Exploring Educator Practices and Perspectives as Teachers of English Language Learners

Public school teachers are working with an increasing number of ELLs. Without doubt, teachers have different attitudes toward ELLs. Some teachers believe ELLs should be treated the same as English-speaking students and be held to the same expectations. Others believe ELLs need to be taught differently. Therefore, in this paper, the author conducted 40-hours observations in a public school in Virginia to answer the following questions: Do general education and ESL teachers have different attitudes toward ESL students? Do they use different teaching strategies? What are the reasons for the differences and similarities between these groups of teachers.

This study explored practicing teachers’ perspectives on teaching English language learners, including recent immigrant and refugee students. Traditional coding procedures employed during analysis of 13 in-depth interviews with K-12 mainstream teachers suggested that they valued two-way learning, though elementary teachers maintained more of an asset perspective in talking about ELLs while secondary teachers focused more on the challenges of teaching content effectively. A second round of data analysis employing the Listening Guide and I-Poems revealed further layers of teachers’ perspectives that enhanced and elucidated the original findings. Implications for qualitative data analysis will be discussed.