Reply to What does having a high percentage of English learners in a class mean in practice?

Forum Index » VA Public Schools other than FCPS

Reply to "What does having a high percentage of English learners in a class mean in practice?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I teach in a school which has about 60% EL population.  What does this mean?
Amazing kids from all over the world, who are eager to learn, caring, interesting and funny people.  Many of them are smart enough to speak 2, 3 or 4 languages. 
 
My kids who aren't as gifted linguistically, those who can only speak English, are not put on computers so I can "catch everyone else up".  Nor are they given a book to read while I "catch everyone else up".  In fact, the students who are only able to speak one language are often just in much of "catching up" as my bilingual and multilingual kids, if not more.  Yes, even the white, middle income kids need remediation.

I think we need to stop saying our bilingual and multilingual kids need remediation and insist that every single student become proficient in at least two languages in order to graduate 8th grade.  And then let's test the kids whose first language is English and see how they perform on assessments after a year or two in Urdu or Spanish or Polish.  My guess is everyone else would have to sit around waiting while the "I only speak English" crowd has to catch up.

But, to the OP's question, it means that your child will have friends from different places, who speak different languages and what a rich school environment that will be!  I put my own child in a heavily Spanish speaking school.  She's now fully bilingual and headed to college on a full ride scholarship in her field of choice.  We Americans need to stop understanding "smart" as a 1600 SAT and a top ten university and need to start understanding smart as learning more than one language.  [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics