STAND Student voices
Featured Student Voice: Josephine Hong-Goranin
Josephine Hong-Goranin is a rising senior at Germantown Friends School. Having attended both public and private schools, she has developed an interest in literacy, multilingual education, and the ways schools can better serve their students. Outside of school, she rows competitively, sings in a choir and an a cappella group, bakes very good brownies, and loves to read.
What Makes ESL Support Effective?
At my school, junior year includes a month-long independent project—the Junior Project. For my junior project, I wanted to understand how schools support students who are learning English. My father immigrated from Poland when he was entering first grade and received ESL support right away. His brother, two and a half years younger, did not receive those supports and the differences in their education journeys showed how important those supports are. My dad went on to get straight A’s and win academic honors and awards. His brother had a more difficult relationship with school. Their experiences are not proof that ESL support determines a student’s future, but they showed me how much early support can matter.
I spent the month visiting three Philadelphia elementary schools (Schools A, B, and C), observing ESL classrooms and working with students. I went into the project expecting to find a clear answer to a straightforward question: What makes ESL support effective?
There was no clear answer.
One of the main decisions schools face is what model of instruction to use. ESL support generally takes one of two forms: push-in or pull-out instruction. In a push-in model, ESL teachers go into general education classrooms to support ELLs during regular instruction. In a pull-out model, ELLs are removed from the classroom to receive one-on-one or group instruction, which may mirror or differ from the content in the classes they miss. So which one is better?
School A used an exclusively pull-out framework. ESL students were pulled out of their regular classrooms every day and taught in smaller groups based on their approximate English proficiency. I saw a clear advantage to this model: the teacher could focus entirely on the students in front of her. There were fewer distractions, and lessons could move at a pace that made sense for the group.
But at School B, the school’s highest-need English learners were placed together in one classroom and spent essentially their entire school day with the same teacher. They received consistent language support, but they were also separated from most of the other students in their grade. During grade-wide activities, these students appeared disconnected from the larger school community.
School C used a dual push-in and pull-out approach depending on students’ assessed needs. Students were placed into tiers based on their assessed needs, and the amount of ESL support they received varied. Some students received both push-in and pull-out instruction, while students who needed less support received it less frequently. Teachers at School C still expressed a preference for pull-out sessions, as they were able to give more individualized instruction, control the content covered, and saw more results.
Seeing the three models side by side changed how I thought about the push-in versus pull-out debate. I had initially expected one approach to clearly work better. Instead, I saw that each solved a different problem. Pull-out instruction gave teachers more time and control to target language skills. Push-in instruction allowed students to stay with their classmates and participate fully in the general education classroom.
The structure of ESL instruction was not the only learning challenge. The curriculum was another. School A and School B both expressed discontent with their curriculum and textbooks. Teachers at School A, which used the Teaching ELLs for Academic Language Mastery (TEAM) curriculum and books, said that the textbook limited ELLs and their creativity when the students were capable of so much more. Additionally, confusing topics and exercises were randomly thrown in, making it challenging to keep a straightforward curriculum. Supplemental worksheets, activities, and assignments were needed. As one teacher at School A said, “It’s so obvious these books were not written by someone who actually understands ELLs.” The ESL teacher at School B expressed a similar sentiment, saying that the INSIDE textbook that she uses has “dumb”, “confusing”, and “non-engaging” activities and explanations. “It’s a good baseline,” she said, “but it’s limiting.”
Watching that made me think that an effective ESL program cannot depend entirely on a textbook. Teachers need enough flexibility to change a lesson when the students in front of them need something different. Rather than treating the curriculum as a fixed set of lessons that every student must follow, teachers should be able to use it as a starting point and adjust it based on what their students actually need. This would give teachers more control over the classroom and make instruction more responsive, especially when students are progressing at different rates or struggling with particular skills.
Beyond the structure and curriculum of ESL instruction, schools also face a more fundamental challenge. At all three schools, educators described the difficulty of determining whether a student’s academic struggles were caused by limited English proficiency or by another learning need. I saw why that could be so difficult. A student who struggles to understand a reading assignment may simply need more time to develop their English skills. But the same struggle could also indicate a reading comprehension difficulty that ESL instruction alone will not solve. Educators told me that, in many cases, schools could not determine the root cause until students had spent several years in the program. By that point, significant time and resources had already been invested without addressing the student’s actual needs.
If a student continues to struggle after receiving ESL support, educators should have a process for determining whether the difficulty is primarily linguistic or whether additional academic intervention may be necessary. This could include regularly reviewing a student’s progress, comparing performance across different subjects, and having ESL and general education teachers work together to identify patterns in the student’s difficulties. Most importantly, these decisions should be revisited over time rather than being based on a single test or observation. Earlier identification could prevent students from spending years receiving support that does not fully address the source of their difficulties.
After a month of observing these classrooms, I did not come away with one perfect answer to my question. Instead, I learned that effective support depends on how well schools respond to the individual students in front of them. The best program is not necessarily push-in or pull-out, but one that can adapt its instruction, group students thoughtfully, give teachers the flexibility to use materials that work, and recognize when a student needs support beyond learning English.
Instead, I saw how much depends on getting the details right: grouping students at appropriate proficiency levels, balancing push-in and pull-out instruction, giving teachers curriculum they can actually use, and recognizing when a student’s struggles may go beyond learning English. Effective ESL support is ultimately about making sure that learning English does not become a barrier to getting the education a student deserves.
