35th Annual Student Research Conference
How Cultural Diversity Affects Pedagogy in ESOL Education
Abigail Bidwell
Dr. Heidi Cook, Faculty Mentor
There are about 5 million, and rising, English language learners across public schools in the United States. That's about 10.2 percent of the student population. Pedagogical approaches to teaching English as a second or other language (TESOL) have evolved through intense research to meet the needs of this growing population. Scholars have concluded that Task-Based Language Teaching is the most effective approach for language learning, even though it has faced some backlash due to cultural insensitivity. For this project, I used interviews with ESL teachers to research if it was effective for teachers to deviate away from Task-Based Language Teaching when working with culturally diverse groups of students in a large school district in the suburbs of Kansas City. My hypothesis argues that English Language Development teachers are still effective when deviating away from Task-Based Language Teaching because of cultural and linguistic differences of the student population.
Keywords: Teaching English as a Second or Other Language, English Language Learners, Cultural Diversity, Task-Based Language Teaching, Teaching Approaches
Topic(s):Interdisciplinary Studies Capstone
Education
Linguistics
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
Session: 102-4
Location: SUB GEO A
Time: 9:15