An Introduction to Our Topic
ESL, English as a Second Language, is a program that allows foreign students to become more familiar with the English language. Although English is a dominant language of the United States, it is not an official one. Several other languages are spoken in the United States, such as Spanish, French, Chinese, Italian, etc. The variety of language allows for diversity to be present. Language also comes with culture. The cultural aspect of each language also contributes to our country's diversity. Throughout our research, we each interviewed an ESL instructor at an academically different level: high school, undergraduate, and graduate. Jenna's purpose was to discover the ways in which ESL teachers instruct their students to learn the language. The purpose of the interview conducted by Paavali was to explore solutions at the graduate level for the gap in writing education between ESL students and native English language speakers. Anu's purpose was to understand how ESL is taught in a college setting; she also observed what specific accommodations ESL instructors make in order to help their students better understand the material.
Why ESL Is Important
ESL allows non-English speaking students to have the ability to communicate with the majority of the population of the United States. It is important to become aware of ESL and how it is taught, to understand what foreign students must do in order to connect with English speaking students. Also, it is important to understand how ESL student instruction truly differs from native English language teaching in the United States, and through that knowledge how it can be improved to accommodate a variety of students from different cultures. We all found relevance in this topic because of our exposure to a variety of international students at our university who have accented forms of English and go through ESL teaching.
How Our Analyses Relate to Each Other
In our analyses, we all explored topics relating to the teaching of ESL and what issues and solutions exist in the field. We propose different solutions for a variety of issues that have arisen in the teaching of ESL from high school to graduate teaching level, and explore why ESL teaching has such great importance in our modern day society. We take these sources and apply them to very specific topics that we explore in our analyses. This allowed us to use material from different sources to explore very specific topics in the world of ESL teaching, and through this set up relevance for the importance of focus of research in ESL teaching.