It is a fact of school life for ESL students that they generally have to work harder to complete a piece of homework than native speakers doing the same assignment. A piece of science homework that is completed by a British or American student in 30 minutes may take an ESL student twice that time or even longer. In this way ESL students can easily spend much more than the 1½ hours per day set as a reasonable amount of time for middle schoolers. And this of course means that there is less time for them to participate in the many afternoon activities on offer at FIS or in their local communities. Alternatively, ESL students do take part in sport or have music lessons etc. as well as spending a lot of time on homework, but then go to bed late and are tired in school the next day.

There is no easy advice to give here. The school can suggest a reasonable maximum amount of time to spend on homework and stress the importance of children participating in non-academic afternoon activities, but the way children use their time after school is a matter for each family to decide and this decision is culturally influenced. What is most important is that however long a child spends on homework, it should be time spent profitably. A couple of examples should make my point clear. Suppose the student has to read a primary source of evidence written at the time of the American Revolution (for example a newspaper article) and state the main purpose of the article. She could struggle for an hour or more using her dictionary to look up every new word, ending up understanding very little of the contents of the piece and feeling very frustrated. Alternatively, she could spend some time reading in an encyclopaedia or history book of the period, in her language, to get a clearer understanding of the period and then use the rest of the time to read through the article to get a general idea of the intention of the writer, looking up a few words that seem to be of particular importance. Clearly the second method is a more profitable use of time even if the answer she then gives is incomplete or incorrect.

Another student may spend homework time on a different assignment by copying answers provided to her by a parent or dictated by a private tutor. The end product - the finished piece of homework - in this case may be very good, but the process of producing it has probably not resulted in much understanding of the work being done. A better use of the student’s time would be to have a discussion about the homework, in the mother tongue, to make sure that she understands the assignment and knows in broad terms how to do it. The student is then left alone to produce the answer as best she can. Of course the finished product may fall a long way short of being in clear and accurate English, but this is not expected of ESL students - otherwise they wouldn’t need to be in ESL! However, work produced by the ESL student in this way is not only more profitable for her, it also provides much more useful information to her teachers. The ESL teacher can see in which areas the student most needs help in expressing herself clearly and accurately, and the subject teacher can determine more easily what the student has and has not understood of the work of previous lessons. With this knowledge her teachers can more effectively help her to improve both in English and the subject area.