Barriers For Speakers Of Other Languages English Language Essay

Barriers For Speakers Of Other Languages English Language Essay Multilingual and bilingual education programs have been increasing tremendously over the recent past. This follows the increasing diversity in modern-day classrooms in most parts of the world. Such diversity reflects the ever evolving migration patterns and the hence the increasing need to address the issue of multilingual education programs. These programs target communicative proficiency in at least more than two languages. In connection to this, research on issues of bilingual education has been growing. The popularity of these programs can be attributed to the important role played by bilingual education such as in the accomplishment of various sociopolitical goals (Holliday 21). In most US schools currently, a larger percentage of students use English as a second language. Due to such statistics, the English only philosophy of adopted by the federal government through the Structured English Immersion has been subject to great criticism. However, ESL students encounter great bar riers as they learn the English language. These barriers are either with respect to linguistic factors or cultural factors (Eugene 32). This draws from the fact that ESL learners have their culture which is so different from that of any native English speaking country as well as certain linguistic aspects based on their primary (mother tongue) language. These aspects are difficult to abandon and hence they tend to present a barrier to the effectiveness with which an ESL students learns English. This paper discuses these barriers in detail and also presents a range of strategies that can be employed to addresses such challenges. Cultural Factors One of the important cultural barriers affecting ESL education draws from the fact that most ESL programs instructors are in most cases native English speakers. This is because irrespective of the importance of having ESL education taught by teachers from the language minority groups, the government mostly has in place native speakers teachin g English to ESL learners (Eugene 47). Research has also shown that the native speakers teaching ESL education differ greatly in terms of their cultural and social economic endowments with their ESL students (Huang and Brown, 645). For instance, in US, most of the ESL program teachers are Americans who of course are culturally very different from the L2 learners. This is due to the poor performance as regards to the objective of ensuring that individuals from the minority language community(ies) are developed into being credentialed teachers through relevant training, to enhance the development of ESL education (Nasr 65). These native teachers employ socioeconomically and culturally different styles of teaching ESL education as compared to those ESL learners are used to, from their culture. This presents a lack of connection of the two cultures especially if the teacher fails to employ effective instructional approaches mean such as collaboration. This is made worse by the lack of z eal among the native teachers to learn these different cultures and become part of the ESL learning community (Zimmerman 17). In most instances, the trainers fail to reflect on how their sociocultural backgrounds impact on their perceptions of the community and therefore on how they teach.