The first day I walked into my classroom I found that it wasn’t so much diverse like I had expected but instead almost all of the students were from some sort of Spanish speaking descent. Apart from a few black kids and one Vietnamese girl the students families were from places such as mexico and the Dominican republic. From this I found that many students came from homes where English is not the primary language. This poses obvious problems especially in reading comprehension and writing.
For much of my time tutoring I was helping the students with various writing assignments. Immediately I found out that their writing skills weren’t up to the same quality as other 3rd graders. This relates to the Goldenberg article about teaching ESL students. There are obvious disadvantages for students who’s first language isn’t English. I found that one student got so frustrated that he wrote his story with the characters speaking Spanish. Though the narrative was in English or broken English as the case may be it was clear that the student was proficient enough in the language to produce a fully English story. Goldenberg talked about students falling farther and farther behind in school because of the language boundaries that the children faced.
I found that the teacher had trouble with these problems as well. For example she had a long conversation with the girl about her Spanish speaking characters trying to emphasize the importance of her writing in English just leading to the student’s frustration and eventually writing a whole new story. The end result was a student who was so disheartened by the situation that she produced a sub-par story and received a poor grade and a whole lot of frustration. It is clear that something must be done to deal with these problems such as more involved Spanish to English assignments and even working with parents to encourage English speaking at home.
This reminds me a lot of the blog I just posted, Prompt 6: Johnson. The gist of my blog is about how disheartening it was seeing a little boy, first grade maybe, being spoken to by my advising teacher and have no idea what she was saying. A 5th grader from my class had to translate between my teacher and the little boy. I focused my blog on the fact that as students enter into public school, they are expected to drop their native language, learn the English language, and continue their lives speaking English.
ReplyDeleteYou wrote that “there are obvious disadvantages for students whose first language isn’t English”, and I’d like to add that there is no disadvantage to them, except that we expect them to learn and succeed in an English speaking world. Maybe the disadvantage is on our society when we try to enforce a monolithic culture and language.
You wrote about one student, who got frustrated and wrote a story with a mixture of Spanish and English, even though she was proficient enough to continue with her story in English. How might this student feel writing in her native language- the language she was first taught, the language her parents speak, and a language that may identify with her cultural background- and being told she is wrong. Third graders don’t yet understand SCWAAMP, the culture of power, or socialization, but they do understand right and wrong. She is being taught that English is right and Spanish is wrong.
I agree that there should be a solution, or rather better ways teaching ELLs. Teaching parents English as well would probably help the situation, as Paulo Freire did is Brazil when he taught illiterate children and adults in the community to read. Possibly dual language immersion programs would help our society also; this is where children are taught other languages at a young age.
Hi Ben,
ReplyDeleteI wonder how Goldenberg would have advised this teacher. The research is compelling: Students who are literate in their heritage language can transfer those skills to their English language development. Should the student have been penalized for incorporating her heritage language? How might the assignment have been constructed to reduce this debilitating frustration?
Keep me posted,
Dr. August