Problems in English Education Under the No Child Left Behind Act

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-31-2_259How to use a DOI?

Keywords

NCLB; English education; motivation; critical thinking; passion

Abstract

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act exhibits three potential problems in English education in the U.S. from the perspectives of both students and teachers. Firstly, NCLB reduces English language learners’ (ELLs) motivation to learn English because of the tedious learning environment. Under NCLB, according to the state’s requirement of ELLs’ academic performance, English teachers have to input knowledge to ELLs in a traditional way, such as rote memorization, instead of spending time using some enlightening language learning strategies. Secondly, NCLB may ignore to cultivate ELLs’ critical thinking during learning English. In order to avoid receiving federal sanctions, English educators may solely focus on ELLs’ academic development. However, for ELLs, the understanding of the U.S. cultures is very important, which is helpful to cultivate critical thinking through the comparison between the U.S. cultures and their own cultures. Moreover, except for ELLs, NCLB damages English teachers’ passion for English education. According to the state’s requirement, teachers have few chances to show their personal identity through their unique teaching style. Under NCLB, the curriculum has to be narrowed down because the target of each teacher is to help students pass the state test. Meanwhile, each teacher under NCLB faces a risk of low salaries because NCLB requires that teachers’ salary is tied to students’ performance.

Copyright

© 2022 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Chun Qian
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/12/29
TI  - Problems in English Education Under the No Child Left Behind Act
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 6th International Seminar on Education, Management and Social Sciences (ISEMSS 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 2206
EP  - 2214
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-31-2_259
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-31-2_259
ID  - Qian2022
ER  -