“Breaking Them Up, Taking Them Away" ESL student in Grade 1

Kellen Toohey’s observation on ESL student Grade 1 is genuinely impressive for me. The classroom’s practices, interactions and seats and furniture are interconnected factors which will have impact on those children’s target language competence. It is not shocking/hard to for me to imagine that even kindergarten exists a stratified community that is similar to the harsh outside world.

I was also a little surprised that it is a commonplace teachers everywhere prefer to put those “problem” students seats near them, so that teachers can take care of them.

Another point that interests me is as Hull and Rose(1989)noted that: “A fundamental social and psychological reality about discourse—oral or written—is that human beings continually appropriate each other’s languageto establish group membership, to grow and to define themselves.”I remember when I transferred from a small rural school to a large urban elementary school, I didn’t speak the local dialect. Nobody in my class wanted to make friends with me.Needless to say, I was really having some difficulty adapting myself to a brand-new environment. This situation has not been gradually improved until I acquired the dialect.

For many years, educators and researchers in China are highly concerned with the bullying and violence issues on campus. However, over the years, what have been ignored are not those students who fall victims to violent crimes.Rather,outsider students, because of their defective language competence or discrepant family/ethnic background,more often than not,build inharmonious or even hostile relationship with their peers, enduring the pain of so-called “campus cold violence.” and finding it so hard to fit in no matter how hard they tried. As this has been observed/discovered by the writers, classroom communities that encourage the sharing of all resources-intellectual, emotional, and material-would be positive step in changing attitudes and reducing many problems we face in our schools. Regardless of what subjects we are teaching, we, as prospective teachers, are expected to be compassionate toward our students, giving support to them whenever needed. Furthermore, we need have an observant mind about the classroom community as well. A supportive environment is crucially important for those students in which they spend a good amount of time learning and interacting with teachers and classmates.