Think Piece 8- Multilingual Learners

                                                 (in English)          (in Spanish)           (in Italian)

           

            At this point in my life, I have not yet had the opportunity to work extensively with bilingual students or English Language Learners (ELLs).  I am positive that I would not have felt confident in my abilities to teach these students to write in English if I had not read chapter 14, What is Sound Writing Instruction for Multilingual Learners? by Jill Fitzgerald and Steve Amendum.  I wouldn’t expect teachers to learn the native languages of all their students, however in order to make lessons relatable to ELL students teachers must make the effort to familiarize themselves with the cultures their students came from.  This is something that I am excited to learn as a teacher.  I found that the suggestions, strategies, and examples of specific lessons, genres of writing, and the possible settings for teaching these lessons mentioned in the chapter were beneficial for my learning style.  The authors did not just give statistics, formal jargon, and research results.  They provided the readers with the experiences that Mrs. Chen had when teaching the writing process to multilingual learners. 

            I thought the practices mentioned in chapter 14 of Best Practices in Writing Instruction stemmed from Vygotsky and sociocultural theory, a theory that I too believe in.  Fitzgerald and Amendum wrote that “learning a new language involves active thinking and thinking with peers and adults” (p. 302).  These social experiences are essential for English Language Learners because it is likely that for many, school is the only place that they speak and hear English.  Even friendly or informal conversation will increase their vocabulary.  Even though speaking and writing have similarities, one of the main differences between them is that formal writing has rules, such as structure, tense, and grammar that can be difficult for any student, even when writing in their native language. 

            The description of the strategy known as TREE was creative and applicable to me as a teacher. 

“TREE is a four-stage mnemonic strategy used for writing a persuasive or opinion essay.  Students plan their essay using a structured format: 1) Topic sentence-tell what you believe; 2) Reasons (several)-Why do I believe this?  Will my readers believe this?; 3) Explain reasons-say more about each reason; 4) Ending-wrap it up right” (p. 301).

 I actually got excited when I read it because ideas began flying through my mind about how I could adapt and apply it to my own classroom, which will most likely be somewhere in high school, middle school, or upper elementary school.  This type of writing instruction could be first used as a modeling activity and gradually evolve into an individual writing planning strategy in a general education classroom, pull-out ESL classrooms, foreign language classrooms, or bilingual classrooms. 

Think Piece 7-"Immigrant Students and Literacy"

            Almost immediately as I opened Immigrant Students and Literacy; Reading Writing and Remembering by Gerald Campano, I was able to make a connection to the experiences he was speaking about.  I was able to relate to the issue of immigrant and other low level English speaking students in schools because I had seen it first hand during an observation placement that preceded my student teaching. 

            In chapter one, “From the Heart of the World and Back Again,” Campano writes about the fact that New York State requires that ESL students take state examinations and assessments at all the required benchmarks/grade levels. 

During the first half of the school year, the students were required to take a fairly extensive state examination that involved, among other tasks, reading long paragraphs and marking answers by filling in circles on a test sheet.  Many of the children were from immigrant families and spoke English as a second language (p.10). 

In this case, Campano is speaking about kindergarten students, yet the issue affects students of all ages.  He also mentions that this school, once a high achieving institution in comparison to others like it, was brought down in its ranking.  This was what was happening to Lackawanna Middle school because of the influx of Muslim and other Middle Eastern families.  Many of these students had only been in the United States for less than two years.  They spoke Arabic or other native languages outside of school and in their homes, yet they were required to read, write, and comprehend all things English on the Regents exams. 

            Due to the fact that ESL students are required to take the NYS assessment exams with no regard to how long they have been living in the United States or speaking English.  Therefore, the school’s scores tend to suffer.  By no means am I saying that the ESL and immigrant students are to blame.  In fact, it is just the opposite.  New York State has such a highly acclaimed and respected education system that one would think that they could come up with a better way to test ESL/immigrant students’ progress and knowledge in a way that they could understand.  Without sounding insensitive I would like to say that I do think that ESL and immigrant students should be taught American history, language, and studies because they are a part of the United States.  On the other hand I think that perhaps there should be some leniency in testing students so that they can be first evaluated on the information in their native language before being shoved into a completely English environment in which no learning will occur.