New, revolutionary teaching method: instruction

I know I won’t be able to keep the sarcasm and anger out of this post, so I apologize in advance.

There’s a story in The Funny Paper today about how much better our schools are doing teaching English to English as Second Language (ESL) students, because they are using a “new way of teaching that has swept Oregon ESL classrooms in the past couple years.”

What is this new approach that our educators only recently discovered?

“Schools have begun explicitly teaching the grammar, rules and structure of English. And they are doing it in a carefully ordered way, making sure that students don't miss any of the building blocks of how English verbs are conjugated, words are ordered, conversations are expected to proceed and sentences are constructed.”

In other words: Instruction. The “new approach” is to actually instruct the students in the English language. So what on Earth were they doing before, one might ask? Well, the ESL coordinator at Gresham Barlow is helpful enough to give us the answer, as incredible as it seems.

Before you read the quote, please pause for a moment and prepare yourself to read one of the most idiotic things you have ever heard uttered. It should be enough to completely destroy any remaining confidence you might have in our education establishment:

“For a long time, we just read to them and exposed them to English and figured they would pick it up just like native speakers do," said Danelle Heikkila, who directs the English Language Learner program for Gresham-Barlow schools.”

So the strategy before was to not instruct them, and just to hope the non English-speaking students would pick up the complicated English language by osmosis.

This is disturbing on so many levels. First, it reveals an incredible ignorance of how children acquire language skills. Yes, kids learn to speak English by simply being immersed in an environment where it is spoken. But reading is an entirely different matter, and decades of research proves it.

So to say that “native speakers” pick up reading by being “exposed” to English quite simply reveals such a shocking ignorance that this person should be fired immediately. The problem is that this is not an isolated attitude. It is the prevailing notion of how to teach English, as the article points out. Not just for ESL kids, but for all kids.

So for years and years, our public schools have been teaching English by not teaching them English. It’s called “Whole Language,” and it has failed miserably. But it’s not often it gets so clearly exposed as the farce it is, and for that we should thank Ms. Heikkila.

And then we should call for her resignation, and the resignation of the countless other bureaucrats, college of education professors and teachers who have perpetrated this fraud on the public for the last several decades.

But we all know, nobody will ever be held accountable for the untold damage done to kids’ lives by the fact that our schools simply refused to teach English for decades on end.