ESL Joins Vocational Training

The original technical and vocational education team included two ESL teachers and a Spanish-speaking bilingual family and consumer sciences teacher. These three worked during the summer with teachers from all the district's vocational areas. Each sub-team of teachers, under the direction of the ESL teachers, broke skill processes down into clear steps the vocational teacher could explain simply or act out for the ESL students. Vocational teachers also learned translations for certain key words that pertained to their curriculum.

"This program is aimed toward assisting students whose primary language is not English, and in our case it's mainly Spanish," Salinas says. Corpus Christi is 66 percent Hispanic.

Another aspect of the program involved VESL teachers working through vocational modules with the student in another classroom. But because this coincided with class time, many times vocational teachers would forget to send those particular students, says Salinas, a former family and consumer sciences teacher. And because the students had such varying class schedules, it was difficult for the VESL teacher to round them up from throughout the building. What worked better was having the VESL teacher come to the vocational class. "Either the VESL teacher would go into the classroom and help the vocational teacher directly or there would be peer tutoring," Salinas explains. Peer tutoring, she says, is a positive result of having classes with a mix of English-speaking students and ESL students.

"There is definitely a core group of kids who depended on this service to get through their classes," Salinas says, noting that the program only exists at one high school these days--Roy Miller High School, Center for Communications and Technology. "Some of that money has been allocated elsewhere, especially for technology" she explains. "Therefore, one of the programs did eventually close. But it was a valued program."

Platt says it's unfortunate that some of the programs she researched several years ago have folded or cut back because the beauty of vocational education is that so much of it is hands-on and procedural. A student can see what is being demonstrated. Electronics instructor Clarence Marks estimates that at least 60 percent of all electronics students at Trade Tech are limited English-proficient. He says that although the VESL program Platt observed several years ago no longer exists, it's still helpful to apply certain ESL strategies to the vocational classroom.

"In working with students you've got to be sensitive to how they respond to certain stimuli" he advises. "Acting it out, using non-verbal expressions, these get the concept across much better to ESL students. If it's acted out it tends to stick. As opposed to OK, here's the vocabulary, act out what the words mean. I've learned to be a good actor."

Platt also suggests vocational teachers become familiar with some of the cultures represented in their classrooms, perhaps with the help of the ESL teacher. "Vocational teachers probably ought to understand more about the discourses that take place within the communities that these kids come from," Platt says. "... What are the ways that they interact with each other? This is something that we're just beginning to understand and really needs to begin being a part of our teacher preparation, assuming that we're going to be culturally sensitive and linguistically sensitive."