TEACHERS' POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT BENEFITS AN ESL LEARNERS ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT

Teachers' Positive Reinforcement Benefits an ESL Learner's Academic Achievement

Teachers' Positive Reinforcement Benefits an ESL Learners Academic Achievement

A major and continuing challenge for American education is the poor academic performance of the growing school population of English language learners. Because learning the type of English needed to do well in school requires several years, an important focus of many educators is to find ways to improve and speed up these children's knowledge of English and their English literacy in order to support adequate school achievement. The question for this paper is: How do immigrant second language school age children differ from Americanised children; and what can be done by our educational system to improve the transition of immigrant second language learners and bring those children up to their age-level education? English language learners are often the least successful group of children academically. It is often assumed that children can learn languages faster than adults, that immigrant children translate for their parents who have not learned the language, and that child learners grow up to speak without a foreign accent, whereas this is impossible for adult learners. Most commonly people claiming the superiority of child learners cite to the critical period hypothesis that argues that children are superior to adults in learning second languages because their brains are more flexible. They can learn languages easily because their cortex is more easily manipulated than that of older learners. However, the critical period hypothesis is quite controversial. It has been proposed that differences in the rate of second language acquisition may reflect psychological and social factors, rather than biological ones, that favor child learners. For instance, children may be more motivated than adults to learn the second language due to more incentive to fit in than for ...