Weiss ESL 509

Upon finding and reading, I found this article very interesting and very relevant to what we are learning about this year.  This article explains how Chicago Public Schools are being audited and assessing their ability to provide services for students who are English Language Learners.  I know that so often we are hearing about budget issues in schools and not having enough jobs out there but when you really start to dissect some of these schools it is amazing to see how short we are falling of reaching the needs of our ELL students.  I'm sure there are other groups of students that are often not addressed like ELL students, but it is not fair to any of them to be put aside or not made a priority / become an afterthought. Part of me is curious from reading this if there are just not enough ELL teachers out there to help meet the need.  I know this is one of the bigger growing departments as far as educators go.  When I was in college this was barely an area that I had even heard

I found this article that was posted yesterday that really caught my eye.  The article is tackling the issue of translating different languages to english and how there are many problems that arise.  It also directly ties it into all the new uses of technology that are out there and claim to help/provide translations that might not meet the guarantee. From the article it states, “There is such a variation between written and spoken Spanish, academic and colloquial Spanish—much more so than in English.” She explains that translating an English sentence into Spanish word-for-word doesn’t always make sense, and sometimes needs to craft a completely new question on the spot so students can understand." I found this very interesting because I never really thought about the different contexts that occur so often in other languages.  Many times I have seen where the words don't necessarily fit correctly when translating from one language to another because maybe they do not have th

This week I came across an online article that discussed these new educational online games.  As a person who loves a great video game it was a must read to see what all the hype was about.  It seemed like it was saying all the right things any educator would want to see prior to letting their students play games on the computer during class.  Says the games are aligned to standards and common core.  It provides teacher and student guides.  The producers of the game are even will to work with districts to modify games to best meet the needs of the schools. Following reading the article, I went to the game website and saw the list of games that were available. Of course you need to create an account and it costs money to the play the games (not sure why I was surprised), but I do think the games would be beneficial.  It has posted information about each game, which standards it would work towards, and what I found the best is it sends reports/makes reports available to you of how each

This week I was reading a blog and it was talking about how there is much more that goes into being a teacher of L2 students than just that of the classroom (well no kidding). There are many ways in which being educator goes past in the classroom, but this was referring to being a strong advocate for your students. It goes on to give guidelines to help best educate these L2 students so they are not being held back. These guidelines go on to express best practices for instruction, classroom culture, and family and community engagement.  As being a teacher who is not primarily in the ESL setting, there were many things between these 3 categories that I had not even really considered.  I know it is very common at my school to be pulling the ESL students during our cycle/special classes.  Some of the main points it addresses were limiting pull out time to ensure ESL students are not missing contact time with their peers to build those connections with them, go beyond the classroom for g

This week I found a blog post by Education Week that discussed a 2nd grade teacher, Anna Dearlove, and how she prepares her ELL students before a whole class lesson.  There is a video included with the blog that she shares what goes in to preparing the lesson and also how she delivers the content. I found this very interesting and knowledgeable because I do not teach an ELL/ESL class.  I am in the physical education and health setting.  Being able to watch the video of what a 2nd grade ELL class looks like and how the small group instruction goes was very valuable to me. When planning the lesson, a focus on the standard was essential.  It gave the focus on what was to be targeted to meet the needs of the students.  Anna selected the important language/words that the students would be using and how she was going to introduce them to these terms.  In the video, the key word was variation and they had other disruptive words they would use to differentiate things like texture, shape, s

Blog 1 – Influx of Immigrant Students This week I found myself reading an article about a school in Missouri that has noticed an influx of immigrant high school students who have very little education or English.   In the article it mentions many of these students are coming in from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.   The article by Koby Levin of Joplin Globe expresses it “points to the ongoing violence in those countries, which has driven successive waves of immigration by Central Americans into the U.S.” The numbers of immigrant students prior to 2015 school year were 83. By the end of the 2015-2016 school year it had risen to 118.   At the end of the following school year the number continue to grow reaching 142 immigrant students. About 28 percent of the districts students are students who speak English as a second language.   What I found most interesting about this article is I know I have seen a similar trend occurring at my school and have heard of i