ESL students include a wide range of students in terms of their ethnic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds. But clearly there is a tendency, especially practitioners in school settings, to view ESL students as a homogeneous group, one that is referred to non-mainstream students. A closer look at the students’ ethnicity, the number of years in the US, and personal experiences etc. would reveal how disparate they are. In addition, considering the importance of representations of them in identity (re)creation and attitudes toward learning, images that are not that representative, type of assignments and placement tests based on them obviously do harm students’ development.
When you are an immigrant who has lived in the US more than 10 years and feels more comfortable with English than with your heritage language, yet you are supposed to write about ‘your country,’ it’s not difficult to imagine that you are unwilling to deal with the topic. For this student, the ‘country’ topic may be very tricky. The student might feel that he/she belongs to neither of the two countries: where he/she lives now nor where he/she comes from but doesn’t know much about how it is now. If this instructor had been open to the possibility that there are other students than newly-arrived international students in the classroom, the teacher would not have given this topic for assignment or at least would have given more choices from which students can decide.
Although I guess it’s inevitable for teachers to have some kind of images about their target students, it’s imperative to realize that diversity is there and diverse needs wait to be met. Unless teachers try constantly and consciously to be sensitive to their students, it’s possible to exert a damaging influence on their students without realizing it.
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