’ learning. It is easily applied to the SL
learner. The advantages are:
The teacher then has a progressive record across the year of
the child’s learning development, the learning issues and the
scaffolding and support strategies which have been used in that
period. This provides a full reportable record of each child’s
learning development for that year. The record is transferable
to the next teacher and is an accurate document for reporting
progress to parents, talking with the child and reporting externally
to a range of accountability stakeholders. Each assessment piece
reects what has gone on in the classroom.
(ibid.: 99)
Further benets of formative assessment for ESL students can be seen from
the following quotes: ‘The core of formative assessment lies not in what
teachers do but in what they see. The teacher has to have awareness and
understanding of the pupils’ understandings and progress’ (ibid.: 10). ESL
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teachers have a close relationship with their students, and will be well
placed to write comprehensively about their progress and learning needs.
‘It is attention to pupil thinking that will cause the teacher to abandon
his/her original plan for a lesson’ (ibid.: 11), which shows the need for a
‘negotiated syllabus’ (see Carder, 1979). Also, ‘formative assessment should
be understood and presented as nothing other than genuine engagement
with ideas, which includes being responsive to them and using them to
inform next moves’ (Coffey et al., 2011: 1129, quoted in Boyle and Charles,
2014: 6). This points out that the teacher will use the assessment for future
planning. Furthermore, ‘The formative assessment activity must arise from
current classroom practice (not externally produced tests, quizzes, work
sheets for mass consumption and completion)’ (Boyle and Charles, 2014: 7),
which puts a denitive curb on mass-produced materials.
Practical examples of AfL would include:
For example, if a teacher during a teaching session is assessing a
learner’s understanding of alphabetic principles (phonemes), we
would not expect that teacher to present a worksheet focused
on the 26 letters of the alphabet. Rather there would be multiple
assessment routes for that concept, for example how the child
reads, how the child writes, what form of code the child uses
to write. These are all normal teaching activities with which
the learner is comfortable (affective and conative domains)[;]
however[,] they are also assessments.
(Boyle and Charles, 2014: 13)
These are useful strategies for SL teachers. In conclusion:
An assessment task should build on a learner’s current experience.
The task needs to be clearly, carefully and precisely constructed
to enable the learner to demonstrate what he or she knows.
Assessment needs to be understood as tightly integrated within
teaching and learning.
(ibid.)
This may look like common sense, but in reality how many content teachers
would be willing to assess in this way for SL learners?
Assessment for ESL students in the middle school should be overseen
by the ESL department. It should not be done in any way that diminishes
the self-esteem of the students. Thus, in the IBMYP, for example, grades
will not be given according to the language B/acquisition criteria as they
have no relationship to the language needed for academic success. Portfolio
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Establishing a department in the secondary school
work can be documented; there can be regular liaison between ESL and
content teachers to decide on progress or the need for intervention.
Issues relating to assessment in a student’s mother tongue are raised
by Mahoney and MacSwan:
We make a strong distinction between assessing a child’s native-
language ability and assessing a child’s academic subject matter
knowledge in his or her native language. The latter, like the
assessment of children’s knowledge of reading and writing in their
native language, improves our understanding about the role that
prior academic experience in the home language might play in
students’ ongoing educational experience. The former does not.
(Mahoney and MacSwan, 2005: 38)
They continue:
We advocate a child-study approach to assessment of ELL
students, one that takes into account a wide range of evidence
bearing on an individual child’s specic needs and in which all
stakeholders have a voice in important decisions. Local resources
and program options are as important as the child’s level of
prociency in the second language, and must also be taken into
consideration. Criteria for identication might be rather different
from those established for reclassication, and in no case should
important decisions be … based on one or more scores on
standardized tests of language ability or academic achievement.
(ibid.: 40)
Here is more conrmation that standardized tests should be avoided, in this
case for SL learners’ mother tongues.
Tangen and Spooner-Lane also address the issue of assessment, and
the ensuing placement of students in appropriate classes. They write:
Researchers have found that standardized testing for learning
difculties alone is inadequate and inappropriate to use with
students who have EAL (Brown, 2004; Gunderson and Siegel,
2001; Limbos and Geva, 2001). As successful completion of
such tests requires sufcient English language prociency, it
stands to reason that students who lack such prociency will
score poorly. In spite of the difculties involved with testing,
Vaughn, Bos and Schumm (2006) reported that there continues
to be a disproportionately higher classication of learning
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170
difculties/disabilities and emotional/behavioural problems
for students who have EAL than for those of the majority
population group.
(Tangen and Spooner-Lane, 2008: 65)
Every trained and experienced ESL teacher knows about these issues with
the testing of ESL students, and the need for more time. Standardized testing
is simply not appropriate for them. There is a paradox in the current climate
of education in the Anglosphere: as globalization becomes more pervasive
there is increasing diversity of languages in the ‘global mix’; but at the same
time there is an increase in the demand for standardization of testing. There
is a sense of a runaway train: the size, speed and complexity of so many
issues require a rm hand to bring everything under control. What is needed
is a sensitive and understanding approach to the needs of each individual,
and this can be enabled by the professional ESL teachers overseeing the
testing of ESL students, upon arrival in the school for appropriate placement,
and thereafter by setting up school policies throughout grades 6–12 for
assessing each ESL student’s progression from class to class, or placement
in suitable classes for best achievement. The focus will not be on what suits
the framework of a politically and economically savvy curriculum provider,
but on what is best for each ESL student’s learning needs, and also on
consideration for content teachers so that they can best provide for uent
English speakers.
We know that children learn at different rates, and we must
use differentiation to reach a wide range of students and treat them as
individuals, catering to their particular needs, and bringing them along. So
why do we judge them all on standards that require that they all get the
same skills at approximately the same pace? The irony seems to escape
people. Attitudes to assessment have had a largely negative impact on ESL
students. Harper and de Jong, discussing the No Child Left Behind Act
of 2001 (NCLB; www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/index.html, accessed
13 February 2018):
Unfortunately, expectations for grade-level achievement on
standardised tests in English have resulted in the placement of ELLs
into remedial reading classes alongside native English speakers
who have been identied as poor readers (Harper, de Jong, and
Platt 2008; Callahan 2006). It is assumed that the instruction in
these intensive reading classes will meet their needs; however, the
texts used in these classes are often too difcult for ELLs, and the
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Establishing a department in the secondary school
curriculum is generally inappropriate for those whose reading
difculties in English lie in vocabulary development and reading
comprehension, and not in the decoding and basic skills practice
provided.
(Harper and de Jong, 2009: 140)
Here once again is evidence that SLLs are being wrongly placed with native
speakers with learning difculties, a situation that in my experience can be
deeply demotivating for the SLLs and may even slow their advancement,
but that takes place in many international schools.
Harper and de Jong write further about the inappropriateness of
standardized tests for SL learners, and attest to:
the potential and very real negative consequences of standardised,
grade-level tests in English for ELLs, including higher dropout
rates and a narrowing of the curriculum as teachers focus on
preparing students for the test. Further, although allowances
for test ‘accommodations’ (such as bilingual dictionaries and
additional time to take the tests) were later added as ‘exibilities’
to NCLB accountability guidelines, research by Abedi (2002)
and S. Wright (2005) indicates that such accommodations fail
to adequately compensate for the language difculty of the tests.
(ibid.)
It should by now be common knowledge that ‘Teachers must provide
CLD [culturally and linguistically diverse] students [with] content-specic
academic language instruction to support their performance on content area
assessments (Kieffer et al., 2009)’ (Scanlan and López, 2012: 605). As O.
García and Flores point out (2014: 161–2), ‘For bilingual students it would
be important to create language-prociency assessments that assess their
ability to perform academically in English, their heritage/home language, or
a combination of both. In addition, it would be most important to develop
valid and reliable assessments that separate language prociency from
content knowledge.’
Common-sense facts about the need for separate
instruction for SLLs
Krashen (1982) has shown that an important factor in teaching ESL students
is lowering the affective barrier. This implies that in order to encourage ESL
students to feel condent, and not to feel restrained by making errors, the
teacher should create an atmosphere of trust and freedom in which it is
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possible to speak out regardless of the consequences. Forty-two years of
experience have provided me with conclusive proof that such a strategy
bears fruit. Having taught them year after year, I have seen that ESL
students aged 11 to 18 open up and gain condence in a classroom in which
they are encouraged to use whatever English language skills they have. A
colleague posted a notice above his chalkboard to the effect that errors were
to be seen as positive aspects of language learning which could be built on,
discussed and improved. A mainstream teacher with many uent English
speakers in her class cannot create these conditions: the uent speakers will
lose patience; the ESL students will keep silent; they may even be teased or
bullied by uent speakers. The class teacher has a massive syllabus to get
through; slowing down at every stage for the ESL students is not realistic,
nor feasible, however much training may have been received (and for SL
requirements it is usually minimal or non-existent).
If all the uent speakers are graded, and the ESL students are given
only comments – as is recommended in best practice – the ESL students, as
teenagers, will come to see themselves as being in a separate category. This
may persuade the content teacher to give them grades, which may be always
lower than uent speakers’, which will discourage them, so that they get yet
lower grades.
School administrators, and curriculum providers, need to be realistic
about the needs of ESL students. They should not demand of teachers
anything that they have not actually done themselves for a period of years.
‘Curricula are largely determined by education ministries based on political
decisions’ (Conteh and Meier, 2014: 7), and teachers are often prevented
from doing what they believe to be right because the mainstream curriculum
or the hierarchy prevents them.
Tangen and Spooner-Lane comment:
Students who have EAL very often experience an initial ‘quiet
period’ (Igoa, 1995) as they come to grips with their new situation.
There is no set time frame for these quiet periods but it has been
observed that the younger the child, the longer the quiet period
lasts. During this time, students may exhibit resistance to learning
and being included in class activities. Teachers may interpret
this reticence to engage in classroom activities as students being
uncooperative and misbehaving. It is important for teachers to
remember that students who have EAL experience incongruity in
their home customs and practices while trying to adjust to their
new culture (Singh Ghuman, 1994) and are often bewildered by
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Establishing a department in the secondary school
their new circumstances. Teachers who are unaware of students’
underlying difculties for learning may become focused on the
product of students’ work (correct spelling, grammar, reading
pronunciation) rather than the process of learning (Nunan, 1999).
(Tangen and Spooner-Lane, 2008: 65–6)
This extract reveals that it is taken for granted that content teachers will
not know about the quiet period experienced by ESL students. This is yet
another indication that all teachers require CPD in linguistically responsive
teaching, and staff who have not had such training should not be employed.
Hayden and Thompson note:
Although programmes such as ESL in the Mainstream (Unlocking
the World, 2013) have become increasingly popular in response
to a need for support in this area, it is undoubtedly the case that
too many international school teachers are expected to cope
without specic training, and in some schools students may not
be as well supported as they and their parents might expect to be
the case.
(Hayden and Thompson, 2013: 10–11)
ESL in the Mainstream is no longer offered, and the website has moved to
https://lexised.com/courses/teaching-esl-students-in-mainstream-classrooms/
(accessed 13 February 2018). It is interesting to note that these writers use
the word ‘cope’, perhaps implying that this is the best that can be expected
with ESL students.
Researchers Hansen-Thomas and Cavagnetto reported:
Many of the mainstream teachers … reported the desire to
learn techniques appropriate for ESL students, as well as to
communicate more with the ESL teacher. This suggests a strong
need to provide teachers with both time and opportunity to work
with trained ESL professionals, through in-service professional
development and through release time during the school day.
and:
Further, a partnership between well-trained … teachers who are
informed as to the linguistic demands of … curriculum, texts,
and assessments and other teachers (including those with ESL
training) would greatly benet the teachers and the students
by conducting training and dissemination of appropriate
information. It is therefore our view that consistent, long-term
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training in ESL pedagogy and methodology, as well as in the
current dimensions of [content matter] and its language-rich
requirements, will bring benet to the teaching and learning of
ELLs in content-area classes.
(Hansen-Thomas and Cavagnetto, 2010: 262)
The facts once again provide justication for setting up separate classes for
ESL beginners so that they gain condence in the hands of ESL specialists
who are provided with the pedagogical tools and training to handle all
aspects of the students’ development.
Tangen and Spooner-Lane have also written:
Some teachers embrace the opportunity to work with students
who have EAL, others may feel a cultural distance between
themselves and their students (Gersten, 1999). Teachers who feel
such a gulf may retreat into ‘safe’ teaching practices that involve
little risk-taking for themselves and their students and that may
mask what Wheatley (2002) describes as ‘teacher doubt’. Teacher
doubt may occur when a teacher feels that they are unable to
differentiate between a learning difculty and a difculty in
learning due to limited English language prociency.
(Tangen and Spooner-Lane, 2008: 64–5)
Again, the need for specialist advice, and professional development training,
is clear.
Tangen and Spooner-Lane go on to provide a brief recommendation
on how all can be solved. Teachers should:
provide appropriate instruction for all students in the class.
Such practices include developing strong communication ties
with support personnel, accepting responsibility for including all
students, partnering with parents, knowing when and who to ask
for help and getting the most effective resources to do the job.
(Tangen and Spooner-Lane, 2008: 67)
Apparently simple, and of course well intentioned, each one of these precepts
involves a massive number of obstacles. ‘Developing strong communication
ties with support personnel’: does this mean ESL teachers? SEN teachers?
ESL teachers will, in our model, be referred to as appropriate professionals.
This whole concept of support continually subverts the professional status
of all ESL teachers in the teaching profession. It plays straight into the
hands of politicians who are out to de-skill the profession. It is yet another
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Establishing a department in the secondary school
example of how ESL students in international schools are victims of a model
designed by political forces in national systems to pander to the forces of
nationalism and protectionism against immigrants.
‘Accepting responsibility for including all students’ is easy to pen, but
impossible to realize for teachers who have no training or knowledge of ESL
and no idea of what it is that makes the lessons challenging or inaccessible
for ESL students; in a dynamic class in which a content teacher is keen to
proceed with the syllabus, having to apply the brakes every tenth sentence
in order to explain for ESL students is often not an option. This is where a
parallel ESL class teaching the same content but at a different speed is the
solution.
‘Partnering with parents’ is of course always recommendable, but
issues of time again present themselves, especially if over 50 per cent of the
students are SLLs. ‘Knowing when and who to ask for help’ sounds a little
desperate; if there was an appropriate model of parallel ESL classes, in a
framework in which ESL teachers had responsibility for parallel content,
a mother-tongue programme and continuing professional development,
‘help’ would no longer be necessary. There might be occasions when extra
advice on details was valued, but ‘help’ simply reveals the failure of the
‘EAL as support’ model.
Woolley assures us:
There is, however, wide agreement that appropriate instruction
for ESL learners should include explicit support in language
and literacy and access to a balanced and challenging curricula
associated with high but realistic teacher expectations (Geva &
Verthoeven, 2000; Hammond, 2008; Lipka & Siegel, 2007; Ortiz
et al., 2006).
(Woolley, 2010: 90)
Again, a rather bland statement that covers a large number of issues that
need to be addressed. ‘Explicit support’ in language and literacy: why not a
professional programme of ESL instruction?
Woolley (2010) focuses on reading in ESL students, but, again, his
recommendations are nothing that a professional ESL department would
not quickly identify and remedy. For example, he writes:
Although there is limited research on effective intervention
practices for English-language learners the assertion is that many
ESL learners with reading difculties can achieve grade-level
norms as a result of appropriate instruction (August & Shanahan,
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2006; [S.] Baker, Gersten, Dimino, & Grifths, 2004; Linan-
Thompson et al., 2006; Snow, 2008; Tam et al., 2006).
(ibid.)
Once again, there is ‘wide agreement that appropriate instruction for ESL
learners should include explicit support in language and literacy’, which
will happen automatically where there is a professional ESL department
to provide such instruction. The comments reported above highlight
why international schools need to ensure that there is a professional ESL
department staffed with qualied applied linguists who can advise content
teachers on appropriate strategies, ensure that school directors only employ
content teachers with appropriate training, and initiate such training in
schools, but above all who can teach the ESL students in separate classes
at carefully chosen times so that they can gain the condence and skills
required.
This leads us to issues surrounding ESL and SEN.
Issues relating to the misplacement of SLLs in SEN
programmes
In schools in England ‘EAL’ and ‘language support teachers’ come under the
aegis of special education needs (and disabilities) departments. This model
has become ingrained to such an extent that it is barely questioned, and
publishers reinforce it. A glance at a well-known publisher – Bloomsbury
Publishing – shows how. On their website, www.bloomsbury.com/uk/
education/ (accessed 13 February 2018), under ‘Secondary’, there is a list
of 23 subjects. One of these is ‘Special educational needs and EAL’. Of the
pages that follow of books for this area, there is just one book on ‘EAL’,
titled ‘100 ideas for supporting learners with EAL’ (notice the ‘supporting’,
not teaching), and the other books are on such subjects as psychological
disorders, multiple disabilities, dyslexia, supporting deaf children, dyscalculia
and such matters. ‘Teaching modern foreign languages’, of course, gets a
separate link, even though this subject involves far less complexity than
teaching a second language. There is no separate link for EAL. The negative
effects of treating ESL students as SEN students have been documented
throughout the literature on ESL students (e.g. Cummins, 1984), and have
been touched on above.
The model from England had consequences for international schools:
as already related, in 2002 the CIS reallocated ESL and put it in the same
section as SEN in the Guide for Accreditation; in 2006 the IB devised a
new post of Second Language Learning specialist, but appointed her under
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Establishing a department in the secondary school
the SEN section. International schools in Europe are more affected by the
proximity of the English experience, and many ESL teachers are British,
bringing with them the experience of the English school curriculum. The
result is often a docile acceptance that ESL/EAL will not be seen as a
separate discipline, will be labelled EAL, and will be subsumed under the
SEN umbrella.
Woolley (2010: 81) writes: ‘In many countries the proportion
of students learning English as their second language [L2] is increasing
dramatically and presenting educators with greater challenges (Freebody,
Maton, & Martin, 2008).’ He continues (ibid.: 88), ‘There is a growing
international consensus in the literature that second-language (L2) learners
have generally been underdiagnosed and overrepresented in special
education classes.’
As mentioned above, Tangen and Spooner-Lane (2008: 65)
address the issue of assessment, and the ensuing placement of students in
inappropriate classes.
It is important to establish a clear differentiation between ESL students
and those with genuine learning difculties. Of course, such boundaries are
not always clear, but they are not clear in any discipline when it comes to
distinguishing students who are struggling with a particular subject, and the
concern here is to provide a learning environment for SLLs which is geared
to their potential and to avoid them being placed with a particular group of
students, which might be seen as demotivating.
Some research articles on the ESL/SEN boundaries will be reviewed.
What is interesting about these articles is that the authors appear to take
it as a given that teachers will not have basic training in ‘linguistically
responsive teaching’ of the type we recommended.
Tangen and Spooner-Lane write:
There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that some students
who have English as an additional language (EAL) are being
misidentied by teachers as having learning difculties when, in
fact, some of these students may not have a learning difculty
at all (Artiles and Klingner, 2006; Brown, 2004; Gersten and
Baker, 2003).
(Tangen and Spooner-Lane, 2008: 63)
The reasons for this are related:
[S.B.] Garcia and Ortiz (1988) suggested that one reason why
students who have EAL may experience difculties learning
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is because they are often taught solely in English. Teachers
who expect that these students should be keeping up with
their peers may become frustrated teaching students who are
EAL because they are not maintaining a similar learning pace
(Byrnes et al., 1997). Teachers need to take into account that
students who have EAL must learn new concepts in a new
language within a new cultural reference. Teachers, therefore,
must make accommodations in their teaching. Without adequate
groundwork in developing learning activities to support their
learning, students who have EAL may be missing out on
important English language instruction due to limited teacher
preparation and/or limited resources (Iredale [and Fox], 199[7]).
Lo Bianco and Freebody (1997) described this decit mode of
teaching as a ‘sink or swim’ approach. Students who have EAL
are placed in an English speaking classroom and are expected to
learn in English while still learning the English language. While
some students adapt and quickly learn the classroom protocol
(swim), others struggle until the point of giving up (sink).
(Tangen and Spooner-Lane, 2008: 64)
These are strong statements of the situation of SL learners, and are ones that
are frequently found in international schools.
Mahoney and MacSwan have another insight into the misclassication
of ESL students as SEN:
Artiles, Rueda, Salazar, and Higareda (2005) report that ELL
children assessed as lacking prociency in their native language
have a high likelihood of being classied (arguably incorrectly)
as special education students. Although it has been argued that
assessing children’s native language provides supplemental
information to help teachers and administrators better evaluate
students’ English-prociency test results (CCSSO, 1991 [Council
of Chief State School Ofcers]), we believe it is more likely
to create an atmosphere of confusion and result in incorrect
perceptions of children’s learning situations.
(Mahoney and MacSwan, 2005: 38)
With the expert knowledge of ESL specialists the confusion could be
resolved.
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Establishing a department in the secondary school
The following websites provide information on ways of differentiating
ESL and SEN issues:
www.naldic.org.uk/teaching-learning/
https://naldic.org.uk/httpsealjournal-org20170320eal-pupils-with-special-
needs-are-we-meeting-their-needs/
www.colorincolorado.org › School Support › Special Education and
English Language Learners
https://bctf.ca/uploadedFiles/Publications/ESL-SpecialNeeds.pdf
www.education.vic.gov.au › ... › Language Support
www.assessmentforlearning.edu.au/verve/_resources/specialneeds.pdf (all
sites above accessed 13 February 2018).
Realities and practicalities
Schools are places of tension and stress. Even in a school with no second
language students there would still be the daily tasks of preparing, teaching,
doing duties, attending meetings, liaising with other staff, correcting work,
keeping up with the latest demands of the newest bureaucracy and the most
up-to-date IT, informing parents – the list is endless. To add to this the
creation of a new ESL and mother tongue department, with its declared
role of educating all staff, leadership, parents and board members, will
add a new dimension to the daily round. But it is essential that this new
dimension be taken seriously and developed systematically, and this needs
a guaranteed commitment from school heads. Without this commitment,
and a comprehensive understanding of all the language and in-service
issues involved, the new department will fail. It will be marginalized and
deteriorate, and in all likelihood return to the status so long prevalent in
national systems in which ESL students are seen as a problem in need of
support, and the ESL teachers can look after them.
There is a real danger that the creation of a department seen to be
responsible for bilingual matters will lead most of the other staff to shun
their own responsibilities and defer all matters to the ESL staff. This of
course would defeat the purpose of the exercise. Shaw’s comment (2003:
104–5) that ‘there is no collegiality in schools’ and Davison’s discussion
(2006: 458) of ‘contrived collegiality’ need to be taken seriously. Sears (2015:
74) suggests that ‘For teachers new to [the MYP], the most effective way
forward is to build a good relationship with the … MYP coordinators, who
are appointed in every IB school to oversee the programmes and to support
teachers.’ Of course: but this won’t help if the MYP coordinator does not
have any answers about the learning and assessment needs of ESL students
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180
except for ‘you must follow the language B/Acquisition programme’, which
has been shown to be working against their best interests. Tensions will
arise. Maybe the head of English will intervene and say that the MYP
rules must be followed at all costs, and that resistance to such a path will
be referred to the head of school, with possibly dire consequences. These
are not inventions but real case scenarios, and many ESL teachers end up
in survival mode, hoping that someone somewhere will understand the
wonderful potential of ESL students and provide a programme designed for
their true learning needs rather than to suit a global curriculum body that
wants to win the game. Therefore, no half measures will be enough. School
heads and directors who are persuaded by the arguments in this book will
need not only to set up the type of department advocated, but to back
it all the way. Such departments will need strong, determined, qualied
leaders, who can stand up to criticism in head of department meetings,
make their case to boards of governors and to parent meetings, and employ
enthusiastic, well-trained and exible staff for the daily tasks of teaching
ESL students, liaising with content teachers, running in-service programmes
for all staff, and generally spreading the word about the potential and needs
of ESL students.
ESL department heads will also need to have excellent organisational
skills. Sears notes:
Most specialist English teaching [i.e., ESL] … programmes have
one thing in common: they tend to be logistically complex. It
is common for teachers to have to consult numerous schedules
and programme documents in order to understand the detail.
The complexity arises because specialist English language and
mother tongue provision (where an in-school programme exists)
typically involve cross-class scheduling with classes at multiple
levels. Newly arrived teachers in a school may need to consult
year-level colleagues and specialist English language teachers in
order to understand how the programme offerings affect the day-
to-day running of an individual class.
(Sears, 2015: 153)
Many years of experience of running a professional ESL programme support
this statement, and contact with ESL in other international schools bears it
out: one teacher told me that he always wore trainers in school as he spent
so much time running around to talk to the various content teachers of the
ESL students.
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Establishing a department in the secondary school
Implications for international schools, accrediting
agencies and curriculum providers
When the recommendations outlined in this chapter are carried out there
will be a need for a shake-up in international schools, accrediting agencies
and curriculum providers.
In schools, directors will establish ESL and mother-tongue
departments in middle schools and begin a process of cementing their
centrality in the hierarchy. Only highly qualied and experienced ESL
teachers will be employed: there is no lack of these, as many universities
in the Anglosphere can corroborate, and there are countless NNESTs
available. Unqualied ESL teachers and assistants offering support will be
phased out. My experience of ESL teachers in many international schools is
similar to that recounted by Pedalino Porter:
I observed the haphazard assignment of ill-prepared teachers to
teach ESL. In most cases, they had little idea at all of how to
teach a foreign language – which is what English was to their
students. My experience, once again, is representative. In the
minds of school administrators, anyone who can speak English
can teach English. … [T]hey press-ganged all sorts of people into
teaching limited-English students: high school English teachers
and foreign language teachers, elementary classroom teachers, …
remedial reading teachers …. It was not unusual for small-group
English lessons to be given in hallways, broom closets, cafeterias,
and boiler rooms. …
Teachers who could not maintain discipline, who were not
competent in teaching their subjects, or who, for various reasons,
were functioning at a low level were sometimes given the job of
working with … children … whose situations cried out for the
most able teachers to work with them.
(Pedalino Porter, 1990: 28–9)
Pedalino Porter also outlined, nearly thirty years ago, that a model ESL
programme should have:
● Well-trained staff, skilled in second-language-teaching theory and
methodology and in the school subjects, informed and sensitive to
cultural differences, and with high expectations for the students
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182
● Training for the whole school community – principals, mainstream
teachers, and support staff – to recognize and understand cultural
differences and to provide a reassuring, welcoming school atmosphere
● Strong, consistent communication with parents to enlist their
understanding of and participation in the school’s goals.
(ibid.: 129)
Schools will need an accelerating process of CPD in linguistic and cultural
awareness techniques such as TESMC, which will be obligatory for all staff,
regularly updated. Accrediting agencies such as the CIS will take the lead by
carrying out the same process in their accrediting documentation: ESL will
not come at the end of the documented requirements under support. Rather
it will appear as the rst subject item, carrying the most weight.
Curriculum providers such as the IB will make a clear distinction
in the MYP between foreign language and second language. There will be
extensive documentation specically for second language, with details of
the need for a well-constructed ESL programme and examples of the most
appropriate types of assessment: the work has already been done with the
SLA and MTD Guide. There will be workshops designed solely for teachers
of ESL students, not combined with foreign-language workshops. If such
changes are not forthcoming, alternatives to the MYP will need to be sought.
School heads will make clear to parents the issues associated with
bilingualism, the principal ones being: the considerable length of time
required for learning a second language to a high academic level; the fact
that post-pubertal children will rarely acquire a native-like English accent;
and the importance of maintaining and developing the mother tongue.
When all of the above processes are carried out school heads will
experience improvements in many areas. Placing ESL teachers and their
expertise at the centre of the departmental network will make all staff
familiar with the many aspects of SLA and bilingualism. ESL students
will benet immensely and their parents will be enlightened and probably
relieved to see the potential of bilinguals being unleashed. Monolingualism
will no longer be seen as the norm. It is probable that IB examination results
will improve across the spectrum.
But there is one large caveat: ESL professionals must be just that
– professional. Having gained their new central status in the school and
curriculum structure, they will be hardworking and outgoing, ready to deal
with many issues beyond their teaching load: liaising with content teachers,
communicating regularly with parents, sharing information about their
students with the mother-tongue teachers, running CPD for content staff.
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Establishing a department in the secondary school
It will be vital to select a strong, knowledgeable, qualied and determined
head of department and ensure that her department has the central status
necessary to implement the strategies discussed, and to take a proactive stance
with leadership if it does not understand or condone the central tenets of a
professional ESL department. This person’s most important tasks will be to
ensure that all the ESL staff are trained and qualied ESL professionals, that
there is a clear understanding that the department is of the same status as
all other departments, that new staff have a university qualication focused
on ESL and bilingualism, and that there is a comprehensive mother-tongue
programme, and to take action when there is a lack in any area. Managing
people is complex, but the responsibility is to the students, and ineffective
and recalcitrant staff help no one.
There is a large body of research on the broad benets of bilingualism,
from neurological to economic advantages (Bialystok, 2011; Callahan and
Gándara, 2014; Craik et al., 2010; Engel de Abreu et al., 2012; Hogan-Brun,
2017; Kovács and Mehler, 2009). Let international schools build on this in
a professional manner, not on the rubble of national educational systems.
As Fukuyama notes, ‘The ability of societies to innovate institutionally
… depends on whether they can neutralize existing political stakeholders
holding vetoes over reform’ (Fukuyama, 2011: 456).
184
Chapter 9
The need for
continuing professional
development (CPD)
Patricia Mertin
The days when it was sufcient to train as a teacher then continue on
the same path until retirement are long gone. Formerly it was often seen
as a strength, and a sign of solid experience, when a teacher consistently
maintained the same teaching approach, followed the same curriculum, and
assigned the same homework tasks, tests and grading. However, this could
be described as one year of experience followed by many years of repetition,
rather than as a sign of developing knowledge. In the late twentieth and
early twenty-rst centuries the philosophy of education, and beliefs
about teaching and learning, have undergone many changes. Practice is
continually inuenced by the latest research, with developing curricula and
ever-changing examination requirements making it essential for educators
to remain up to date.
Education has moved on from the twentieth-century emphasis on
acquiring knowledge, facts and skills to a world in which facts are readily
available through the internet, but the real expertise of analytical and critical
thinking, together with deep understanding, is urgently required. There is a
need for students to think for themselves, dene and form opinions about
problems and issues, nd creative solutions, discuss, defend and debate
ideas, listen to others and share knowledge.
In both national education systems and international education
there is a growing awareness of global issues and their importance for the
youth of today as the world becomes a smaller place. International schools
in particular now use the term ‘international-mindedness’ to express a
raft of ideas about the shared world we live in, and the development of
intercultural understandings and linguistic prociencies. A further idea
which is reinforced by the IB is that we all, teachers and students, are or
should be lifelong learners.
In addition to these developments in educational thinking, the world
is changing around us, and across the globe people are becoming more
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The need for continuing professional development (CPD)
mobile. In the past many people stayed in the same town, or at least the
same area, for most of their lives. It often happened that children went to
the same schools, even with the same teachers, as their parents did. Everyone
spoke the same language, so that teaching students with a different mother
tongue was seldom an issue. Now, however, in a world with increased
mobility, more and more children are attending schools in which they must
learn in one language but communicate in another, or others, at home.
This change in society necessitates an additional set of skills, regrettably
one seldom addressed in teaching colleges. This means that few teachers in
international or national schools have been effectively trained and equipped
to work with SL learners.
The current research on language acquisition has taken a new
‘social turn’ with the focus on social interaction as a key component of
language acquisition (see Block, 2003). At the same time, more research
is being undertaken into multilingualism and multilingual education. We
now know that skills gained in the mother tongue are readily transferred
to a second language. The need for qualied, experienced ESL teachers
in international schools with a high percentage of SL learners is clear to
any thinking educator. But there is also a need for mainstream classroom
teachers, who are experts in their own special areas, to be given ongoing
additional training to make their teaching accessible to the SL student’s
learning.
Just as teachers generally receive little training in working with SL
speakers, they have even fewer opportunities to develop their ideas about
and understanding of multilingualism.
[M]any teachers struggle with the idea of legitimising
multilingualism in their classrooms. Often, this is because they
have had little opportunity to reect on this during their teacher
education, and to develop appropriate teaching strategies.
(Conteh and Meier, 2014: 296)
Research has shown that the time taken for a SL learner to reach a native-
speaker level of CALP is between ve and seven years. During this period
of time, after students have been given a solid grounding in the English
language and have moved into full-time mainstream classrooms, they still
require linguistically aware, thoughtful, knowledgeable teaching. That is
teaching which will not only make the content and language of successful
learning comprehensible but also equip students with the level of language
required to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding.
Patricia Mertin
186
The administration
In an international school, as in any school, the principal and the school
leadership team play a crucial role and have responsibility for the
provision of quality education for all students. However, as long as most
administrators are from anglophone countries and monolingual, they may
be led to believe that students who speak other languages at home present a
problem, whereas these students are better seen as a source of linguistic and
cultural learning experiences. Welcoming students from different cultural
and linguistic backgrounds needs to be viewed as an exciting opportunity
for all teachers and students: after all, these are the students who make an
international school international.
It is essential that appropriately qualied and experienced
administrators are hired, when possible from a variety of ethnic and
linguistic groups which reects the student population, and bring with them
an understanding of the benets of multilingualism and multiculturalism.
Unless the situation of the majority of international students as SLLs is
recognized and valued as a resource by those in leadership positions, little
progress will be made. Monolingual educators often have difculty accepting
the idea of bilingualism or even multilingualism in the classroom, let alone
the idea of using other languages to support content learning in English.
Practices in schools are always led from the top, and the climate of
a school as a multilingual, multicultural, welcoming institution can only
be determined through the demonstration of effective practices by the
leadership team. If the leadership team and teachers are monolingual, from
Anglosphere countries, with limited experience of working with SLLs in
their classrooms, they are unlikely to understand the challenges facing
SLLs, recognize their talents and abilities, or support their teachers in their
efforts to teach. Cummins states in his discussion of why students choose to
engage, or to withdraw from academic effort:
[H]uman relationships are at the heart of schooling. All of us
intuitively know this from our own schooling experiences. If we
felt that a teacher believed in us and cared for us then we put
forth much more effort than if we felt that she or he did not like
us or considered us not very capable.
(Cummins, 2000: 40; emphasis original)
August and Hakuta (1997) reviewed 33 studies of school effectiveness, and
from this compiled a list of 13 attributes of effective schools. The second of
these concerned the school leadership:
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The need for continuing professional development (CPD)
(2) School leadership. The principal of the school is seen as a
key player in ELL students’ academic achievement in most
of the studies reviewed. She or he makes the achievement of
ELL students a priority, monitors curricular and instructional
improvement, recruits and keeps talented and dedicated staff,
involves the entire staff in improvement efforts, and maintains a
good social and physical environment.
…
(12) Staff development. August and Hakuta [(1997)] note that
staff development for all teachers in the school, not just language
specialists, was a signicant component of many of the effective
schools. All teachers were expected to know how to teach ELL
students … and were given the support to do so.
(Cummins, 2000: 264, 265)
The teachers
As explained in chapter 1, teachers tend to come from three groups: local
hires, local expatriate hires, and foreign expatriate hires. The hiring of the
best teachers is key to the quality of education in any school. Unfortunately,
school directors or their principals who are responsible for hiring frequently
have little training in the international aspects of the process.
Teachers new to international schools have rarely had the kind
of training that prepares them for their new assignments, as their initial
teacher training will have been based on their own national system. The
biggest problem is that insufcient ESL teachers are being trained. Similarly,
mainstream teachers are not being trained to teach the language of the
curriculum or to respond to the challenges this presents to students as regards
the language they need to express ideas, give information, answer questions,
or complete any of the other tasks expected in a mainstream classroom.
This problem is both a national and an international one, as reports in
the British press demonstrate. Concerning the situation in England, Libby
Purves wrote in The Times, in an article entitled ‘Gift of language is what
migrants need most’
For decades ‘full-speed immersion’ was a favoured local authority
policy, pitching children into a mainstream class with a learning
support assistant as if they had some mental or physical disability.
Extroverts survived this, but other children felt humiliated and
different, and never quite took to education thereafter.
Patricia Mertin
188
She continued:
In some places, ‘immediate immersion’ dribbles on for both
economic and ideological reasons. One educationalist said that it
doesn’t much matter if children aren’t saying much, they could be
happy and ‘picking up a lot’. But a child unable to express anything
in the long school day is not, in my experience, particularly
happy. Some schools rewrite lessons ‘to accommodate low levels
of English focusing on graphs and pictures’. That, like support
assistants and relying on ‘picked up’ language, is far cheaper
than hiring a qualied EAL teacher, if you can nd one, to work
alongside regular staff.
(Purves, 2015)
Holderness writes:
In 1998, Peel suggested that the task before international
education was to ensure:
● shared responsibility;
● global standards in examinations;
● training of teachers and examiners.
Yet most newly appointed international teachers, leaving their
home countries to enter the world of international schooling, are
likely to have had little preparation for, or induction into, their
new life.
(Holderness, 2002: 86)
Many teachers hired to teach in international schools are young and
enthusiastic as they embark on this new adventure. They know they are
going to teach in a new country, but in many ways they are unprepared for
the challenges they will face. Many are the same challenges new students
at an international school face: living in a country where they may not
speak the language, growing accustomed to everyday life in an unfamiliar
environment, nding their place in a new school, nding friends, dealing with
a new curriculum, and more. In addition, new teachers have to work with
new bosses and colleagues in a different school system, but lack a network
of family and friends to support them. The familiar phases of culture shock
and assimilation are experienced by new teachers and students alike. The
question Cummins poses is relevant to international schools and teachers:
189
The need for continuing professional development (CPD)
To what extent is it child abuse to send new teachers into
classrooms (in multilingual cities such as Toronto, London, or
New York) with minimal or no preparation on how to teach
academic content to students who are in the process of learning
English and whose cultural background differs signicantly from
that assumed by all of the structures of schooling (e.g. curriculum,
assessment, and teacher preparation)?
(Cummins, 2000: 14)
New teachers may have a working knowledge of a foreign language
themselves, but the ability to communicate in a foreign language is very
different from the ability to study, to understand academic content, or
to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of academic content in all
subject areas at the same level as native speakers. When students learn a
foreign language, as opposed to a second language, they may spend four
or ve teaching periods in the foreign-language classroom per week. In
that time they are being actively taught the language. However, when they
leave the classroom at the end of the period they will probably not use the
language again until the next foreign-language class. They will not need to
use it to communicate with their peers on a daily basis and they will not
be studying science, maths, humanities or any other content area using this
foreign language.
Second language learners, on the other hand, spend the entire
school day listening, speaking, reading and writing in the second language.
Moreover, many international schools are situated in countries where
the environment presents a third language for SL students to master. The
challenges to succeeding academically are huge.
As most teachers have only learned a foreign language at school or
in their free time, it is difcult for them to appreciate the task of an SL
learner in their classroom. They often just do not know how to make the
language of their subject area accessible to SL learners. The content, the
specialist vocabulary, the language around it and the genres required are so
much part of the teacher’s world, of who they are and what they do, that
when a student is unable to see through the language to grasp the content,
these teachers are often unable to understand the problem. The problem is
compounded when the students are unable to explain what it is that they
do not understand.
Leung notes:
The mainstream (ordinary) curriculum is the place where a
good deal of EAL teaching and learning is meant to take place,
Patricia Mertin
190
particularly for those students who are beyond the early stages of
learning English … in many English-speaking education systems.
(Leung, 2010: 9)
If the mainstream teacher has not been trained to recognize the challenges
and deal with them, the SL student is seriously disadvantaged. Often this
leads the parents to hire private tutors who may or may not be familiar
with the curriculum requirements of an international school: often the
parents have neither the language nor the content knowledge to support
their children. Native English-speaking parents are often able to provide
more help, simply because they are more familiar, from their own school
time, with the kind of material being learned.
Research has conrmed that bilingual students’ perceptions of their
teachers’ appreciation of their mother tongue do indeed inuence their
bilingual cognitive advantages. Goriot et al. (2016) examined whether
bilingual Dutch primary school students who spoke either German or
Turkish at home differed in their perceptions of their teacher’s appreciation
of their home language, and also whether these differences could explain
any differences between the two groups’ performance in various skills.
Their ndings were that ‘German-Dutch pupils perceived there to be more
appreciation of their home language from their teacher than Turkish-
Dutch pupils’ (Goriot et al., 2016: 700). This is more proof of the need for
culturally and linguistically responsive teaching.
Varieties of in-service training
Induction
Many international schools offer a phase of induction to new teachers
before the new term begins, but when basic problems such as where and
how to do a daily shop, how to get to school each day, or how to deal with a
new landlord, must be overcome, preparation for teaching may take second
place. These teachers often need practical and even emotional support
during the rst weeks and months in a new school in an unfamiliar country
when they face so many other challenges. This support must come from
the administration, the department chair and departmental colleagues, all
of whom are, hopefully, familiar with the details of daily life in school: the
schedule, the curriculum, tasks to cover, the pace of teaching, assessment
and more. In addition, new teachers are often unprepared for classes of
highly motivated and engaged students whose parents are also successful
and motivated.
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The need for continuing professional development (CPD)
These teachers may be surprised by the range of cultures and language
levels which faces them from day one, so that the lesson plans and teaching
methods which were successful in the past are inexplicably unsuccessful in
their new situation. However, a one-week induction programme for new
teachers cannot equip them with the skills they need to teach a linguistically
and culturally diverse student population. Another challenge presented
by international schools is the high level of motivation of many parents,
who are themselves successful professionals and expect strong academic
results from their children. SL learners are learning language and content
simultaneously, and their academic results will inuence their future
prospects. This makes it essential for teachers to focus on the language of
their subject as well as the content:
The integration of content and language-learning objectives
presents challenges for policy makers, program planners,
curriculum designers, teachers, material writers, teacher educators,
teacher supervisors, text writers, and learners.
(Stoller, 2008: 65, quoted in Leung and Creese, 2010: xviii)
Professional development to deal with these challenges faced by new teachers
needs to be a priority and has to be ongoing. The skills and strategies
which teachers need to enable the SLLs to access the curriculum cannot be
taught in an afternoon: there needs to be a process of in-service training in
appropriate linguistically responsive techniques. Moreover, as the turnover
of teaching staff is high in many international schools, this process has to be
sustained over the years.
Professional development
One of the challenges facing international schools is which professional
development should be offered to the faculty; there is a real danger that if
too many initiatives are attempted at once the result will be overload and
additional stress.
While the IB training for teachers is essential if the PYP, MYP
and DP programmes are to be taught well, it is unfortunate that the IB
fails to recognize the importance of a dedicated, qualied department to
teach English to second language learners. Teachers who take part in the
training, for MYP especially, nd that ESL is considered to be language
B/Acquisition, like other foreign languages studied at school. Those other
languages, for example French, Spanish and Mandarin, are studied for
an average of ve periods each week. However, for SLLs, who leave the
language classroom and use English to communicate socially and to study
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academic content across the curriculum for all of their studies – humanities,
science, mathematics, etc. – the difference is considerable.
There are many other areas within a school which can be improved
through professional development, and the key to this development is found
when individual teachers can see the effect it has on both the effectiveness of
their teaching and the learning demonstrated by students in their classrooms.
There are many ways in which CPD can be encouraged and become an
essential part of the culture of the school.
All-school professional development may be led by an outside expert
who comes in for one or two days and presents to the full faculty. The
danger with this form of PD is that one size does not necessarily t all,
and not everyone will see the value of the sessions. This external specialist
may also work more specically with small groups, but at the end of the
day he or she will leave the school, and the old routines will return unless
a concerted effort is made by the administration to develop the skills and
strategies the visiting trainer has introduced.
Other professional development opportunities are presented at
conferences, where individuals, who are permitted to attend by their school,
can select the presentations they wish to hear and take back new ideas for
their own teaching. This opportunity is often limited to a few individuals
because of the cost, but the new knowledge and skills learned should, of
course, be shared with colleagues wherever appropriate. A professional
training course for teachers working with students who are learning English
language and content in their mainstream classes is offered by the course
TESMC (https://lexised.com, accessed 13 February 2018).
This is offered as a tutor-training course primarily for ESL teachers. A
ve-day, train-the-tutor professional development course is given to teachers
who can go back to their schools and deliver professional training to the
content teachers. The course for classroom teachers consists of 25 hours
of instruction delivered in nine modules, plus readings and activities. This
results in a total of 50 hours of professional development, which the teacher
trained as a tutor can give to all their colleagues over a period of months.
The course focuses on the language-related needs of ESL students, develops
teacher awareness of cultural and linguistic difference, helps teachers try out
strategies and to reect on their own practice, and supports the development
of collaborative working partnerships across subject areas and with the ESL
department. The TESMC course is described as follows:
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The need for continuing professional development (CPD)
The programme claims the following outcomes:
● Identication of the language-related needs of ESL students and
development of teaching practices that address their needs in a holistic
and explicit manner.
● Development of teachers’ awareness of how to accommodate the
cultural and linguistic diversity and experiences of ESL students.
● Provision of a positive context for teachers to trial suggested strategies
and reect critically and openly on their teaching.
● Exemplication of how to develop collaborative working relationships
between teachers (across subject areas) through a shared understanding
of how to support ESL students.
(https://lexised.com/courses/teaching-esl-students-in-mainstream-
classrooms/, accessed 13 February 2018)
The TESMC course is a development of ESL in the Mainstream (DECS,
1999), launched in 1987 in Australia, but no longer offered. Both Carder
and I have been trained as tutors and led courses with colleagues from our
schools. Experience shows that there is much enthusiasm for the course
while it is running, but, so far, to the best of our knowledge, no research has
been undertaken to measure the longer-term effects.
An initiative from the ECIS is the ITC, the International Teacher
Certicate (www.ecis.org/learning/itc, accessed 13 February 2018),
developed and examined by the University of Cambridge. Its main aim is to
‘equip teachers with the global mind-set necessary for successful teaching in
the 21st century’. This certicate has ve standards, one of which focuses on
the ‘language dimension’ of teaching and learning. The intercultural aspect
of education in international schools is also addressed by the standards.
‘George Mason University has been preparing educators to teach
in international environments since 1990. Formerly called FAST TRAIN
(Foreign Affairs Spouses Teacher TRAINing Program), Mason continues
to offer high quality, convenient, and experience-driven graduate education
to international educators worldwide’ (https://gse.gmu.edu/teaching-
culturally-diverse-exceptional-learners/international-cohorts/; accessed
18 September 2018). Teachers in the state of Colorado are now required
to have a specic qualication for teaching ESL in content areas if they are
working with middle-school students. A school that employs teachers from
England will have to establish that ESL teachers have an MA in applied
linguistics or TESOL, as there is no undergraduate or PGCE qualication.
A fundamental text for content teachers is What Teachers Need to
Know about Language (Adger et al., 2018), which has chapter headings
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such as ‘Analyzing themes: Knowledge about language for explaining text
structure’, ‘What educators need to know about academic language: Insights
from recent research’, and ‘Language and instruction: Research-based lesson
planning and delivery for English learner students’. The book, written by
foremost researchers in the eld, covers all aspects of what teachers need to
know when teaching culturally and linguistically diverse students.
Cambridge International Examinations also offers routes that
candidates can follow, from post-kindergarten stage through to university
entrance. Cambridge University Press’s provision includes support for
teachers through publications, online resources, training, workshops and
professional development. It offers examinations in ESOL at various levels
of prociency, and has centres throughout the world. Since it also offers
training for teachers in ESOL it can be seen as a viable alternative to the
IBMYP, which offers no dedicated course for ESL students or specic
training workshops for ESL teachers. Recently, Cambridge University Press
has published a book which focuses on content language for ESL students (T.
Chadwick, 2012), and there is also a series of books on ESL for chemistry,
biology and physics (Sang and Chadwick, 2014). I have written a book
specically for content teachers in international schools (Mertin, 2013).
If we are to put the ‘continuing’ into professional development the
process must be continuing, ongoing and effective. There are many kinds
of professional development, but the focus here has to be on the needs
of teachers who are learning to work effectively with second-language
students, ‘effectively’ meaning that the teachers are able to make the content
comprehensible and accessible, while at the same time enabling the students
to learn the language of their subject and develop their ability to listen,
speak, read and write about their subject in English at grade level.
The array of subjects taught in international schools presents a huge
range of content vocabulary, text structure, genre writing and expectations
which students need to recognize and use correctly. A worthwhile activity
for any teacher would be to spend a day shadowing an SL student and
experience the range of language which confronts them as they struggle to
master the language of maths, science, business studies, humanities, IT and
other subject areas – a huge challenge.
One of the most effective ways of encouraging all-school PD is to
promote the formation of small learning groups of teachers who identify
their own areas of interest and undertake research to improve their teaching
and learning. This can take many forms, for example observing colleagues
and sharing observations, or reading and following up research in order to
share and try out new ideas. A wealth of material on the subject of language
195
The need for continuing professional development (CPD)
acquisition is available, and of course the school’s ESL department is a
further valuable resource.
Creating small learning groups for PD has the advantage of engaging
teachers in the areas they are interested in, and in which they can widen
their areas of professional expertise. In this way, they are working towards
a goal which they have identied, and so are engaged and active, rather
than just passive receivers of information. At the same time, because the
teachers have been active in choosing the research topics, they have a vested
interest in the development. Final results can be published and shared in
international school journals, which makes the research more meaningful.
As, probably, the biggest challenge to international schools is giving
SLLs access to the curriculum, research groups can be formed, either by
subject area or by grade levels, that include the ESL teachers. Through
discussions about many aspects of language acquisition, the difference
between academic and social language, and the challenges of specic
language for certain areas of the curriculum, the ESL teachers can support
and guide the classroom and subject-area teachers while the latter learn
more about the linguistic demands which confront students in each area
of the curriculum. Enabling the ESL students to be successful, by clarifying
the demands of academic language, has to be the responsibility of the
whole faculty.
196
Chapter 10
The importance of
maintaining mother tongue
development
Patricia Mertin
Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiss nichts von seiner eigenen.
(Goethe, 1821)
The nature of an international school is that many of its students are
not mother-tongue speakers of English, which is usually the language
of instruction. These students not only need to learn English but also to
learn in English, which is an enormous challenge. As SLLs make up a
high percentage of the students, it is a key responsibility of the boards, the
administrators and all teachers to ensure that they are taught English in
such a way that they benet socially and academically and can continue
their education with as little interruption as possible. As SLLs may stay for
only a few years before either moving on to another international school
or returning to their home country, to continue school or higher education
or to pursue their careers, the importance of an effective ESL programme
cannot be ignored. The students’ time in an international school may begin
at any stage of their education, from kindergarten to high school, but it is
essential that during this period their academic study continues successfully;
their whole future depends on this.
The parents of these students entrust their children to international
schools in the belief that the administration and teachers know how to
teach their children English to the level required for academic success. This
makes the maintenance and development of the mother tongue to an age-
appropriate level of vital importance for their continuing academic success.
The role of English in the lives of SLLs is unusual in several ways.
The language they must learn, English, is often not the language of the
environment, so there may be little linguistic input outside the school
environment. A further language is often used in the environment, so that
students have no opportunities to practise their English while shopping,
reading local papers or magazines, watching local TV, or reading road
signs or advertisements in the street. This is a fundamental difference from
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The importance of maintaining mother tongue development
the situation of SLLs in Anglosphere countries: English is not heard being
used by the local population. Their fellow students may speak a wide
variety of other languages, so that much of the language practice will be
undertaken between English language learners and users with varying levels
of prociency, rather than with uent native speakers.
The mother tongues spoken by students in international schools need
to be valued as of equal status and importance with English. This contrasts
with SLLs in national systems where assimilation is the goal and other
mother tongues are ignored.
Recognition of the mother tongues in the classroom
Students who speak languages other than English in the home become English
language learners and users in international English-medium schools. They
bring with them their cultural capital: a wealth of knowledge about the
world, their previous learning, educational experience, culture and their
language. All of these can contribute to enriching learning experiences for
everyone who comes into contact with them if they are given opportunities
to share. When their language, their culture and their previous knowledge
and experiences are recognized and accepted, the students’ own feelings of
worth are increased. However, as Cummins states:
[W]hen students’ language, culture and experience are ignored
or excluded in classroom interactions, students are immediately
starting from a disadvantage. Everything they have learned about
life and the world up to this point is being dismissed as irrelevant to
school learning; there are few points of connection to curriculum
materials or instruction and so students are expected to learn in
an experiential vacuum. Students’ silence and non-participation
under these conditions have frequently been interpreted as lack
of academic ability or effort, and teachers’ interactions with
students have reected a pattern of low expectations which
become self-fullling.
(Cummins, 1996: 2–3)
Similarly, Reeves writes:
The use of bilingualism in the classroom is an important
educational tool. The Cox Report (1989) followed in the
footsteps of the Swann Report (1985) in stating that the emphasis
in the primary classroom should be rmly on the development of
a good command of English. At the same time the Cox Report
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asserted that ‘the evidence shows that children will make greater
progress in English if they know that their knowledge of their
mother tongue is valued’.
(Reeves, 1994: 61)
Unfortunately, while the students are learning English, less attention tends
to be paid to their mother tongue; consequently, parents and teachers
need to be informed about the importance of maintaining and developing
students’ mother tongues.
Clearly mother-tongue maintenance is important for social reasons:
maintaining contact with extended family and friends, and making new
friends who speak the same language at school. It is also important for
academic and professional reasons: deepening and extending students’
understanding of the material studied, enabling them to discuss their
learning with family members, and facilitating their return to their home
countries to continue their education before beginning their careers.
Students who maintain their mother tongue while learning English, and so
become balanced bilinguals, have major advantages when they begin their
careers, as the increasingly globalized world requires speakers of more than
one language who can communicate across borders. Additive bilingualism
brings clear professional advantages.
The importance of the mother tongue is not a new idea: Cummins
quotes an example in which Gaelic is the mother tongue and English the
target language:
[N]ot all regions in Scotland had schools, even well into the
nineteenth century. And where schools existed, students and
educators alike faced another dilemma: largely for political
reasons, English was the preferred medium of instruction, despite
obvious problems in communication. Worse, many schools
ignored Gaelic entirely, both because it was politically expedient
and because there were no Gaelic texts to use. Fortunately, by the
early nineteenth century, attitudes had softened somewhat; the
Scots had not risen against the English recently, and educators
discovered that Gaelic students learned to read English more
easily if they had a basic grounding in Gaelic grammar and
literature.
(Thompson, 1998: x–xi, quoted in Cummins, 2000: 173)
This extract underlines the relevance of the mother tongue to learning a
second language, and many studies have shown that cognitive and academic
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The importance of maintaining mother tongue development
development in L1 has a strong, positive effect on L2 development for
academic purposes. Cummins states:
There are close to 150 empirical studies carried out during the
past 30 or so years that have reported a positive association
between additive bilingualism and students’ linguistic, cognitive,
or academic growth. The most consistent ndings among
these research studies are that bilinguals show more developed
awareness of language (metalinguistic awareness) and that they
have advantages in learning additional languages.
(Cummins, 2000: 37)
Cummins’s threshold hypothesis has been discussed already; it highlights
the idea that if a student’s mother tongue is not supported, and they are
required to focus only on learning English, they will reach a stage where they
become unable to function academically in either English or their mother
tongue. In English the language to explain the concepts is missing, and in
the mother tongue both concepts and language have been neglected, so
that the student lacks the language to think, reason, understand or discuss
effectively in either language. This means that if the mother tongue is not
developed in parallel with the second language and so remains at a lower
level, prociency in the second language will be negatively affected.
In a large-scale research project Thomas and Collier (2002) show
that the longer students are educated using both English and the language
of the home, the better the results, and this is of course encouraging for
bilingual schools. However, international schools are generally not bilingual
schools. The range of languages spoken by students can be extensive, and
the presence of up to 100 languages is not unusual. This makes educating
students consistently through English and their rst language extremely
difcult, if not impossible. However, it remains essential that schools
support all students’ mother-tongue development and growth, and there are
a number of ways in which this can be facilitated by school administrators,
teachers and parents working together.
Informing the students and their parents
Parents need to be informed of the importance of students maintaining
and developing their mother tongue, and schools must do all they can to
support both students and parents. Most of the parents will have had little
or no experience of learning in a different language, and so support and
advice given by the school are essential if they are to feel condent in and
knowledgeable about the process.
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Few teachers or administrators in international schools are
themselves bilingual, which often means that their understanding of the
process involved and the challenges students face is limited. Consequently,
these challenges are frequently underestimated or ignored. The process of
language acquisition is outside the area of expertise of most administrators.
They should consult and be advised by the language acquisition experts
in their ESL departments. These teachers will have specialist knowledge,
training and experience. But all too often their voices are not heard and
decisions are made from administrators’ desks. These can have negative
effects on the academic success of SL learners.
The academic success of SL learners of English who complete their
education in international schools is often demonstrated by their IB Diploma
results. Over many years of teaching in international schools, we have
often seen these L2 students outperform the native English speakers. This
indicates that the students have experienced a solid programme of English
as a second language, but also that their mother tongue development has
continued.
Factors that inuence bilingual development
Yamamoto (2001: 19) reviewed a number of studies of the factors which
inuence children’s bilingual development and the families’ use of language;
she summarizes these factors under three main headings: linguistic and
environmental, sociocultural, and familial. The linguistic and environmental
factors which inuence bilingual development include the parents’ language
choice. The parents may speak different languages, or communicate with
each other in just one language. They can make a conscious choice of which
language or languages to use with their children. The quantity and quality
of linguistic exposure which the children receive is an important factor, as is
the style and quality of parent–child interaction. Yamamoto names patterns
of language use and parental discourse strategies towards language mixing
as key factors. The language of formal instruction in school is also of vital
importance.
Sociocultural factors which inuence bilingual development include
the attitude of the parents towards bilingualism, the status of the language
(the mother tongue), and the input of both parents and other members
of society.
Familial factors include the need or desire for communication with
the extended family, which is often important to international families.
Yamamoto identies the existence of siblings as a factor which may
inuence the use of the native language. For example, if siblings attend
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The importance of maintaining mother tongue development
a school in which English is used throughout the day, they may continue
to speak English to each other outside school, rather than the language of
the home.
The importance of mother-tongue maintenance and development
should be clear to educators who understand the importance of building
on the students’ previous knowledge and experience. A positive culture of
recognition and appreciation of the range and value of students’ mother
tongues communicates to parents and students that bilingualism is a
desirable aspect of life which all should strive for. The expectation that
the student will leave their language and their culture at the school gate
should be unacceptable. Raising the awareness of parents, administrators
and teachers of the importance of mother-tongue development remains
essential, as the turnover of families, administrators and teachers means that
the understanding may be lost if it is not a central part of the philosophy of
the school.
Some of the benets of bilingualism
Some of the benets of additive bilingualism are now well known. In
particular, the research of Bialystok is often described in the popular press;
it shows a positive link between bilingualism and a delay in the onset of
dementia (Bialystok et al., 2007).
Bilingualism affects the brain and improves the executive function.
This is the command system, also called cognitive control, which allows
humans to pay selective attention, to avoid being distracted, to concentrate on
problem solving, to stay focused, and to hold information; the improvement
seems to result in a heightened ability to monitor the environment in
bilinguals. In addition, and of great relevance to education, cognitive and
linguistic development in the rst language transfers positively to the second
language. Students are also more aware of language and have increased
exibility in thinking and understanding. Other researchers describe the
benets of bilingualism in more general terms. Bilingualism is thought to
result in the ability to think more divergently and creatively, and to access
a greater number of learning strategies and be more adaptable (Sears,
1998: 44).
Mehisto describes a number of benets of bilingualism for individuals:
they include increased mental processing capacity, greater control over
information processing, improved memory, greater metalinguistic awareness,
increased mental exibility, improved health, improved intercultural skills
and opportunities for increased income (Mehisto, 2012: 6–8).
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The goal
The goal will be additive bilingualism, in which the new language is added
to the existing language, not subtractive bilingualism, in which the new
language replaces the old. For academic study in an international school,
the second-language student will aim at a level of prociency which allows
them to function with a high level of competence in both languages. The
challenge for teachers is to integrate the mother tongue into the students’
learning so that both languages grow and develop.
Research-based developments
In the past it was believed that the best way to learn a new language was to
completely separate the mother tongue and the language to be learned, as if
these were two separate entities. In the classroom, students were told only
to use the target language in order to avoid interference from their mother
tongues. To quote Cenoz and Gorter:
The ideology of language separation is well rooted in education
and the teaching practices that date from the Direct Method
and avoids translation and interaction between languages.
There is a strong idea of separating the target language from the
student’s L1 or from other languages in the curriculum. Thus,
only the target language is expected to be used so as to avoid
interference from the other languages. The idea that languages
have to be kept as separate containers has been referred to as
‘parallel monolingualism’ (Heller, 1999: 271), ‘two solitudes’
(Cummins, 2005: 588) or ‘separate bilingualism’ ([Creese and
Blackledge], 2010).
(Cenoz and Gorter, 2015b: 4–5)
Research has shown that using the rst language as a resource is an excellent
strategy, especially when the content and the language level are complex.
The term ‘translanguaging’ is used to describe the way emerging bilinguals
work with both languages to the best possible effect.
Wei explains:
The term ‘translanguaging’ is often attributed to Cen Williams
(1994, …) who rst used it to describe a pedagogical practice in
bilingual classrooms where the input (e.g. reading and listening)
is in one language and the output (e.g. speaking and writing) in
another language.
(Wei, 2015: 178)
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The importance of maintaining mother tongue development
For example, a text relating to new material in class may be read in the
mother tongue, possibly on the internet, but then the student may read a
similar text in English before answering questions or writing a response in
English. However, the term is also used in a much broader sense which can
describe a variety of ways in which a student uses his or her languages to
make sense of information.
Wei continues:
[T]he act of translanguaging is transformative in nature; it brings
together different dimensions of multilingual speakers’ linguistic,
cognitive and social skills, their knowledge and experience of
the social world and their attitudes and beliefs, and in doing so,
it develops and transforms their skills, knowledge, experience,
attitudes and beliefs, thus creating a new identity for the
multilingual speaker.
(ibid.: 179)
This transfers easily into the classroom. In the early stages of learning
English, students can use their mother tongues to research the topics being
studied and produce work for the class. Working in both the mother tongue
and English creates opportunities for the students to discuss their work with
other speakers of the same language, including their parents, of course, and
so develop a deeper understanding of the material and language used.
The interdependence hypothesis makes clear the advantages of being
literate in the mother tongue:
[A]cademic language prociency transfers across languages such
that students who have developed literacy in their L1 will tend to
make stronger progress in acquiring literacy in L2.
(Cummins, 2000: 173)
and:
‘Focus on multilingualism’ considers that the metalinguistic
awareness and communicative competence acquired in previously
learned languages can be actively used to learn the target language
in a more efcient way.
(Cenoz and Gorter, 2015b: 8)
To date there has been little research on translanguaging in the secondary
school. Cummins’s work on identity texts focuses primarily on the second
language acquisition of students in the elementary years. Mazak and Carroll
(2017) published, in Translanguaging in Higher Education, a collection of
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204
accounts from all over the world, but the secondary school area has been
neglected so far. This is surprising, as the level of understanding of cognitive
academic language required for success is a challenge for many second
language students. The implementation of translanguaging in all subject
areas across the secondary school will bear fruit for bilingual students (see
Mertin et al., 2018).
Responsibility for mother tongue maintenance and
development
Administration and board of governors
The maintenance and development of all students’ mother tongues need to
be explicitly encouraged and supported by the leadership in international
schools. There are a variety of ways in which this can be achieved, for
example through having language policies which support mother tongues
and through educating staff and parents about the huge benets to be gained
from bilingualism and the dangers which can arise if the students’ mother
tongues are ignored. Regular CPD must be planned for staff, especially
as in a typical international school there is a rapid turnover of teachers.
Many teachers are monolingual and will have had little experience of what
it means to be fully bilingual. As a result, they have little understanding
of how to achieve additive bilingualism or of the benets it brings. This
means that the teachers are unable to work effectively with the SL learners.
Professional development should include a focus on the key role of the
mother tongue in learning, the process and stages of language acquisition,
and the advantages of second language acquisition. New teachers should
be encouraged to learn a new language themselves, as this will give them
some insight into the challenges students face. Often, lessons are offered to
teachers keen to learn the language of the host country.
The leadership should raise the prole of the mother tongues
used in the school, as they are essential elements of internationalism and
multiculturalism. For example, the school website, brochures, handbooks,
yers and other sources of information for interested parties should have
sections in a variety of mother tongues, not only in English. The variety
of languages used in the school should be visible in the building wherever
English is being used, for example on signs: ‘Director’s ofce’, ‘High School
secretary’s ofce’, ‘Nurse’s room’, and so on. Samples of children’s work
that highlight the range of languages spoken in the school are also a positive
example of international and multiculturalism in practice. The admissions
information should be available in all of the main languages of the school.
Information about teaching programmes should also be available in mother
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The importance of maintaining mother tongue development
tongues. The weekly bulletins which most schools produce for parents
can be produced in various mother tongues as well as English. Many of
these documents could be contributed by older students as part of their
community service work. The administration can support the development
of mother-tongue resources in the school, for example through developing
collections of library books, newspapers, magazines, videos and other
resources. Resources which explain and offer information on bilingualism
are also helpful for parents new to the situation.
Parents
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his
head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
(Attributed to Nelson Mandela)
Parents especially need to be informed about the process of becoming
bilingual, and the importance of their support for their children. Such
communication should be part of the school’s programme of informing and
advising new parents, and reminding present parents of the importance of the
mother tongue and the advantages of additive bilingualism. Unfortunately,
parents, and indeed teachers, often fail to understand that learning a foreign
language at school is very different from learning a language which will be
the main source of academic learning; the latter means not only learning the
language but, critically, learning to learn in the second language.
These information sessions for parents need to take place regularly.
Many parents have little idea of how or why they should support their
children’s growth towards balanced bilingualism. It is not easy to arrange
mother-tongue classes in a wide variety of languages, but with the support
of parents, embassies and the local community it can be done. In some
situations, classes may take place within the school day; alternatively,
after-school classes can be offered. Parents often have the best contacts
for nding other parents and children who share the same mother tongue,
and can establish playgroups, encourage friendships and share resources.
Through such networks, parents can also nd mother-tongue teachers of
their language. Where mother-tongue classes are held at the end of the day,
this will add depth and intensity to the practice of the mother tongue, and
students will benet from the additional exposure to academic language
at the appropriate age level. Some languages may be taught in private
supplementary schools in the evenings or at the weekends. The educational
authorities of some countries, for example the Netherlands and Sweden,
offer professionally organized classes for their citizens living abroad, at
which students work on the home-country curriculum content.
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All of these activities make a valuable contribution to the academic
success of second language students in the mainstream classes, as the
skills, content knowledge and language acquired in the mother tongue are
resources which are transferable and support English language acquisition.
More detailed information on how to set up a mother-tongue department is
to be found in Carder, 2007a, chapter 4.
Parents often believe that they can support their children’s
progress in school best by using English at home. This, of course, will be
counterproductive, as the student loses the chance to develop their mother
tongue age-appropriately, and other benets of bilingualism are at risk. The
parents of SL learners are usually English-language learners themselves,
and although their level of prociency may be high it is important that
discussions, explanations and conversations with their children are held
with competent, native-level speakers of the mother tongue.
The mother tongue is an important part of a child’s identity: it is who
they are. From birth, or even before birth, the sound of this language plays a
key role in a child’s emotional development. This is the language of parental
and family love and affection, the language of the rst nursery rhymes and
stories, the language of family rituals and practices and the basis of all the
learning which the child will receive in the future. It is a responsibility of
the parents to maintain and develop that language within the home as far
as possible. The books read, the discussions enjoyed, the talk around the
dinner table, should all be in the mother tongue. At the same time, of course,
the parents will continue to develop the child’s mother-tongue competence
by extending the vocabulary and increasing the complexity of the language
and the child’s ability to discuss, reason and argue in depth.
Examples of negative practice concerning mother tongues in
international schools
At one of the few international schools that had a proactive policy for
mother tongues, within a few months of the director responsible for that
policy leaving the school, the new director initiated a policy which stated,
‘Our mother tongue programme is a “point of difference”’, ‘the use of
mother tongue by our students will not be permitted where it excludes
others; students and teachers’, and ‘all teachers are expected to promote the
use of English’.
Many of these students certainly feel excluded for most of the time in
an English-speaking environment, as they do not understand all the words
and nuances that are spoken. The school head was presumably reacting
to the concerns of some staff or parents, or his own monolingual outlook.
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The importance of maintaining mother tongue development
Understandable though this may be, the new policy imposes a blanket
silence on the central aspect of these students’ identities. These students will
in any case continue to use their own mother tongue in their heads, but they
will feel silenced and thus stigmatized. Mother-tongue English speakers in
international schools are never subjected to such policies, and the edict reveals
a lack of knowledge about students’ identities, social behaviour and ways
of learning. In addition, to say that a mother-tongue programme is a ‘point
of difference’ is the exact opposite of what needs to be said; the aim of such
a programme is to integrate all students’ languages, not to stigmatize them
by calling them ‘different’. Again, the fact that such a statement could be
made in a school with a well-developed mother-tongue and ESL programme
emphasizes two points: the continuing in-built sense that ‘English is above
all other languages’, and that decisions on languages are taken by those who
are in power and are mother-tongue English speakers.
As documented by Young:
Refusing to authorise a child to use her/his home language as a
cognitive tool for learning is effectively an act of discrimination.
UNESCO underlines language as a human right, stating that
the integration of migrant ‘children should be facilitated by
teaching the language in use in the school system’ … (UNESCO,
2003: 16–17).
(Young, 2014: 97)
In addition:
[MRG (1994])] proposes ve reasons as to why minority
language children should develop their home language including
maintaining communication between grandparents, parents and
children, promoting a positive self-image and supporting the
learning of the second language.
(ibid.)
In a study of head teachers’ views on bilingualism carried out by Young
(2014: 90), only one out of 46 mentioned the cognitive benets of
bilingualism: this was also the only head that referred to research ndings.
Of course, school heads are busy, but the responsibility for the education of
the hundreds of children in their care lies with them, and they should be up
to date with what has become the reality in international schools: most of
the students do not have English as their mother tongue. Cruickshank (2014:
60) writes: ‘It is “surreal” that the day schools often have no knowledge of
which of their students are learning in community languages schools or of
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208
the language practices and cultural knowledge they have acquired and use
in contexts outside day school’. Young writes:
It has been acknowledged that as a direct result of our increasingly
globalised world, many school populations now include a greater
number of pupils with a wider variety of home languages which
are not languages of instruction (OECD, 2010). This places
additional strain on teachers, who very often have received little
or no training to prepare them to support these pupils (Cajkler &
Hall, 2012; Murakami, 2008; Wiley, 2008).
(ibid.: 93)
Young’s next statement about the language knowledge of the teachers in his
study resonates with the situation in international schools:
Given that the majority of teachers in France are not from a
migration background (Charles & Legendre, 2006) and have only
a school-based experience of languages, how are they supposed
to understand complex issues such as bilingualism, biliteracy,
multiple identities and intercultural communication with little
personal experience and training?
(Young, 2014: 96)
The argument for training and careful recruitment is evident.
Advice for parents
Parents should be encouraged to talk to their children about the day at
school from the very early stages of learning in a second language right up
to the high school. The content of lessons can be supplied by the teacher
so that parents can access the same information in the mother tongue. For
example, if the child is studying the water cycle at school, the water cycle
can be researched on the internet in the mother tongue and shared with
the child. The topic can be discussed, and the child can explain it and give
additional information which may have been learned in school. In this way,
through the transfer of language, competence in both languages is further
developed. Older children can be encouraged to research topics on the
internet using mother-tongue resources. This will develop their academic
vocabulary and deepen their understanding of the content matter. It will
also make it possible for parents to discuss the content with their children,
so that the students benet from opportunities to talk around the subject,
and question, challenge and conrm their understanding.
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The importance of maintaining mother tongue development
Reading is a key resource for supporting, developing and maintaining
the child’s mother tongue. For younger children, after a tiring day at school,
being read to in the mother tongue will be an enjoyable, relaxing experience.
Similarly, through technology and the internet, stories, songs, cartoons and
lms can be enjoyed, shared and discussed in the mother tongue.
Some languages may be taught in private supplementary schools in the
evenings or at the weekends. These activities make a valuable contribution
to the academic success of SLLs in the mainstream classes, as the skills,
content knowledge and language acquired in the mother tongue are all
resources which are transferable, and support English language acquisition.
If a student joins an international school, for example in grade 5,
and then uses only English until they return to their home country – a
frequent scenario in international schools – they will not have acquired the
necessary academic vocabulary and language to express knowledge and key
concepts and so to continue to study successfully in their mother tongue.
Students who continue their studies up to grade 12 using only English and
then wish to enter university in their home countries often nd that they
lack the academic language and the ability to explain concepts and express
their higher-level thinking through lack of language, uency, experience or
practice. They may be left with the vocabulary and language style of a much
younger student, which will not come up to the standards of academic study
or help them to make new friends.
Teachers
The teachers are the people who spend the most time with the students
during the school year, making their role in recognizing the vital importance
of mother-tongue maintenance and development, and encouraging and
supporting them, of prime importance.
International teachers and students change schools more frequently
than those based in their home countries and attending national schools.
Those rst days at a new school are always stressful for new teachers and
students, but at least the teachers speak the language and are familiar
with the cultural norms of schools. It is their responsibility to make the
new student’s rst hours and days comforting. For students who do not
speak the language of the school uently the level of stress is magnied
and may become almost unbearable. Students have to cope with a day in
a new school where they cannot understand what is being said, they do
not have friends, and their language, their culture, in fact everything which
is important to them, becomes irrelevant in this incomprehensible new
environment. Teachers who recognize the challenges these children face can
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210
help them in many ways. Often schools have a ‘buddy’ system, whereby an
established student takes the new student through the school day and is an
instant friend for the rst few weeks. If the buddy is a speaker of the same
language the level of comfort and reassurance given is great. The system is
simple but can prevent untold misery. Buddies can explain the schedule,
help locate classrooms and the toilets, be a friend at break- or lunchtime
and introduce the new student to after-school activities.
Teachers should make a point of knowing which students are coming
into the school, where they have come from, which language(s) they speak,
their level of English, and most importantly how to pronounce their names
correctly. It is also important that the student knows the teacher’s name,
how to pronounce it correctly, and how to spell it. Just as the student’s
name may be challenging for the teacher, so may the teacher’s name be
unfamiliar and confusing.
In the classroom
The teachers in the lower grades spend more time with the students than
teachers in upper grades, so they have more opportunities to support the
mother tongues of their students. For example, the students could teach
expressions in their mother tongues, which would add to their condence
and self-worth by allowing their own special abilities to be recognized. Not
only greetings and phrases but also the language used in science or other topic
areas can be shared. In this way students can learn to appreciate linguistic
similarities and differences and extend their interest in and understanding
of their own languages. As long as they are unable to express their ideas in
English and are given no alternative avenues to do so, students’ identities,
abilities, creativity and originality are ignored and thus appear to count for
nothing. The work of Cummins and Early on ‘identity texts’ (Cummins and
Early, 2011) has been shown to bring many advantages to young students
whose mother tongue is not English. Through writing texts, stories and
poems in their mother tongue and having them translated into English,
the students conrm their own identities. These texts can be translated by
classroom friends who are further along the bilingual continuum, or by
older students or relatives. The translation process is also supportive of the
new student’s second language development. The samples of creative work
which are truly their own can be shared outside school with relatives and
friends to demonstrate their growing bilingualism.
Parents may read or tell stories in the mother tongue to groups of
children or talk to the whole class, in English, or in the mother tongue
with a translator, about their home country and language, using artefacts to
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The importance of maintaining mother tongue development
make the talk come alive: pictures, clothes, music and so forth. The mother
tongue can be explained, simple words taught, and the written language
shared. The teacher can take a language each week to share, and the students
can teach their classmates new words and phrases, maybe even a rhyme or
a song. Weekly assemblies can also be used to focus on one of the many
mother tongues in any school. Students who share the same mother tongue
can be given opportunities to discuss the content of lessons in that language,
or work together to produce texts, charts and posters in their mother tongue
related to the work being done in class. Students can be given opportunities
to explain and share their work, and so to demonstrate to everyone the
importance and relevance of other languages. These experiences enrich
the learning of all students. Some teachers may fear a loss of control – see
the quote below – and thus be reluctant to allow students to discuss in
their mother tongues, but if the students are later asked to report on their
discussion in English this can be avoided.
Language teachers who ban the students’ rst language from the
classroom might be shattered to know how much it is being used
in the privacy of the students’ minds.
(Cook and Singleton, 2014: 9)
Teachers in upper grades can create situations which give students
opportunities to discuss their work in their mother-tongue groups. Students
can also be encouraged to use the internet to research the topics studied in
their mother tongue. Students who are beginning to learn English should
be given alternative ways to demonstrate understanding, for example by
making charts or diagrams, which could easily be labelled in the mother
tongue and to which the English terms could be added later. Through CPD
given by experienced, qualied ESL colleagues, classroom teachers can
begin to comprehend the challenges SL learners are facing, and learn skills
and techniques to enable these students to access the curriculum and to
succeed, using their mother tongues and English.
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Chapter 11
Advice and guidance for
school leaders, teachers
and parents
All of this reinforces the fundamental conservatism of human societies,
because mental models of reality once adopted are hard to change in
the light of new evidence that they are not working.
(Fukuyama, 2011: 443)
Obstacles to instituting the proposed model
What is needed in international schools is that leaders have the courage
to recognize that language policies based on research serve the students
and their parents and will affect the quality of their long-term future.
Individual components of the international schools network – curriculum
providers and accreditation agencies, school heads, boards of governors,
and teachers – may argue against change. But the burgeoning numbers
of ESL students in international schools demand that change occurs, so
there needs to be an agenda about how to manage that change fairly and
equitably. Those who resist such a change, or who claim that it is totally
unexpected, should explain why, after obvious trends over many years,
and the number of publications pointing out the demographic linguistic
shift, they have not already shown their competence as leaders, seen the
clear picture approaching, and admitted that they were simply not doing
their job.
As Wolin warns, there is a:
paucity of intellectual proposals that deviate from the current
orthodoxies. This reects a quiet but paradigmatic change: a
shift in intellectual and ideological inuence from academia to
think tanks, the vast majority of which were conservative and
dependent upon corporate sponsorship. Whereas the former had
on occasion housed and nurtured deviants, ‘impractical dreamers’
of new paradigms and challengers of orthodoxy, the think-tank
inmates are committed to inuencing policy makers and hence
their horizons are restricted by the demands of practicality
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Advice and guidance for school leaders, teachers and parents
and constricted by the interests of their corporate sponsors to
proposing mitigative changes.
(S.S. Wolin, 2008: xv)
This shows the inuence of well-nanced corporate bodies on those who
come up with proposals that might offer sensible, academically supported
ways forward.
Higgs (2014) traces the subtle inltration of the language of
obfuscation, the spread of public relations (PR) and the various tactics used
by politicians and corporations to oppose the scientic facts about ‘global
warming’, a phrase which was one of the rst victims of their campaign;
the more acceptable ‘climate change’ was their proposal. Higgs writes, for
example, of how some anti-environmentalist businessmen set up a ‘wise use’
umbrella organization. Higgs reports a 1991 conversation between John
Krakauer and the businessman Ron Arnold, who was the vice-president of
the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise:
‘Wise use’ itself was ‘a marvellously ambiguous expression. …
Symbols register most powerfully in the subconscious when
they’re not perfectly clear. … Facts don’t really matter. In politics,
perception is reality.’ ‘Wise use’ was perfect. It smacked of good
judgment and responsibility and could have meant almost
anything.
(Higgs, 2014: 234)
It is possible to trace the inuence of PR and wise use on the IB decision
to phase out language A2 in the Diploma Programme, to merge second
language and foreign language into ‘language acquisition’, and to dispose
with the SLA and MTD guide.
Another area addressed by Higgs is ‘doubt’. By sowing the seeds of
doubt about second language issues, educational organizations can claim
that ‘there is no consensus on the best method’, thereby laying the ground
for whatever suits their needs best. As reported by Higgs:
We are operating in a political world from which morality has
been banished …. In its place … we nd simple greed masked by
the euphemisms of ‘management’ and ‘efciency’.
(Middleton et al., 1993: 4, 11, quoted in Higgs, 2014: 129)
Maurice Carder
214
Further insights into why more effective SL programmes
have not been instituted
Understanding why effective policies and programmes for ESL students
have not been put in place in international schools will help educators to
ensure that the situation can be reversed. Many of the underlying reasons for
such failure have so far in this book been traced to the politics of national
educational policies; now some insights drawn from research by cognitive
psychologists and sociologists will be presented.
Language is something that people take for granted, and believe that
they own. English speakers especially are owners of the world’s current
lingua franca and the great majority see no need to learn another language.
Even though it might be expected that in the eld of education a more
objective, scientic approach to this essential element of schooling would
be taken, especially in an international context where many languages are
represented among the student body, this is often not the case.
Tame and wicked problems
Cognitive psychologists talk about two types of problems: tame, or simple,
problems, and wicked problems. Simple problems have dened causes,
objectives and outputs; wicked problems are multifaceted and constantly
changing: they are complex, demanding a continuous process of evaluation
and redenition. There are obvious attempts by governments in some English-
speaking countries to ‘simplify’ education generally. It is easier to control a
simple mechanism. When an issue to do with state education dees a clear
denition it becomes frustrating, as it keeps evolving as various solutions
are tried. When, as with our issue of language and languages, it impinges on
our basic comfort zone, ‘our’ English language, it is easiest to proclaim that
students should just get on with it, especially when parents mostly demand
that their offspring should learn it quickly and get good grades in it. But
language, in fact bilingualism, for that is what is involved, is an educational
problem, a human rights problem, a social justice problem, a governance
problem, and an ideological battle between contending factions.
To solve tame problems, the solution is rst to understand the
problem, then to gather information, collect it together, and work out and
apply solutions. If students are not all equally good at maths, put them in
different sets. This is precisely what happens in most international schools
at some stage. For wicked problems, you have to know all about their
context; however, it is often the case that you have to delve deep to discover
the roots of the problem, and the solution may prove elusive.
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Advice and guidance for school leaders, teachers and parents
Many – most? – international schools treat bilingualism and ESL
issues as somewhere between a tame and a wicked problem. The purpose
of this book has been to show that they should be treated as a tame
problem: we have understood the problem, gathered information, collected
it together and worked out solutions, and are waiting for the international
educational community to apply them by setting up the structures we have
recommended. We have known about the solutions for some time, but
issues have intervened that can be categorized as political, which have made
the problem a wicked one. So rather than actively addressing the bilingual
learning needs of the many, many students who could have far better
programmes of instruction and assessment than they are currently receiving,
we actively shift attention away from them, keeping them permanently on
the edge of our pool of worry (see Rittel and Webber, 1973).
A compelling narrative is key to managing a school, a curriculum
body or an accrediting agency. Research has shown that this is best done by
including a cause, an effect, a perpetrator, and a motive. What is seen about
the way that ESL students (the cause) are treated is often that the governing
body/agency/school (the perpetrators) justify the peripheralization of ESL
students in order to marginalize them and so save the effort of devising
appropriate programmes (the motive). The result (the effect) is that ESL
students are often marginalized and not given the means to achieve their
full potential. A gripping story, even when we know that it is factually
wrong, is often more emotionally compelling than the truth. Among a large
body of mostly monolingual English-speaking staff, and parents who are
keen – sometimes desperate – to have their children in an English-speaking
school, the emotional narrative of ‘putting them all in the mainstream with
“support”’ is not so hard to sell. Parents can see that their children are in
the regular classes, even if they don’t understand much and their writing
skills in content areas leave much to be desired.
Different types of bias
There are also issues of ‘bias’. Many people interpret language questions in
the light of their own assumptions and prejudices: they may prefer a certain
accent, or insist that a particular point of grammar is wrong. If they believe
that English-only is the natural way forward, they see speakers of other
languages who learn to speak it, and lose their mother tongue, as proof
that assimilation is the only solution; if they accept that bilingualism can
bring advantages, they see successful bilinguals as proof of the benets of
bilingualism. Psychological researchers call such conclusion-drawing ‘bias’.
Those who cherry-pick evidence that ts their world view are showing
Maurice Carder
216
‘conrmation bias’. For example, if a student has been diagnosed as an ESL
student by ESL specialists, but has been determined by non-specialists to
be ‘uent’ as she can talk quite uently about her wish to be in the content
classes rather than in a parallel ESL class, the non-specialist will claim that
the student has perfectly good English and her wishes should be followed,
showing conrmation bias. Further testing of written prociency, however,
may show that the student’s writing skills are a long way behind her
speaking ability. If there is no ESL specialist to conrm this, or no dedicated
ESL programme, the student will commence a long decline of reading and
writing skills.
There are also situations in which we modify new information to t
in with our world view; this is called ‘biased assimilation’. For example, the
parents of the student described above may bring in reports from a previous
school in another country that show good writing skills in English. The
non-specialist will proclaim, ‘Here is the evidence’, but the ESL specialists
may produce current evidence that shows insufcient writing skills.
Attitudes towards language can become very heated and polarized: a
teacher from, for example, the English department may say that the student
in question has given very good presentations in class, but then backtrack
and say, ‘Well, the writing skills were not so good today’. Making one’s
mind up on the spot in this way, on the basis of easily available evidence, is
called ‘availability bias’. This kind of decision making happens frequently
to students with language issues in schools which do not assess in depth
the veriable language abilities of every student – their speaking and
writing abilities in both their mother tongue and English – and provide the
appropriate programme. Teachers in such scenarios are not doing their duty
as educators.
All of these ‘biases’ are common human foibles, but there should
be no place for them in the professional environment of international
schools. Language is the basis of everything students do in schools, and
with a complex multilingual student body it is essential rst to evaluate the
possible language skills of each student in all of their languages, and then to
provide the appropriate programme of instruction.
Rationality versus irrationality
A book that became a bestseller contains useful advice on these issues. In
Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman, 2012), the author writes about human
rationality and irrationality. He shows that people obtain their information
through those they think they can trust, and the reason they accept or do
not accept an issue is to do not with the information on the subject, but
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Advice and guidance for school leaders, teachers and parents
with the ‘cultural coding’. So in our case, in an international school where
English is the language of the curriculum and the majority of the teachers
are monolingual and from the Anglosphere, a rational discourse from ESL
specialists on the best programme for a second-language student can lose
against a compelling story that speaks to people’s core values, such as ‘We
know English, we can see that this girl has uent English, so she can join
our regular English department class’. If all the surrounding teachers and
administrators are also monolingual English speakers, the ESL specialist
can give all the rational arguments in the world for setting up a dedicated
ESL programme, with a mother-tongue programme to back it up, but
communications from peers can have far more inuence than the advice
of experts. A reminder: in a school where the ESL teachers are in ‘support’
mode and have no professional standing, their case will be even weaker.
Native speakers versus non-native speakers
Then there is ‘self-categorization theory’, by which people not only identify
strongly with their own social group but believe that it has a distinctive
identity that makes it superior to other groups. Thus in schools where a
board of governors may, apparently with good intentions, have insisted on
recruiting only native English speakers, perhaps even only British teachers
(seen in some international schools), there will be a body that will be wide
open to conrmation bias and the white man effect. For ESL specialists, to
stand up to this, day after day, is a gruelling experience: science and maths
teachers do not have to justify their decisions in their subject area, case by
case, on a daily basis. This can lead to ‘pluralistic ignorance’, which happens
when people – teachers, for us – misread the social norm and suppress their
own views, which further widens the divide, and may create an atmosphere
in which the majority of teachers keep silent because they fear they are in a
minority. I have seen this in action in many instances.
When school heads or boards of governors make such decisions
– to employ only native English speakers – they are unwittingly doing
exactly the wrong thing, as potentially bilingual ESL students will see only
monolingual English speakers as their teachers and take that as the ideal.
School heads must understand what is at stake and speak forcefully to
governors and parents so that they understand how much better the ESL
students would progress if they could see that their teachers were bilinguals,
like them, that their chances of developing a native-like English accent after
puberty were minimal, and that there are more SL speakers of English than
native speakers in the world. We have noticed the professionalism and
competence of SL English speakers who are teachers of ESL; they compare
Maurice Carder
218
favourably with the too often seen amateurism of ‘native speakers’,
who are frequently poorly qualied. Indeed, native English speakers can
actually be worse communicators than SL speakers of English: Morrison
(2016) writes, ‘often you have a boardroom full of people from different
countries communicating in English and all understanding each other and
then suddenly the American or Brit walks into the room and nobody can
understand them’. The reason for this is that ‘The non-native speakers
… speak more purposefully and carefully, typical of someone speaking a
second or third language. Anglophones … often talk too fast for others to
follow, and use jokes, slang and references specic to their own culture.’
Morrison quotes Jenkins: ‘“Native speakers are at a disadvantage when you
are in a lingua franca situation,” where English is being used as a common
denominator, says Jennifer Jenkins, professor of global Englishes at the
UK’s University of Southampton. “It’s the native English speakers that are
having difculty understanding and making themselves understood.”’
In schools whose ESL teachers come from a system like that of
England, in which they are not given professional status and have become
inured to being in a support role, it is likely that content teachers who see
them and may believe that there might be something that they could do
about the situation, do not speak out as they are more likely to be victim to
the ‘bystander effect’, by which the more that people have seen of a problem
and the way it is dealt with, the more likely they are to ignore their own
judgement. This is a strong factor working against ESL teachers in a British-
style international school. With globalization, language has become an issue
needing a global response, and is thus particularly prone to the bystander
effect. People look around to see what others are doing and saying, or more
pertinently what they are not doing or saying. Social conformity is a strong
behavioural instinct built into people’s core psychology, as in earlier stages
of human development not doing the same as others around us could entail
ostracism or abandonment. There are often risks involved in holding views
that are not in step with your social group. In addition, if an ESL teacher is
repeatedly out of step with the English-speaking peer-group majority, the
threat of dismissal is always present; the choice is to speak out on the issues
and be red, or be silent, swallow, and sit in classes in a support role. ESL
teachers have written to me about precisely this scenario, in real fear of
losing their jobs.
It needs repeating that the monolingual English teachers and
administrators are the ones who are out of step, as the student body is
usually multilingual. Since experiments on social conformity have shown
that people conform even when there is a real threat, a strong school
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Advice and guidance for school leaders, teachers and parents
leader will be needed who is determined to maintain a professional ESL
department. Another potential problem is that the board may feel that such
a strong leader does not have the backing of the staff, or is upsetting them,
so will not renew her contract. English speakers, when in a majority on
a school staff, face two risks: accepting bilingualism, possibly a perceived
risk, compared with the certain and very personal risk of opposing the norm
of English-only, or keeping a support ESL programme instead of having a
professional ESL and mother-tongue programme.
Lynskey afrms:
Humans do not instinctively enjoy changing their minds.
Admitting that you were wrong, especially when the original
decision has huge ramications, is a painful and destabilising
experience that the brain tends to resist. Research into this kind
of denial has given us concepts such as cognitive dissonance and
conrmation bias.
‘When you have a strong view about something, you’re likely
to reject information that’s contrary to your view, reject the
source of the information and rationalise the information,’ says
Jane Green, professor of political science at the University of
Manchester …. ‘We select information that’s consistent with our
views, because it’s more comfortable and reafrming.’ In fact, it’s
physically pleasurable. Some recent studies of conrmation bias
indicate that consuming information that supports our beliefs
actually produces a dopamine rush.
(Lynskey, 2017)
Further examples of how large organizations are unable to adapt to a more
appropriate path are given by Meek:
[We live in] an era where large corporations’ trappings of
openness – bright, friendly, content-rich websites and well-staffed
PR operations – turn out to be facades for gagged workforces,
denial of corporate history and a refusal to engage with sceptical
questions.
(Meek, 2015: 266)
Unfortunately, requesting the setting up of a professional ESL and mother-
tongue department as the centre of each international school is likely to be
seen as a sceptical question.
Maurice Carder
220
Solutions
How can we counter these tendencies? The solution is to use words that
promote the main ideas of bilingualism and inhibit those of monolingual
smugness. Once words become engrained in common usage they
perpetuate their message. Ideally this will lead to international school
leaders maintaining a message of the centrality of a professional ESL
department, promoting students’ mother tongues, and the benets of
additive bilingualism. They will talk down the terms EAL and support, and
all the language that contributes to the demotivation of SLLs. They will
point out that EAL has no professional status in England. If teachers do
not understand the theory behind the advantages of bilingualism, school
leaders will talk about it over and over again. Kahneman (2012) has shown
that the division between the emotional brain and the rational brain (he
calls them ‘system 1’ and ‘system 2’) runs deep in our culture, and this
‘cultural mistake’ should have no place in an education system. But it does.
Unfortunately, extensive research evidence shows that information does not
change people’s attitudes, and since the emotional brain leads in decision
making, its initial impressions will sway subsequent decisions; there are
plenty of examples from recent world events that show how lies, repeated
between peers, can gain social acceptance. Leaders can create the impression
that something is being done while preventing anything from happening, or
do the reverse – do something that is not welcome among the populace
while creating the impression that it is for their benet. Education has the
care of children in its hands: there really should be no place for deception
or for not doing what is known, on the basis of solid research and good
practice, to be the best. If school leaders see their job as making a sales
pitch, getting parents hooked on promises of native English teachers only
in order to promote the numbers of entrants, their motives for their career
choice should be questioned: treating the care of young children as a market
opportunity is not an option.
Unrealistic pretensions of having a ‘native’ accent
Parents are naturally keen for their children to become uent in English. It
is the globalized world’s lingua franca, and uency is considered to offer
considerable benets. Indeed, it is safe to say many opportunities and career
paths will not be available to someone without competence in English.
However, it is important that parents understand that their children are
unlikely to acquire an impeccable native accent, especially if they commence
learning the language after puberty.
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Advice and guidance for school leaders, teachers and parents
Some examples will illustrate how far false expectations can lead,
and the views that adults can hold of the importance of having a native
accent. Stephen Krashen recounted (at the ECIS ESL and MT conference,
Geneva, in 2008) how in South Korea many parents believed that their
ethnic background included having a physical characteristic that precluded
them from speaking English ‘native-like’. They therefore took their children
for operations that involved cutting away certain tissues around the tongue.
No perceivable benet was reported.
The argument that being taught English by a native speaker is the
only way to be sure of gaining a native-like accent has many aws, not the
least of which is that SL speakers of English far outnumber native speakers,
so SL learners are far more likely to spend their lives conversing with other
SL speakers than with native speakers. A thorough investigation of this
issue is made by Cook (2014c), who states (p. 134), ‘If you ask L2 learners
what they want to become in a second language, the answer is . . .: they
want to be native speakers.’ However, he points out that ‘A native speaker
is usually said to be “a person who has spoken a certain language since early
childhood.”’ He adds, ‘most people seem to believe that the only person
who speaks a language properly is a native speaker. But, if the denition
above is correct, no L2 user could ever become a native speaker: it’s far too
late. The only ones to make the grade would be children brought up from
the very beginning in two languages’ (ibid.: 135). The result can be that
‘Consequently most L2 users consider themselves failures for not sounding
like native speakers, something they could never be – by denition’ (ibid.).
In a summary of a thorough analysis of the matter, Cook writes, ‘Many L2
learners and L2 users aspire to be as similar as possible to a native speaker.
Yet it is hard to pin down what an ideal native speaker might be. This native
speaker goal cannot be achieved because they already have one language in
their minds. L2 users and L2 learners need to be assessed against successful
L2 users, not against native speakers as reected in many contemporary
examination systems’ (ibid.: 139).
The need to inform parents
These facts need to be distributed among the parent body and the school
faculty. Through CPD, teachers should be aware of these facts. But parents,
too, need to understand them, so that their expectations are realistic.
Schools should have notice boards and newsletters and websites where all
these facts are widely available.
It is important that parents are made aware of what their children
are involved in through booklets and information evenings. An informative
Maurice Carder
222
website on all aspects of bringing up children bilingually is www.
multilingualliving.com (accessed 13 February 2018).
Many parents are so grateful to have their children in an international
school that they will accept any type of programme, and the ‘promise of
English’, the world language and the key to success, may blind them to the
vast task of language learning and the personal stress awaiting their children
(Krashen, 2006). Unfortunately, unscrupulous or unknowing international
school boards and school leaders are frequently party to attracting parents
to a school with poorly designed provision for ESL students.
School leaders need to ensure they employ well-qualied ESL staff,
and listen to their advice. This is possible, as I found in my former school.
Although in the USA in 2002 ‘only … 18% [of ELLs’ teachers] were certied
in … English as a second language’ (Crawford and Krashen, 2007: 14),
and in England there is no statutory provision for an EAL qualication,
I always insisted that ESL teachers had an MA in ESL, TESOL, applied
linguistics, or similar: there are plenty of such teachers out there looking for
employment in international schools. I wrote in 1990 (almost thirty years
ago), ‘An ESL department is generally seen as the hub of the school, with
the spokes leading out to the other departments’ (Kalinowski and Carder,
1990: 81). Some schools have managed to maintain and develop such a
model, notably the Frankfurt International School (www.s.edu/, accessed
13 February 2018) which, by offering the IBPYP and the IBDP but not the
IBMYP (they have created their own programme), overcomes the negative
effects of that programme on ESL students already noted.
Many years of regular contact with parents in international schools
have cast light for me on matters which are of a sensitive nature, but which
have to be discussed if there is to be any chance of improving the language
education of their children. A useful introduction may be in the form of
an anecdote. A director new to the international school, who had heard
that there could be ‘tricky’ situations with parents, recounted that she was
quite ready to deal with any encounter, as in her previous school (in the
English state system) an angry parent had threatened to dump a lorryload
of earth at the school gates if certain conditions were not met. The director
recounted how she had dealt with the matter successfully. After a year at
the international school the director realized that dealing with the more
sophisticated complaints and detailed requests of the professional class of
parents at the school was more time-consuming and complex. As mentioned
above, Bourdieu (1984) recounts in Distinction, at great length and with
well-chosen examples, that those in privileged classes are unwilling to
challenge the authority of the dominant power directly: rather, they expect
223
Advice and guidance for school leaders, teachers and parents
what they consider to be sensible decisions as regards their children’s
education to be taken on their behalf as soon as they air them, but often
prefer to pursue their agendas covertly, in discussions with other parents,
or by contacting teachers or heads of school. As professionals, they may
not wish to speak openly at school meetings on matters of concern to them
– often nancial issues – but they will pursue their agendas in other ways.
Parents are often not cognizant of the factors which go towards
making their child able to master English at an academic level. When school
directors are not aware of such factors either, as recounted throughout this
book, poor models of instruction are often accepted. A group of Brazilian
businessmen, for example, came to Europe looking for a teacher to set up
a new school in a large city, but wanted ‘only British teachers’ as there was
an anti-American mood at that time. It should by now be clear that SLLs
will usually not develop native-like prociency or accents after puberty,
and will in all likelihood acquire the ‘mid-Atlantic’ accent common to most
international school students worldwide.
The marketization of professionalism versus commitment
Research has shown (Carder, 2011) the diverse responses of parents
to maintaining their children’s mother tongue to an academic level. In a
school in which every effort was made to promote the importance of every
child keeping up and developing their mother tongue literacy, the issue
of payment for mother-tongue classes became political. The department
responsible for mother-tongue classes had a policy of approving each
mother-tongue teacher and drawing up a recommended payscale for such
teachers to ensure a professional standing for the teachers. One language
group protested about this as they had found a teacher who charged less
than the published rate:
[Parent]: Well, what’s the advantage of the mother-tongue
programme? As opposed to tutoring our kids on the side, for
instance?
(Carder, 2011: 110)
This area is discussed by Sennett under the heading of ‘craftsmanship’.
He writes:
The educational system … favors facility at the expense of digging
deep. … [C]raftsmanship has a cardinal virtue missing in the new
culture’s idealized worker, student, or citizen. It is commitment.
(Sennett, 2006: 194, 195)
Maurice Carder
224
However:
Commitment poses a more profound question about the self-as-
process. Commitment entails closure, forgoing possibilities for
the sake of concentrating on one thing. You might miss out. The
emerging culture puts enormous pressure on individuals not to
miss out.
(ibid.: 196)
Mother-tongue teachers at the school in question were committed
professionals working in a situation that isolated them and left them
vulnerable to ‘market forces’. The director responded:
[This] school is unique, I believe, quite unique in offering a
programme of such variety and such size here in the school. Many
IB schools simply say to students: ‘You sort that out. You arrange
your own tutors. You do that out of school. You do that privately.
We don’t want to know.’ OK? [This] school has taken a very
different approach, and I believe a very, very successful approach
and we measure that success by the benet to the students; by the
number of bilingual diplomas; by the success rate in the diploma
programme and by the fantastic success rate in getting those
young people to the universities of their choice.
(Carder, 2011: 111)
The IB coordinator intervened and commented:
I’m a teacher and an English speaker but I would not like to
teach my own children English because the approach to learning
a language from a linguistic viewpoint is very different from just
speaking at home; so the literary skills, the analysis it involves
at the IB level, it absolutely has to be taught by, well, as far
as possible it should be taught by a trained teacher, and I can
imagine that that goes right down the line. And there are so many
families that don’t have the opportunity to be able to develop all
the language, that the programme that the school offers reminds
people that they should be approaching the programme in an
organized way and gives those parents the facility to have it done
for them in school.
(ibid.: 238–9)
These extracts highlight what schooling is about: it is about in-depth
learning and knowledge. In an age of the instant x directors will need to
225
Advice and guidance for school leaders, teachers and parents
reinforce this message constantly. Language issues are complex, and having
a department at the centre of the school structure which has a commitment
to manage them will take a weight off the school leadership, and provide
students with a deep knowledge of their own language and of English,
which will benet them in all subjects and in their nal examinations.
Linguistic and cultural diversity is increasing worldwide. Against the
background of a huge inux of refugees to the EU in September 2015, a
spokesman reported:
‘Any society, anywhere in the world, will be diverse in the future –
that’s the future of the world …. So [Central European countries]
will have to get used to that. They need political leaders who have
the courage to explain that to their population instead of playing
into the fears.’
(V. Chadwick, 2015)
Given the linguistic diversity globalization is bringing to international
schools, school leaders and board members need to be equally courageous
in explaining to their communities the complexity of the issues surrounding
bilingualism, and to set up the comprehensive structures recommended in
this book: such action can only improve the lives of ESL students and the
whole student body. Baetens Beardsmore writes in the foreword to a book
for school principals in bilingual schools:
Principals, teachers, students, parents must share the aims of a
common goal where two or more distinct languages form the
foundation of a process seen as a long-term commitment. Such
programmes cannot succeed if based on tactics and strategies
built upon hit-and-miss improvisation.
(Baetens Beardsmore, 2012: v)
This statement could usefully appear at the head of all the mission statements
and accreditation and curriculum documents of international schools.
226
Chapter 12
The challenges ahead
Maurice Carder and Patricia Mertin
International schools across the world, with their multilingual, multicultural
communities, are increasing in numbers at an enormous rate. The great range
of varieties of international schools has already been discussed, and their
geographical locations are spreading from the Western world to the East.
However, most of these schools follow a largely Western style of education,
with Western curricula and Western ways of learning, understanding and
expressing ideas. The IB, with the PYP, MYP and DP range of subjects
which lead to examinations, tends strongly towards the Western view
of education. Similarly, the IB Learner Prole and its attributes actually
embody a Western approach, which ignores the fact that not all cultures
encourage children to be, for example, questioners and risk-takers.
At the same time as international schools are growing in number
the population of the world is becoming more mobile, with the result that
students in state schools across the globe are no longer all speakers of that
state’s ofcial language, and nor do they necessarily share the cultural
norms of the nation state in which they live.
International schools have been working with diverse groups for
many years and so should be models of multilingual and multicultural
understanding. But the truth is that in many schools the leadership fails
to take advantage of this immense resource, and much more importantly
fails to give every student equal opportunities through equal access to the
curriculum.
The mother tongues of the students are often ignored, and students
are not given the chance to learn English (when that is the language of
instruction in the school) effectively.
International schools have so many advantages which could be used
to demonstrate how they could be operating in the globalized world, and
when a variety of languages and cultures exist in close proximity, peacefully
and successfully.
International schools are nancially advantaged, the school
population comes from a relatively well-off sociocultural group, and the
parents of the students are nancially and professionally successful. As a
227
The challenges ahead
result, the parents have high expectations of the schools, which sadly are
often not met with regard to SL learners.
What should an international school be aiming for?
International schools are all set and fully equipped to be world leaders
in education, where they have SL programmes which cater to the needs
of SLLs. Unfortunately, many have not taken advantage of this, as they
adhere to models created in and for national systems, with the residue of the
political detritus that sticks to them.
School heads and directors who are persuaded by the arguments in
this book will need not only to set up the model advocated, but to back it all
the way. Such a move will mature into the solid establishment of equitable
and professional programmes for SLLs. Policies are not enough: they need
consistent implementation. Given the complexity of sound provision for
SLLs it is reasonable to insist on professional courses for teachers, in line
with other disciplines. Professionalism at all levels – ESL qualications, ESL
training, ESL programmes, CPD, access to mentor gures and leaders in the
eld – needs to be recognized as necessary in order to cement the profession
for the long-term benet of SL students.
School leaders should be familiar with the core knowledge base
regarding: trajectories of school language acquisition among new students,
including the time taken to learn a second language – ve to seven years
(Thomas and Collier, 1997) – and the need to employ well-qualied SL
teachers; the positive role of students’ L1 in facilitating L2 development; and
the instructional strategies required to teach academic content effectively to
students who are in the process of developing academic English prociency,
and therefore the need for content teachers to be trained in these techniques.
SL and mother-tongue programmes are developed according to
a specialized body of knowledge – about bilingualism, second language
acquisition and teacher training. Decisions affecting such programmes need
to be considered in the light of the situation in international schools where
ESL students are frequently in a majority.
School leaders will be able to counter parents who want the quick
x, and unaware managers from national systems who want to label ESL
‘support’; they will recognize the need to employ graduate ESL teachers,
regardless of whether they are native speakers, who are qualied in their
speciality with more than a diploma, as experts in all matters relating to ESL
and bilingualism, and who can act as centres of expertise for all staff, parents
and students. They will make this move in the light of the information made
explicit in this book, emphasizing that collegiality actually doesn’t happen
Maurice Carder and Patricia Mertin
228
that much in schools (the more usual path being a contrived collegiality or
a managed collegiality), which is a principal reason for setting up an ESL
department.
ESL teachers will have to work hard in their new role. They will
be highly qualied, and will at rst have to struggle to cement their new
status as repositories of all matters bilingual and as being responsible for
the continuing training of all staff in linguistically responsive teaching.
They will expect 100 per cent support from leadership (the true meaning of
support), and their enthusiasm and energy for delivering the SL programmes
demanded by the linguistic make-up of the student body will be unceasing.
They will work tirelessly at developing a mother-tongue programme, and
encourage all SLLs to take lessons in their mother tongue.
They will deliver sessions on SL learning to staff and parents on: the
importance of students maintaining their mother tongue at an academic
level; the fundamental difference between second language and foreign
language; and the time taken to learn a second language. They will
broadcast information about native-speaker accent and non-native-speaker
accent so that parents do not have false expectations, saying that a native-
speaker accent is largely unattainable after puberty, or even before; they
will promote school-wide understanding about the way in which academic
knowledge is transferred from the mother tongue to the second language so
that all teachers can draw on this resource.
The ESL department will set in motion the programme of CPD through
which content teachers will acquire a deeper understanding of the ways in
which bilinguals have a different knowledge base from monolinguals so
that even their mother tongue may be affected by their second language(s),
and these should be assessed against other second-language measures,
not rst-language ones. Assessment for these students is best given not in
grades, but through comments, portfolios and formative class work, not
summative tests, i.e., tests given at the end of a period of study to evaluate
students’ work.
There will be a school-wide encouragement of ‘critical vigilance’ on
all second-language matters, which will be continually talked up by those
in positions of responsibility, at least as much as on other discriminatory
issues such as race. All new entrants will be screened in depth by the ESL
department, especially on their academic writing abilities, and attention
will be given to probing whether weaknesses are largely linguistic or may
include a special educational needs element. There will be separation of the
ESL and SEN departments and personnel. Each student will be proled on
their language background and given a language passport, updated every
229
The challenges ahead
year to show their achievement in each of their languages in speaking and
writing skills (see, for example, the Common European Framework of
Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (CEFR) of the
Council of Europe: www.coe.int/en/web/portfolio/the-language-passport,
accessed 13 February 2018). All of this information on each student will be
available to all content teachers.
Today’s world has many challenges; many observers point to the
negative aspects of the internet. In Proust and the Squid (Wolf, 2008),
on the origins of reading, how the brain adapted itself to the process, and
how reading enables the reader to build on previously learned knowledge
to acquire a deeper development of their intellectual potential, Wolf
presents evidence that the assumption that thinking faster and having
more information is better requires vigorous questioning. She delves into
the concerns of Socrates about the effect of reading and writing on our
critical faculties, and considers today’s society of internet decoders of
information. Socrates feared that the permanence of the written language
would mean less searching for true knowledge, which would lead to the
death of human virtue. Wolf concludes by writing, ‘I fear that many of our
children are in danger of becoming … a society of decoders of information,
whose false sense of knowing distracts them from a deeper development of
their intellectual potential. It does not need to be so, if we teach them well’
(p. 226). The solution she presents is to teach children to switch between
different presentations of written language and different modes of analysis
‘to preserve the capacities of two systems and appreciate why both are
precious’ (ibid.: 229). In a section on the effects of bilingualism on reading
(ibid.: 105–7), Wolf describes it as ‘an extraordinary, complicated cognitive
investment for children’, albeit one that represents an ever-increasing reality
for huge numbers of students. She points out that the advantages are greater
than the possible ‘up-front costs’, with the important proviso that the child
learns each language well.
Woolley writes that a positive school climate for SLLs is a major
factor in promoting good reading habits:
A number of researchers have emphasized that for any reading
program to be effective, educators must nd ways to embed
the cultural interests and competencies of ESL students into
classroom programs and routines (Craig, Hull, Haggart and
Perez-Selles, 2000).
(Woolley, 2010: 91)
Maurice Carder and Patricia Mertin
230
This is a must-have in an international school, and the ESL department will
be ever vigilant to ensure each incoming director keeps up such practices.
Closing comments
Only by adopting the model and policies outlined in this book can the
subtractive bilingual tendency that is routine in so many international
schools be turned around. School leaders need to be aware of the link
between nationalism and nation building that promotes monolingualism
as the norm and leads to monolingual educational policies. Anglosphere
countries are particularly prone to this mindset, so school boards of
governors could usefully be on the lookout for heads of school who are
second-language speakers of English.
Obviously, the task would be much more straightforward if the
CIS, the IB and other agencies changed their policies and approach; in any
school, teachers have to follow the curriculum and rules handed out from
above and outside. Given the facts set out in this book about those agencies,
school heads will have to take tough decisions: international schools, from
being the leaders in developing the IB, now nd themselves in a minority.
The IB has some excellent programmes, but has set its sights on the national
US market, thereby becoming less concerned about the international
schools’ constituency in matters related to SL learners, in the middle school
especially. Schools which had good ESL programmes in middle schools have
sometimes seen these diminished in efcacy, or even dissolved. Schools that
offer the PYP, jump the MYP and develop their own programmes but still
offer the IB Diploma have, to the contrary, shown the way (see http://esl.
s.edu/index.htm, accessed 13 February 2018). What is the purpose of the
‘international’ in the IB if appropriate language-development programmes,
according to the latest research, are not provided to all students who are
not literate in the language of instruction? As already related, ‘Will the
programmes of the IB continue to be t for the purpose of international
education, as practised in international schools?’ (Cambridge, 2013: 201).
For ESL students, they certainly will not.
This is equally true of the CIS: this organization is not, as far as is
known, aiming to secure a niche in a national system in the same way as
the IB (though its close partner, the NEASC, is), so it can focus its efforts
on providing a genuinely fair and supportive model of accreditation for ESL
students that is international, no longer relegating them to the end of the
accreditation documents under support services, and removing the language
of the disabled: support.
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The challenges ahead
We, the authors of this book, have lived our lives through ESL and
MT issues. Researchers and academics have been of enormous assistance as
they have provided a bedrock on which to base our programmes. But the
daily experience of teaching ESL students, providing the best programmes
and tuition, talking to the parents, explaining painstakingly to school heads
who have come from national systems and are soon replaced – all these
factors have convinced us that a good SL programme in the middle school
will not only enable SLLs to better develop their English for schooling, but
will change the very nature of the school teaching force and the school
ethos, thereby delivering a model for the globalized world we inhabit.
International school leaders need to take bold decisions, to accept the
reality that current models, and the organizations that provide or oversee
them, are not fullling their potential, and to urgently institute the model
outlined in this book.
232
Appendix: Useful websites for
SLLs in international schools
Bilingual Family Newsletter archives: www.multilingualmatters.com/bilingual_
family_archive.asp (accessed 13 February 2018).
Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching,
Assessment(CEFR): www.coe.int/en/web/common-european-framework-
reference-languages (accessed 18 September 2018).
Frankfurt International School, ESL: http://esl.s.edu/ (accessed
13 February 2018).
Institute for Language and Education Policy: www.elladvocates.org/ (accessed
13 February 2018).
International English Language Testing System test (IELTS): www.ielts.org
(accessed 13 February 2018). ‘The IELTS Academic test is suitable for entry
to study at undergraduate or postgraduate levels, and also for professional
registration purposes. It assesses whether you are ready to begin studying
or training in an environment where English language is used, and reects
some of the features of language used in academic study.’ Free practice tests:
https://takeielts.britishcouncil.org/prepare-test/free-practice-tests (accessed
13 February 2018).
Thomas and Collier: www.thomasandcollier.com (accessed 13 February 2018).
Language Web Site & Emporium (DiversityLearningK12): www.languagepolicy.
net/ (accessed 18 September 2018).
Maurice Carder: www.mauricecarder.net (accessed 13 February 2018).
EAL-time (Joris Van Den Bosch): www.eal-time.com (accessed
18 September 2018).
Multilingual Living: www.multilingualliving.com (accessed 13 February 2018).
Stephen Krashen: www.sdkrashen.com/ (accessed 13 February 2018).
Jim Cummins’s web page with resources: www.iteachilearn.com/cummins/
(accessed 13 February 2018).
The Council of Europe Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters (AIE):
www.coe.int/en/web/language-policy/the-autobiography-of-intercultural-
encounters-aie- (accessed 3 September 2018).
The Council of Europe platform of resources and references for plurilingual and
intercultural education: www.coe.int/en/web/platform-plurilingual-intercultural-
language-education/home (accessed 3 September 2018).
Teaching ESL students in mainstream classrooms (TESMC): https://lexised.
com/courses/teaching-esl-students-in-mainstream-classrooms/ (accessed
13 February 2018).
ESL Resource Guide: www.wiseoldsayings.com/esl-guide/ (accessed
13 February 2018).
233
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Index
accreditation xix, xxii, xxiv, 5–6, 27, 38,
56, 102–8; impact on mother tongues
102–8; impact on SLLs 100, 102–8,
121, 130, 145, 149, 154, 162, 176,
212, 225, 230
additive bilingualism 70, 77, 198, 199,
201, 202, 204, 205, 220
affective barrier, need to lower
152, 153, 171
Anglosphere 2, 3, 11, 19, 20, 163, 170,
181, 186, 197, 216, 230
assessment 32, 40, 50, 56, 75, 77, 78, 84,
92, 93, 97, 99, 102, 103, 113, 115, 118,
119, 123, 124–6, 128, 149, 152, 159,
162, 163–171, 173, 177, 179, 182, 189,
190, 215, 228, 229, 232; accountancy
model 166; banking model 77,
166; benets of formative/AfL model
for SLLs 165–8; formative/AfL
versus summative 165, 228; overseen
by ESL department 139, 145, 168,
176, 228; testing 169, 170, 171;
testocracy 166, 167
assimilation versus diversity xiv, 18, 19,
61, 65, 197, 215
Association of German International
Schools (AGIS) 10, 11
bias, types of 26, 56, 61, 68, 134,
161, 215–19
BICS 73–4, 85, 138, 143, 144
bilingual studies 66, 67, 72, 150
bilingualism additive 70, 77, 198, 199,
201, 202, 204, 205, 220; advantages
of 67, 69, 220; advantages of early
bilingual exposure 82; benets
of 10, 57, 183, 201, 206, 207,
215; bilingual education 67,
71, 86; recognition as distinct
discipline 62; socio-cultural factors
inuencing bilingual development 200;
subtractive 21, 26, 47, 70–2, 77, 151,
161, 202, 230; views on 207
bilinguals and uniqueness of community
69–70; denition of 70
boards of governors 25, 26, 30, 112, 154,
180, 204, 212, 217, 230
CALP xx, 52, 73–4, 85, 86, 138–9, 140,
143, 144, 185
Cambridge International Examinations
194; IGCSE xx, 136–8,
140, 141, 145
CIS accreditation 102–8; and British
model 32, 51; and ESL 103–8;
and mother tongues 103, 107–8
cognitive psychologists 214–20
Common European Framework of
Reference for Languages: Learning,
Teaching, Assessment (CEFR) of the
Council of Europe 229, 232
content and language integrated learning
(CLIL) xx, 39, 84–6, 142
content teachers and assessment 168,
229; contrived collegiality 89–90,
179, 228; and CPD in SL issues 10,
83, 143, 144, 152, 173, 176, 192,
193, 227, 228; and the language of
content 156; and liaison with SL
teachers 88, 89, 90, 91, 138, 139, 141,
142, 169, 180, 182; and materials
113, 136, 152, 34, 39–40, 99, 170, 194;
recruitment policies 9, 218
content teaching 34, 39–40, 99, 170, 194
CPD xx, 6, 14, 33, 60, 77, 107, 110, 138,
152, 154, 161, 173, 182, 184–95, 204,
211, 221, 227, 228; lack of training,
child abuse 189; quick and dirty
sessions 108, 155, 227; TESMC
xxi, 10, 34, 182, 192–3, 232
critical thinking 42, 77, 118–20, 129,
131, 143, 184
Cummins, Jim 72–9; Developmental
Interdependence Hypothesis 72;
empowered versus disabled 15,
75, 154, 230
EAL and AGIS 10; political history
of xxii–xxiii, 42; support
model 32, 177
ECIS, developmental history xx, 20, 102–3
ECIS-ESL committee 8, 103–4
education systems impact of national
systems on international schools xxiii,
10, 11, 28, 31–3, 38, 39, 50, 64,
92, 176–8
England status of SLLs 10, 19, 31–3, 39,
92, 93, 94, 100; status of teachers of
SLLs 36, 39, 41–2, 50, 95, 105, 218,
220, 222; status of mother tongues
28, 62, 196–7
English language ownership of 62;
pronunciation 156; spelling 156,
157; status in contemporary world
19, 63–4, 153
equity of programme provision 10, 42,
53, 77, 149
ESL charging for 47, 48; and class
size 44, 86; department as centre of
expertise 36, 99, 137, 139, 140, 145,
146, 148–83, 227; downgrading of
ESL departments, xix, 10, 11, 21, 38,
41; and English departments 8, 37,
38, 137, 138, 151, 216, 217; need
for professionalism 7, 35, 37, 42, 93,
107, 110, 134, 135, 139, 140, 145, 151,
183, 193, 222, 227; politicization
of xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 9, 18, 19, 31–3,
37, 50, 57, 67, 79, 98, 100, 119, 153,
170, 172, 174, 175, 183, 198, 213, 214,
215, 223, 225, 227; recognition as
distinct discipline 37–8, 50, 92, 93,
119, 148–83
ESL in the Mainstream 10, 11, 173, 193
261
Index
ESL instruction and programmes 8–10,
83–6, 148–83; effects of some
consultants 36; effects of poor
programmes 39–41, 99–100; extra
payment for 47–8; inuence of
national systems 11, 39–41; length of
time in programme 162–3; need for
professional programme of instruction
83–6, 175; need for recognition as
professional structure 103, 115,
117, 143, 162; need for effective
screening of new entrants 6, 14, 49,
61, 209, 210, 228–9; negative effects
of management 10, 27–8, 29, 35–7,
41, 43, 54–6, 60, 88, 98, 99, 100, 233;
recruitment policies 41, 43, 45, 208
ESL students: see second language learners
ESL teachers and content teachers xviii,
9, 10, 39, 40, 83, 88–91, 99, 113, 136,
138, 139, 141, 143, 144, 152, 156, 168,
169, 170, 173, 176, 180, 182, 192–4,
218, 227–9; as professionals 10, 11,
27, 33, 37, 46, 99, 105, 109, 113, 118,
120, 122, 137, 162, 170, 174, 180–2,
185, 228; democratic professionalism
56; in England 36, 51, 95, 177, 218;
perceptions of 8, 30, 32, 41–4, 45,
50, 92, 97–9, 112, 122, 124, 125, 128,
144, 152, 162, 179, 218; qualications
135, 142, 143, 145, 187, 192, 193,
217, 222, 227
foreign language versus second language,
essential distinctions xxii, 20; need
for separate pedagogical provision 11,
42, 61, 111–12, 115–17, 120–8, 129,
164, 176, 182, 189, 203, 213, 228
globalization, effects of 21, 30, 63, 78,
125, 150, 153, 170, 218, 225
International Baccalaureate (IB) critical
thinking 42, 77, 118–20, 129, 131,
143, 184; Western-style curriculum
xvi, 8, 12, 13, 23, 226
IBDP xx; history of structure of
language provision 28, 61; language
A1, A2 and B 61, 111, 112, 122,
125, 129, 213
IBMYP xx, 110; creation and demise
of Second Language Acquisition and
Mother Tongue Development Guide
(SLA and MTD), 112, 113, 114,
124; examples of the reality for SLLs
in the MYP 110–31; examples of the
reality Mother tongues in the MYP 28,
128; ‘Language acquisition’ 112,
113, 115, 120, 121, 122, 127, 128,
129; need for clear distinction between
SL and FL 115–17; and school
structure 107
IBPYP, a successful working model for
SLLs 109, 110
IELTS xx, 137, 140, 141, 232
identity 6, 10, 25, 52, 62, 65, 67, 68,
78, 79, 122, 135, 149, 154, 203,
206, 210, 217; bicultural 63;
simplex view 63
inclusion 36, 94, 100, 123, 159
interdependence hypothesis 72, 203
international mindedness 5, 6, 184
international posture 62
international schools 2–31; accreditation
status 5; administration 35;
benets, ESL parents 15; challenges
16; continuing teacher development
184–95; creating system managers
9; cultural values 9, 11, 14, 76;
culture shock 6; denition 2;
differences from national systems 4;
ESL instruction, development of 8,
31; failure by heads to recognize
needs of second language students 35;
increase in proliferation globally xxii;
international-mindedness 5, 6, 184;
international space 10; linguistic
challenges 15, 16; mother tongue
28; negative policies on SL students
39–44; nationalities 4; power
distance in 12, 13; predominant
language of students 4, 9; staff
xxiv, 2, 9, 11, 16; students in a bubble
10, 20; student population xvi,
33, 45, 47, 186, 191; theory differs
from practice 65; uncertainty
avoidance in 14
language and reasoning 119; as the
hidden curriculum 159; of content
133–42; unease about 79; relation
to power struggles 79
language acquisition 66, 80, 85, 121, 138,
151, 158, 185, 195, 200, 204, 213
language learning, need for direct instruction
86, 156–62
language policy, importance 47, 59, 78
language skills, danger of businesses
losing out 70
leadership versus management 57,
98–9; and understanding bilingual
issues 186–7
linguicism 21, 22; denition 22;
against ESL teachers 45; against
students 22, 44
linguistic identity 62
mainstream teachers, treatment of ESL
students 39–41
management and Board of Governors 26;
ESL staff affected by 35; ignorance
of international school ethos 35; lack
of experience 38; managerialism,
effects of 54; negative impact
of 35–7; and professional ESL
staff 43; self-perception as experts
56–7; top down versus bottom
up 10; treatment of ESL teachers
35–7; use of consultants 36; versus
leadership 98–9
minority students as a majority 20
mission statements 22
monolingualism as the norm 8, 26
262
Index
mother tongue 7, 196–211; advice
for parents 208; factors affecting
maintenance of 7, 53, 65, 100, 114;
importance of xvii–xviii, 20, 22, 52–3,
62, 67, 128; issues of payment 28,
29, 53, 223, 47, 53; loss of 18,
19; maintaining literacy in 7, 8, 20,
70, 77; and negative practice 9, 26,
28, 29, 44, 45, 48, 71, 105, 116, 118,
151, 169; parental involvement 16,
17, 25, 27, 28, 199; parents’ views
on 27; skills transferred to second
language xvii–xviii, 8, 34, 61, 72, 80,
185; status of teachers of 21, 44
motivation 62, 63, 72, 74, 75, 77, 123,
161, 220; and ideal self 63
multiculturalism 15, 18, 19, 23, 45, 116,
186, 204, 226
national models consequences of
importing 11, 21, 39, 117, 227; ESL
staff affected by 35, 179; negative
inuence on international schools 7,
10, 32, 39, 57, 116, 150, 154, 175, 197,
231; poor 20, 33, 227
native speaker xvi, xxii, 33, 80, 152,
163, 185, 227; at a disadvantage
45, 218; myth of 24, 26–7, 134,
135, 221; native accent, unrealistic
aspirations 218, 221, 228; policies
of employing only 43; versus non-
native 217, 218
neoliberalism impact on education 55
NNESTs xxi, 45–46, 134–5, 181;
benets of 134–5; insights 45;
mobbing of 45
niche, denition for international SLLs 19
parents choosing schools 9, 14, 68, 79,
119; and language issues 19, 20, 22,
24, 25, 27, 39, 50, 57, 65, 69, 77, 93,
94, 116, 143, 144, 163, 205, 208, 212,
221; and issues of privilege 19, 20,
24, 32; socio-economic status 19, 20,
24, 49; and unwillingness to challenge
authority 16, 17, 25, 26, 28, 29,
30, 33, 47
pedagogy interaction-oriented 9, 77;
transmission-oriented/banking 76, 77
pluralism 19, 32
politicization of SL issues xxii, xxiii, xxiv,
9, 18, 19, 31–3, 37, 50, 57, 67, 79, 98,
100, 119, 153, 170, 172, 174, 175, 183,
198, 213–15, 223, 225, 227
power 29; and managers 30, 36, 56;
and relation to ESL 21, 22, 28, 31,
75, 96, 207
power structures in schools 37, 60; in
society 12, 13, 23, 29, 64, 75, 79, 96,
98, 131, 153, 222
prism model 80–2
programmes, cost of mother tongue 25;
SL 47–8, 98
public relations 213
publications on SL issues in international
education 59–62
racism xxiii, 23, 35, 42, 44, 50, 61, 79
reading importance of 77, 209, 229;
used to empower 78, 229
regions 153–4
researchers (direct instruction for
SLLs) 157–61
school leadership versus
management 57, 98–9
second language acquisition (SLA) xxii,
10, 26, 37, 106, 112, 113, 114,
124, 128, 135, 145, 151, 152, 164,
203, 204, 227
second language instructional competence
(SLIC) 85, 121
second language programme (SLP), exiting
too early 73, 84, 85, 143, 163
second language learners (SLLs)
appropriate assessment 163–70;
chasing a moving target 74, 75;
class size 44, 84; CPD programme
184–95; compared to students in
English-speaking countries xxiii,
10, 11, 28, 31–33, 38, 39, 50, 64, 92,
176–8; disabled 75–7; empowered
75–7; insights to their identity xvii,
6, 10, 25, 52, 62, 63, 67, 68, 78, 79,
122, 135, 154, 203, 206, 210, 217;
lack of exposure to SL outside school
160; length of time needed 162, 163,
182; in a majority in international
schools xvi, 33; mother tongue
programme 196–211; moving target
analogy 74, 75; perceptions of an
articulate student 51–4; quiet period
172–3; rush to exit SLP 73, 84, 85,
143, 163; and self-esteem 47, 50,
52, 67, 81, 91, 154, 168; and SEN
176–8; shame 44, 54; situation
in England 11, 39–40; and social
stigma through lack of language 47,
118, 161, 207; status of 10, 28, 41,
42, 50, 75, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 104, 105,
107, 121, 136, 150, 163, 174, 182, 183;
time needed to achieve grade norms
74–5, 80, 150
second language learning and direct
instruction 157–61; and feedback
40, 56, 77, 92, 141, 158, 160, 164–6
second language programme (SLP)
148–83; importance of pedagogical
programme of instruction xxiv,
10, 26, 33, 35, 113, 114; need for
professionalism 36, 39, 123
second language speakers of English, as a
majority xxii, 20, 33, 47, 59, 99, 142,
145, 150, 154, 186, 227
sheltered instruction 43, 83–5
Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol
(SIOP) 83, 84, 242
silence, culture of 30, 197, 207
singulars 149, 150, 153, 154
special educational needs (SEN) 107,
176–8; higher classication for SLLs
than native speakers 169–70
263
Index
subtractive bilingualism 21, 26, 47, 70,
71, 161, 202
teachers collaboration 86, 89,
90; collegiality 89–90, 179, 228;
deskilling of 32; ESL teachers and
qualications 35, 37, 107, 110, 139,
151, 227; and professionalism 33,
37, 56, 95–8, 223; relationships 55,
75, 88, 91–4, 141, 186, 193
teaching assistants 98, 162, 163
teaching ESL students in mainstream
classrooms (TESMC) 10, 34, 182,
192, 193, 232
theory versus practice 65–6
think tanks, inuence of 212
threshold hypothesis 69, 72, 199
translanguaging 7, 61, 202–4
websites for SEN/ESL information 179
wise use 213
