In this
blog number 3 I had the privilege of speaking with my mentor teacher who is a
ESL certified teacher here at Fiest elementary school in Cy-Fair ISD. She has
been a teacher for 28 years and has been ESL certified for the last 12 years.
We spoke about how things can be different in a classroom of ESL students when
making sure that they are getting everything they need to be successful. We
spoke first about the content areas that ELL students often struggle with and
why they may do this. She said she has always seen students struggle in the
content area of science. In regards to cognition she recognizes that students
struggle the most in her class when it comes to expressing their understanding
of what they have just learned. This is due to their lack of content
vocabulary, which is where many of their struggles start in learning new things
in school. She pointed out how both monolingual and bilingual typically succeed
much quicker in math when it comes to number operations. This is easier for
them since they do not have to focus on the vocabulary but just the numbers and
there is a set operation for them to follow. I thought I learned a lot
from this interview with my teacher. She pointed out many things that bilingual
students struggle with and how to help them get through these in the classroom.
The best strategy we talked about was the emphasis of vocabulary to the children.
Ortega states that he “typically found that learners know
more words receptively than productively, particularly if they are infrequent
or difficult words, and that this gap becomes smaller as proficiency develops.”
(Ortega 2015) This shows that it does not matter which subject that they are looking at,
vocabulary is the place to start.
Check out he video with my teacher here!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InDl-cxcnnA
Hi Gabby! I really enjoyed watching your video and getting an insight into the mind of a 28 year old veteran teacher! It makes so much sense that ELL students have trouble with comprehension, especially because they often times do not have a solid foundation like native English learner. Their foundation is in a completely different language so even their passive vocabulary which is often labeled as “the fastest knowledge vocabulary that is learned.” (Grass, 2013, p.198) It’s not acquired simply because they began learning English later in life. I think it’s good to be aware of this so we can help our students as best as we can.
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