Over the years, I have had the privilege of writing about new technologies and how they can improve life for librarians and teachers. In most cases, when getting people’s stories, I can operate from a comfort zone because I was a librarian for decades and did some teaching at colleges and universities. Recently, however, I found out about an elementary school teacher in California who did a study on how improved audio equipment could impact the effectiveness in teaching the English language to immigrant children in the U.S. I wasn’t familiar with this idea at all, so I was eager to learn more about the situation this teacher was in. Certainly, any added advantage he could get would be worth pursuing.ONE DEDICATED TEACHER
Brian Lopez teaches grades 1−6 at the Emma W. Shuey School in Rosemead, California, which is a suburban town just east of Los Angeles. With that location, I anticipated that the ESL learners would be chiefly Spanish-speaking children. When I spoke to Lopez, I quickly found out that this was off the mark. He said that most of his students are Asian immigrants, speaking Mandarin Chinese or Vietnamese. He told me that he has no facility with either of those languages. One thing he mentioned that resonated with me was that he came up to teacher status after years of working as a paraprofessional and earning his master’s degree in digital teaching. Those skills came into play early in his career when the pandemic hit, and he had to work with remote learning.
Obviously, language lab is an important part of any ESL program. When Lopez began teaching, he found that the headsets in the lab were a mix of various products cobbled together. He went to his school administrators to see if they could buy a full set of good headsets. He was told that they didn’t have the funds to do that. He considered letting students bring in their own equipment, but realized that it would give an unfair advantage to the students in higher-income families. Being the sort of teacher who doesn’t take no for an answer, he began looking for possibilities outside of the school system.
THE SOLUTION
Lopez found a solution by using a company named Epic that supplies ebooks to schools. It has a library of 20,000 titles available free to schools during school hours. It also has a paid collection with twice that number, available at all hours. Epic has a Read-to-Me feature that lets students see the words move across the page while hearing them read aloud by the story’s narrator. Lopez formed a good relationship with Epic, even earning the company’s teacher of the month award in 2021. In fall 2023, he set up a study with Epic to test the results of listening devices on student performance. During the first 4 weeks of the study, students used regular wired earbuds to perform book exercises using Epic products.
In the next 4 weeks of the study, they were given Zone Learn headsets that were specially designed by Logitech for educational purposes. They were built for maximum comfort and noise isolation. The product has a Research-Based Design for Instructional Learning Products Product Certification from the Digital Promise nonprofit. Lopez guessed that using a superior product would increase attention and engagement. Indeed, it did. Lopez noted that the finish rate for books went up 40% with the new headsets. In addition, 90% of students said that they felt very confident in their performance. And 94% of the students said that they felt very focused using the Zone Learn headset, versus 18% of earbud users. Lopez noted that they had far greater success in retaining details from the stories they heard and in relating concepts to other selections.
CONCLUSION
We all know that teachers can change a life. In my case, my college freshman English teacher, Laura Macklin, said to me, “Hey, you’re a writer.” It was like being hit on the head with a script. Seeing the enthusiasm that radiates from Lopez, I have no doubt that his students will, one day, think of him as one of the greats—especially given the special role of ESL in helping students succeed. “I didn’t speak any English, and I went from feeling like a smart, talkative, and happy (albeit very poor) girl in Korea to being bullied and feeling stupid and ashamed. It was the first time I realized that there’s a deep-seated assumption I think most of us have, including me: we equate verbal fluency, especially oral fluency, with intelligence,” author Angie Kim told Zibby Mag. Kim was an editor of Harvard Law Review before emerging as a celebrated novelist.
Having established the connection between good audio and effective learning, Lopez did not sit still. Shortly after his talk with me, he was a featured presenter at the International Society for Technology in Education conference. At that event, he described his initiative to let his elementary students express themselves by creating digital presentations. Some people seem to be beyond limits. As Lopez noted in his Epic teacher of the month announcement, “I am inspired by my students, educators and technology! Being in the classroom allows me to explore my growth mindset by going on a new adventure every day with my students.” What more can be said?
