Been a While
14 years ago
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Campfire Effect
After reading the "Campfire Effect", I feel that I am not prepared to teach ELL students. I did student teach in East Hartford, and although I may have had a lot of hispanic students, not many were ELL students. Some students did have trouble with English, but they could all speak it and for the most part understand. I remember having difficulty explaining words in English because of language barriers, but for the most part we understood each other. However, that doesn't do me any good if when I start teaching next year and i have 5 students who do not speak English. I will not feel prepared to teach them in the best possible way. My only language background is French from taking 6 years of it, but I do not have any Spanish background, if any of my students were Spanish speaking. I really do feel that as preservice students, we should have a class in teaching ELL. There are a lot of areas in teaching that I do not feel prepared for, ELL students is one, as well as teaching students with disabilities, or even students with ADHD. I really feel that it would be beneficial for UConn to have a required class on ELL students or at least teach topics of it throughout other classes.
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3 comments:
I agree Kara- After doing that survey, I realized that Wow I really don't know enough about teaching ELs. I had a few EL students in my student teaching class. Even now in my internship, one of my students recently came from Belgium, so I'm watching carefully as the classroom teacher teaches him to pick up any strategies or tips. I think we should have had a course also or talk about in our other courses especially since inclusion is big now. What I found helpful was using a lot of visuals, sentence frames, and modeling. Also if there is another student who is bi-lingual you can have that student translate directions. There is no one way to teach EL students especially since you have may students that are at varying level of proficiency.
Hi Kara,
I agree that I feel so unprepared to work with ELL students. However, I've been thinking about this and I feel that, if I'm at least concerned and aware as a teacher, that is the first step. I know that I am going to try everything I can think of to help my students. And it is amazing what one can come up with! I worked with an ELL in my student teaching experience and even though there were many days I felt so incompentent, I began to learn what worked and what didn't. Sometimes being an inventive teacher is the best thing we can do.
Nicole
I completely agree with you. I have some experience with ELL students but none with students who don't speak any English. This is very scary for me to think about because any student could start in my class and not know English. I know Spanish a little well, but what if the students come from China or the middle east? How can you communicate with these kids when you don't know any of their language at all? The same goes for students with disabilities. There are so many ways kids can have special needs that it is impossible to be prepared for all of them but I don't feel like I am at all prepared. Likewise I don't feel like I am very prepared to teach gifted students. I feel like we have only briefly grazed upon all of these issues and I have expressed this to several UC professors but I don't feel like they are in control of the kinds of classes we take, but this is something that I think we should voice to the school of ed.
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