Seeing How to Ask First: Photo Elicitation Motivates English Language Learners to Write

Abstract

Photos prompt middle grades English language learners to reflect upon and write about their lives.Mara SalvatruchaMara means Salvatrucha means really angry. Gangsters. They are bad people because sometimes they kill someone. ... They ask teenagers if they want to join the gang. Teenagers join a gang so they could have more people to fight or protect them. ... Gangs sometimes cause trouble in school because they bring knives ... [and] bring and buy drugs in school. ... I don't get involved in gangs because I don't want my parents to feel badly. ... If I do something bad, then maybe I'd have to go to jail. I'd like to be a doctor.-MiguelMiguel was an eighth grader who had recently moved from El Salvador with his family to our exurban community. For the first few months of the school year, Miguel struggled to participate and complete assignments in our English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) class, but he began to engage with writing tasks when we relied on image-based inquiries into his relationship to school as the starting point for our lessons. He was motivated to attend our class and attempt our assignments when he was able to both show and tell why he came to school and what helped or hindered his attendance and achievement.The photo image Miguel took (see Figure 1) and the related reflection he wrote allowed us to know more about why he was distracted in school. Furthermore, they help illustrate a potential solution to the disengagement crisis we face with English language learners (ELLs) in language arts. We have learned that using imagebased methods to ask young adolescents about their relationships to school-instead of only telling them about school's importance-helps them to appreciate the writing tasks in which we ask them to engage. In this article, we discuss the positive effects these photo elicitation inquiries have had onour students' growth as proficient writers and how these activities have raised their awareness of reasons to care about school.Language dropoutsMiguel is a part of a dramatic demographic shiftin our exurban, commuter community, located beyond the first ring suburbs of a major mid-Atlantic U.S. city. In 2000, fewer than 6% of the 900 students in our middle school were classified as ELLs, compared to approximately 50% in 2012. These young adolescents are arriving from as close as other less affordable suburbs and from as far away as Guatemala, El Salvador, and Sri Lanka. All of our ELL students are non-native English speakers and youth of color. Many are also inconsistent school attendees, in part, because our city borders one that has been actively deporting illegal immigrants. Often, these youth are afraid to come to school, and their families are cautious about drawing the attention of truancy reports. These factors contribute to the risk that these young adolescents will disengage from our classes and eventually drop out, or be pushed out of our schools (Children's Defense Fund, 2008; Greene & Winters, 2005). In fact, the national dropout rate for ELL students in 2009 was 40%-60% (NCES, 2009).Sadly, these grim dropout realities are no longer shocking to us, given our students' struggles with school and literacy. While most of the 14 eighth graders in this ESOL class appeared to be on track for graduation, they were, on average, reading at a second grade level. Much research reveals how students' literacy development plays a primary role in their decisions to remain in school (Lan & Lanthier, 2003). More recent studies have documented how schools' curricular responses to diverse populations' low traditional literacy rates contribute to overall school disengagement (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004; Zenkov, 2009). In addition, the crossgenerational nature of school detachment has resulted in increased aliteracy among diverse urban community members: Our students and their family members often can read and write, but they frequently choose not to do so (Ivey & Broaddus, 2007). …