Dear FOB listers----While those six factors that impact adult ESOL learners can sometimes be identified individually, more often they overlap.?? Take the case of very low or non-literate ESOL learners for example.? They often fail to thrive, in my observations, because of a number of these factors:
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First we can look at how the lack of education impacts phonological skills:? Persons with no literacy necessarily have undeveloped phonological skills--those foundation skills needed for reading and writing.? Because they have not learned how text represents speech, they do not have a sense of sound chunks and the sequence of chunks. The most advanced skill in detecting sound chunks is phonemic awareness-- being able to identify and then manipulate individual sounds in words.? This is a counterintuitive process since we do not naturally hear all the individual sounds in words when someone speaks. It is an awareness that develops as we learn to read and spell.  

Yet instruction in reading for these low level learners almost always STARTS? with the alphabet, phonics and blending sounds-- which is pretty much graduate school as phonological skills go!? 

Then we need to consider all the other things that the lack of education means and how teaching practices may not take those factors into account:? 
??? ??? **These learners very likely lack experience with pictures and interpreting two-dimensional information;? 
??? ??? **they don't have the motor skills needed for holding a pencil and writing in spaces or on lines (and they may not easily understand the concept of writing "on" lines);? 
??? ??? **They don't understand about text and how it represents speech.? 
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Perhaps most important to remember is that these learners do not have the concepts or language to talk about learning and language that educated learners do.

Let's think about what that implies for their learning in usual ESOL settings: 
It is common in adult ESOL for learners to be placed on the basis of oral skills only. This means "Beginning" ESOL" is a mixture of learners with no education, some education and a lot of education.? What? then happens is that the teacher inevitably talks about language:? "Can you make that negative?"? "Let's make a question from this sentence,"?? " No, you said "He" --so the verb has to agree-- it has to be "goes' not 'go'. " ???? And the teacher writes these things on the board.????? The learner? with no education is now totally confused and lost.? How can she or he relate to something? she or he has never heard of and does not have words for in the home language?? (And don't forget that just because there ARE words, as in Spanish, the learner does not have them, having never been to school.)? 

Gillespie* reported in her study of the feasibility of native language literacy instruction that adult ESOL learners with low literacy often report being overwhelmed and completely confused by proceedings in ESOL classes.? It is easy to see why.? 

Solarzano,* in a wonderful study on adult ESOL learners in Philadelphia noted that there seems to be some unwritten criterion that a learner needs to have comfort with text to be in a beginning ESOL conversation class- --it is NOT just about speaking and listening.? There is a LOT of writing and text used.? He speculated that this was a big cause of uneducated learners' dropping out--and I agree.?? 

Thus we see the role of inappropriate teaching-- using perfectly good ESOL techniques that are aimed too high and are too full of assumptions about metalinguistic knowledge, a mistake that happens when the learners' educational level is not fully taken into account in the design and delivery of instruction.? 

Tomorrow I will describe an adult ESOL class where virtually all of the factors I have identified came into play.

Robin 

*These reports are available from the National Center on Adult Literacy.? 
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