I just read a very interesting Blog entitled: Incorporating
Technology for Effective ELL Curricula:
https://www.teacherswithapps.com/incorporating-technology-for-effective-esl-curriculums/
The blog post had some great information broken down. For example:
** In 2012, there were 4.39 million ELL students in the United
States.
** In the United States, there are 12 million students, ages 5-17
who speak a second language at home.
(At least 2.6 million of those students have a
difficult time speaking English.
** 73.1% of ELL students in the United States are Spanish
speaking.
Challenges for ELL students:
** 60% of them have parents who did not have at least a high
school education.
** 3 million ELL students in the United States do not have at least
1 English speaking person in the home.
** 39% of the ELL students are not highly literate in their
own language.
** Only 2.5 % of teachers who instruct ELL students have a degree
in ESL or bilingual education.
(I found this number staggering. I have seen many Special
Education teachers being forced to get emergency certifications in ESL because
the schools don't have funds to hire full time ESL teachers and it is very
difficult to get a part time ESL teacher. This seems unfair to students and yet
school districts have their hands tied unless that have large ELL population
which supports the hiring of a full-time teacher.)
Benefits of Technology with ELL students:
Using technology with ELL students will engage them in learning,
it will increase their social interaction, it will help them to learn Science
and it will help with their Digital Job Skills.
This blog suggested that ELL students be assigned multimedia
projects, social networking and online translators. I find the suggestion
of using online translators very interesting. I would recommend the use of
online translators for second language learners in order to survive; however, I
never recommend the use of online translators for foreign language learners. In
fact, the use of online translators for foreign language learners is considered
plagiarism.
This site also had a couple of ideas like using Casa Notes, http://casanotes.4teachers.org/ which is a site that with templates
which helps the teacher send home notes for things like field trips progress
reports, etc. in Spanish. If students like gaming, a great site is
MinecraftEDU: https://education.minecraft.net/ which has lessons in Math and
Language Arts available. Another great idea is MakeBeliefsComix in which
students can make their own comic
strips: http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/.
This blog had some relevant, eye opening information and a couple
of great suggestions.
Those numbers are more than I would think! But, if I think about my district, I do have many students that know English and are on the "watch list" for ESL, since they are doing well but they were not born in the US. Also, the fact that many students' have parents who do not speak fluent English is something I see often in my district. I have had parent conferences before that a child may help their parent translate or help them write e-mails to communicate to teachers. I agree about the emergency certification, that is just not fair to everyone involved.
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