A Qualitative Study of ESL Teacher Experiences and Perceptions of Comprehension and Scaffolding for Refugee Students

Many ESL teachers have difficulty teaching listening and reading skills to newly arrived refugee students due to the challenges that these students have to overcome in an ESL classroom in the United States. The problem was that ESL classroom listening and reading instructional strategies are often not appropriate or beneficial for refugee students. Many ESL classrooms listening and reading instructional strategies may not target the needs of newly arrived refugee students such as psychological, academic, and developmental needs. The purpose of this qualitative survey study was to explore effective ESL teacher experiences and perceptions with comprehension and scaffolding for listening and reading to K12 refugee students from all over the world in public school districts in New York State. A qualitative survey was used to explore the ESL teacher experiences with these instructional strategies with a final purposeful sample of 10 ESL teachers who were members of TESOL International Association and employed in New York State, a state which contained a global refugee population considered as a low-income and high poverty population. Data were collected with a qualitative open-ended survey and data analysis utilized Dedoose to analyze data for pattern matching and thematic content analysis to address the constructs. Five major themes from both research questions were (a) higher level questioning, (b) builds reading comprehension, graphic organizers as a strategy, (c) monitoring comprehension for informal assessment, (d) tools for informal assessment (e) benefits of comprehension and scaffolding strategies and two minor themes were (a) underlining as a strategy tool and (b) use of pre-reading activities to build comprehension. Recommendations for practice included (a) ESL teacher professional development, (b) ESL teacher additional planning time, (c) ESL teacher access to current resources. Recommendations for future research included (a) a quantitative descriptive study to explore themes 1, 2, 3 and 4, (b) a qualitative phenomenological study to explore minor theme 1, and (c) a qualitative case study to explore theme 1 for research question 2.