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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

MCPS teacher here, most times these kids are not literate in Spanish because they come from poor countries seeking a better life. Which means their families are barely literate and they often have had little to no formal education in their own language. Similar to poor minority children here who speak broken english due to their circumstances. The illegal immigrants coming here have no formal education, many times it’s generationally. It’s not the legal immigrants who are sucking up ESOL services because the legal ones usually have had enough formal education to go through the US legal process by-themselves or with a company. Many legal immigrants are white collar workers. Let’s not pretend that these children and their families are literate. OP, do something now, document everything and push the principal and teacher to change their practices. If not go up the email chain. MCPS will usually create a policy in the background for professional staff in the background, even if you think it’s rolling along slow.[/quote]

Posting-in-bold-MCPS-teacher PP, I think it's particularly disturbing that you as a teacher characterize the language spoken by "poor minority children" (I'm assuming that you mean poor US-born black children?) as "broken English". It's not.  "Broken English", charitably, is English spoken by a non-native speaker. But poor-US-born black children children are native English speakers. It's just that the version of English they speak isn't Standard American English.

If you're interested, here is a good piece you could read that addresses the issue from both a linguistic and a teaching perspective:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-code-switcher/554099/

If you're not interested, of course, then you're not interested.[/quote]

Code-switching is nothing new. You act as if the PP has no clue.  As as an ELA teacher, I've been dealing with dialects of all kinds for over 20 years.

the difference? If proper English isn't supported at home (much like any other language learned), transference doesn't occur.

METS kids are illiterate in their own language, as they have never received formal schooling.  So newly arrived METS kids are, for the most part, eager to learn, as there's more opportunity here.  Furthermore, they are in small, contained classrooms with trained teachers who can introduce foundational skills and build from there.

African American "ebonics" (a term which is no longer used) is a dialect that has become acceptable in the U. S. However, similar to other countries, once you're out of your "area," the standard language - and NOT the dialect - is used.  I can't tell you how often I slipped back into the dialect while traveling throughout my parents' home country.  And I was called on it immediately.

We just have more patience in the U.S., which makes it more difficult to code-switch. Furthermore, b/c we've become lazy with grammar, most kids don't understand syntax in standard English.   My daughter learned more about language in her Italian and Latin classes, as she certainly wasn't studying grammar in her English classes.[/quote]

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