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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My daughter just told me that her 5th grade class has a new child that only speaks Spanish.  There is another child in the class that is kinda bilingual.  The teacher is using google translator to talk to her directly and she says after a few sentences when speaking to the whole class, she pauses so the other bilingual girl can translate to her the same few sentences, and then this continues every few sentences.  Does this truly happen in other schools?  Who just sends a 5th grader into a school, that doesn't know any English?  Does the teacher have to continue this bilingual lessons.  It must eat up so much time.  [/quote]

Honestly OP, you have every reason to complain. That child’s time should not be taken up to be a translator for the teacher, your child’s time shouldn’t be spent in school going slower because of one kid, additionally if your child is not in a langaguge immersion class it’s a problem. I would email my concerns to the teacher and principal. The teacher can use other methods without slowing down class lessons for example: using picture vocabulary for the new student, referring the child for ESOL screening, use of manipulative or incorporating more hands on components in her lesson,  use sentence stems to help the child, modifying that particular student’s work to make it a simpler version of what everyone else is doing. I’m a teacher and would be horrified if my colleague wasted the entire classes’s time to try to be bilingual without any formal training. This allows the pace of the class to go slower, all for one kid, that is why there is an ESOL teacher. Those teachers can slow things down. Finally, unfortunately, until the county deals with it’s illegal immigration problem this is what you can expect to happen from a small segment of teachers. The kid is obviously in school to learn English, so the teacher should be speaking in English but adapting lessons that make it easier to understand with pictures or fewer words. [/quote]

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