I try to check out the discussions of this interesting group 
as often as I can, and have been meaning to post an inquiry 
for ages.  I'm a linguist and I'm teaching in a program 
designed to train ESL teachers. Many of the students are 
already ESL teachers in the K-12 system.  I had been out of 
the country for some years before I started working in this 
program, and I didn't have contact either with K-12 ESL 
teachers or programs in the USA.  I was astonished to find 
here that the native speakers who teach or who plan to teach 
ESL have serious language problems.  I've written one paper 
on this and I'm starting another.  The scale and types of 
errors correspond in many ways to various types of language 
deficit --the sort of symptoms we see in referrals to speech 
pathologists.  There is nothing really wrong with these 
students/teachers. Their language problems reflect the 
absence of language instruction in their own education -
mainly grammar (but vocabulary is also a problem).  I have 
found it very difficult to get most of these trainees to a 
level of language skill that might be expected of a language 
teacher.  I am curious as to whether other people see these 
rather massive problems also.  I'll be happy to post some 
examples.

Yvonne Stapp


Yvonne Stapp PhD
Assistant Professor of ESL
James Madison University
Dept of Exceptional Education MSC 6908
Memorial Hall 3130B
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
phone 540-568-4525

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