The Columbia Tribune reported in late September that the University of Missouri-Columbia has set up a new ELL or English Language Learner's Program to help non-English speaking students across the state in public classrooms. The program intends to train 100 teachers across the state within the next five years. After completing the courses, the teacher will then be able to teach non-English speaking students who speak a different native language. Roy Fox who is the chairman of the Missouri-Columbia Education Department and also head of this project, feels this will help students immensely as he complies with the non-English speaking students, "It is much more complicated because students are thinking in their native language and trying to translate."Regularly the students in the course will have 45 minute-to hour long lessons helping better their English speaking skills. Judy Trujillo who is currently a teacher enlisted in the program agrees with Fox stating that," it will help students learn instructional techniques that enable them to reach students at the beginning, when the student has no English-speaking skills."
Although there is no definite language in the United States, I wonder if it will benefit the students to have specialized English classes because they have a different native tongue. Regardless that English is the standard language, living in this country shouldn't the students already have a pretty good understadning of the language already since they will be enrolling in other classes such as math, science, social studies, etc? I do think the program could benefit the learning for students, but I think that it should be done on elementary levels when linguistics and comprehension are extremely important. Also, the students will ultimately need to learn English if they want to succeed in a nation where the standard language is English.
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This program could certainly help the students. The hardest part of learning a new language is the fact that you must think in that language. Most ESL or ENAL (English Not At All) speakers will begin to think in their native tongue and then translate to English. Andrea points to the fact that perhaps it may be a matter of submersion into a culture that uses English primarily as the first language. The facts though may be that even though as a country English is the predominant language, and as seen with the article in class some states want to make it the only language, however many people can get by in the states with only a minimal understanding of the language. This certainly is not a matter of evolution of the English Language, however it is an evolution of our country.
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