Week 6 Readings

I have summarized ideas and thoughts about the two chapter readings and the articles:

There are many differences in ESL and NES writing. The essays that students write are not the same because the students learned how to write them differently. Students who are not native English speakers might have learned how to write an essay a different way. This does not mean that they are incapable of writing a good paper; it simply means that it might not be the same as those who are native English speakers. As future teachers, we have to acknowledge this and know that not every student has learned the same way. We cannot grade a recent immigrant to the United States the same way that we would grade a U.S. born student who knows the most appropriate ways to write a good paper. Teachers have to know where these students are coming from in order to understand why these differences in writing occur. 

Teachers should know at what level their English learners are at. Some students need more help in reading/writing/speaking the language, others might already be at the proficient level and they don’t need to be pushed down to do easier assignments. It’s important for teachers to not only know if they are English learners, but know where they are and what kind of help they need. As future teachers, we won’t be helping students by giving them an assignment that is too easy for them. 

Also telling a child to write about their native country or where they are from, might not help them either. Many times children are brought to the United States as little babies or toddlers, how are they supposed to know what their country was like? It makes no sense to have these types of assignments. The teacher can ask the student to write a research paper about the country, but personal experiences might not be a good thing to use if the student did not spend many years in the country that he or she can remember. If I were told as a student in elementary school, to write about my country, I wouldn’t have much to say. Even though I’m a bilingual student and I was in the bilingual program, I was born in the United States and the only country I know is this one. Other than the few trips to Mexico I would go in the summer, I didn’t know much about where my parents were from as a child. 

In Kubota’s article we see how a teacher who does not know much about other languages starts to learn more about it just because she has bilingual students in her class. Mainstream teachers should know that not all the students in the classroom will be monolingual English speakers. There might be bilingual students in a classroom and they have to know how to teach them and help them succeed. As a young child, I was always in bilingual classes up until half way through fourth grade. Luckily, I was able to get the help I needed in order to be proficient in both languages. Schools should have bilingual education programs, but sometimes they don’t because of the lack of students who are bilingual. For those random bilingual students that are put in any monolingual class, teachers need to be prepared. They need to find ways to teach them and grade them a little differently perhaps since they don’t know everything as well as the rest of their peers due to their low level of English proficiency.