English Learners Outside the Classroom: The Effects of Participating in Extracurricular Activities

Benefits of participating in extracurricular activities

All three participants revealed that participation in extracurricular activities have benefited them socially and academically. According to second language acquisition studies, meaningful interaction between individuals who speak the target language increases a student's proficiency. As a result, an ESL student's continuous engagement in an intense English activity may have an effect on academic performance (Mitchell, 2015). Student 1said his engagement in

after-school activities made him feel like a member of a community, and his language skills improved after he joined the baseball team because he finally ventured to speak English to his classmates and coach. Student 2 stated that having contact with non-Spanish speaking students, professors, and coaches has benefitted her. Since she has no other language in common with her non-Spanish speaking peers, she has been forced to utilize English as a form of communication, which has helped her gain confidence in speaking the second language. This supports the argument that building a collaborative environment where language minority students are central participants offers multilingual participants numerous options. This encourages students to speak their target language with their classmates, but it also provides all students a voice, allowing them to engage despite the language(s) they speak. Allowing students to engage in bilingualism fosters multi-directional learning (Martin-Beltrán et al., 2019). Even though Student 3 has not made the decision to participate in extracurricular activities, her comments aligned with the idea that extracurricular activities can help students learn and develop skills that aren't generally fostered in traditional education (Donroe, 2020), because learning a second language requires interaction with people (Loewen et al., 2018). This includes having opportunities for meaningful language practice and building connections with past ELLs and English-only speakers (Przymus, 2016).