Personal Statement On Teaching Esl

I walk over to the nine-year-old boy sitting across the room as I reach for my pen and sheet of paper. As I approached him, I halted. Quietly, I asked him what he needed help with. Looking confused, he asked me what the word bough meant. I froze. I didn’t know what the word meant. Embarrassed of not knowing a fifth grade word, I asked the teacher for some assistance and after she told me what the word meant I understood and was then able to explain to him that a bough is just a synonym for a branch. Noticing that David was still confused as to what he was reading, I sat beside him and allowed him to read the passage out loud to me. While I defined the words that he didn’t know and listened to him read the passage, I was able to classify him as an English learner who just wanted to be just as good as the other kids.

I am elated to have the opportunity to apply to California State University of Fullerton's Master of Literacy and Reading program. I graduated from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, in 2013. There, I received my Bachelor of Science in Liberal Studies, with an emphasis in Spanish, as well as my Multiple Subject Credential. After graduation, I taught Kindergarten for two years in Greenfield, California. It was there that I learned my passion for teaching reading skills to English Language Learners. I soon realized the joy and cohesiveness literacy can bring into a classroom. For the past three years I have taught first grade at a small rural school in Shandon, California. I was extremely honored to be chosen to travel to Kansas City in July 2017, to

The United States is becoming more and more bilingual every day. It is important for students of the United States of America to keep up with the advancing world. The easiest way to learn a second language is when a person is young. This is why it would be beneficial for schools to start teaching a foreign language in kindergarten and continuing it through twelfth grade. Students are more likely to learn and remember a foreign language if they are introduced to it at a young age. A majority of other countries teach foreign languages to their students throughout their school lives. Most students coming out of high school in other countries are totally

It is important in the United States to have a competitive workforce, and a great way to do that is to have a society of learners that can communicate with people of other cultures and ethnic backgrounds. Although there are efforts for teaching school children other languages, most programs are primitive at best, left to be forgotten before the skills reach the point of relevancy. Dual language programs should be established in the US wherever feasible to give parents, at the very least, the choice to expand the minds of their children. Recent years have seen the inclusion of voluntary language immersion programs in places such as Athens, Georgia, in which students are taught from Kindergarten in two languages. These are steps in the right

The greatest concern of mandating “English only” schools in California for example is that 80 percent of the population of students is Latino. Miner further explains, “Good bilingual programs are about more than learning a language, it should be about respect for diversity and multiculturalism (Bilingual Education, 1999).”

I found it interesting that of the three ELL teachers interviewed, only one had a personal ELL experience. This teacher teaches at my middle school. She moved here from Poland when she was nine years old. She didn’t know any English besides basic words like colors

Teachers have the power to change the world and to make a difference in the student's life. Teacher is a facilitator of knowledge, motivator, advisor and a positive person that can improve the student's education. I decided to pursue the career of education because I have the desire to help others. I also have the ambition to provide encouragement and support to the people that need it. Becoming a teacher means more than sharing my knowledge to the students. It is a commitment with society to shape the performance and learning of future generations.

They leave school with frustration, insecurity, and the desire not to return. They wonder, as I often did, "Am I stupid? Why am I not getting this?" Having a bilingual education program would make school a more positive experience for many children.

In duet reading, a stronger reader is paired with a less-fluent reader. The stronger reader sets the pace and provides visual tracking by moving his or her finger below each word as it is read in unison. In audio-recorded books, the student reads aloud with an audio-recorded version of a book. The purpose is to encourage the weaker reader to read along with the tape. In echo reading, the adult reads a short passage and then invites the child to “Say what I say” or “Copy me,” encouraging the child to repeat what the adult has read (Robertson & Davig, 2002). In this way, the adult models fluent reading and then provides the child with an opportunity for immediate practice. In paired reading, children who are struggling with reading fluency are paired up with a more capable reader. In this strategy, the fluent reader and reader take turns reading by lines or pages (Mathes, Fuchs, Fuchs, Henley, & Sanders, 1994).

The problem with both bilingual education and English-as-a-second language instruction in the United States lies in our unwillingness to treat English for non-speakers as an academic subject (Haas, 2007). While the bilingual programs in California are thought to be mostly for people who speak Spanish, there are also Asian students that need to be taught proper English before continuing their education. As one anonymous teacher points out: "I have had 32 different languages spoken in my classroom over a 25-year period. Eighty-four languages are spoken in our district."(Anon 1998 & Haas 2007). Which for most teachers mean that it is both educationally and economically impossible to teach every student in their own native language.

The United States is filled with many different ethnicities, cultures, customs, languages, etc. Supposedly, our public schools are equipped with classes, teachers, curriculums and materials in order to educate that part of the student population whose first language is something other than the English language. Bilingual classes, transitional classes, ESL classes are just a few of the programs that have been developed to instruct non-English speaking students in order for them to acquire the English language.

However, within the United States, I think it would also be beneficial to promote immersion schools modeled after the Navajo immersion programs. When speaking about Puente de Hózhó, the school’s co-founder Michael Fillerup claimed that, “the vision was to create a school where each child’s language and culture was regarded not as a problem to be solved but as an indispensable resource” (2013, p. 132). It would be interesting to see if academic performance is increased because there is some flexibility for students who aren’t native speakers of English, or if English speaking students also benefit from learning an additional language. I suspect there are a lot of benefits that can be gained for students of all language backgrounds, and the United States should be more open to instructing students based on the needs of local

CONTEXT Katie, aged 15, is a highly motivated student from a family with a strong educational background, currently living and studying in a British-style International School in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam, and is a member of the increasing group of globally-mobile students. Katie can be solidly placed into the “entering phrase” of the transition from Taiwanese national to immigrant in a Western society, where she “has decided to become part of the new community, but is still figuring out what that means” (Hayden 2006:53) at the age of thirteen. She is an example of what has recently been identified as a common occurrence for international school students, children going through a “sojourner adjustment” (McKillop-Ostrom 2000), as can

A survey done by the Center for Applied Linguistics in 2008 found that "The findings indicate a serious disconnect between the national call to educate world citizens with high-level language skills and the current state of foreign language instruction in schools across the country"(Cal:Research). This is concerning as all of the competition for the U.S. is gaining a step and we 're doing nothing . If the U.S. expects to continue to be competitive in the global market we need to have bilingual citizens. In order to ensure this, we must require a foreign language be learned in high school.

Bilingual” (qtd in Shi, Steen 63). The objective of the ESL students is to learn how to speak, read, and write in English and know about the system of the school too. That learning will help them with other courses in school. ESL students have come from all over the world in America to study. Statistically, the number of immigrants in the USA is growing quickly. This quote shows us that