What Is Bilingual In The ESL Classroom

The instructional setting is two eighth grade classrooms with class sizes of 28 and 32 students. Of the 60 students, ten are Hispanic, four are Asian, and one is African-American. All ten Hispanic students are bilingual with overall California English Language Development Test (CELDT) classifications of: one student intermediate, three early advanced, and one advanced. The remaining five Hispanic students have been reclassified to English proficient and do not require EL support. Four students are foster youth. Nine students receive special education support.

Over the years of study at UC Irvine (UCI), I have developed my interest in public education policy. I am particularly interested in improving literacy development among children of immigrants. As an international student, I understand the language barriers that current immigrants have to overcome, especially for children who come from families with limited socioeconomic resources. I would like to study how U.S.-born children, whose parents are undocumented, assimilate in early childhood education. Specifically, I would like to investigate how non-native English speaking parents influence children’s literacy development. My career goal is to promote children’s rights in education at a non-profit organization. I seek tools in Dual Language and

|This family is Hispanic-Mexican-American. The primary language in the home is Spanish. The children are bilingual: |

Spanish education is a subject that has brought debate among educators. With a rise in Spanish speaking people in America, the question has shifted from should English speaking students learn Spanish, to when should said students begin to take Spanish? Many parents are beginning to see that their children need to learn the Spanish language, and that a good time to learn it would be earlier on in life. The Spanish language is a beneficial opportunity for children to expand their minds, learn a new language, and even be exposed to different culture that will benefit them in their everyday lives and open more opportunities for them in the future.

Now, let us tackle into what an experienced bilingual afterschool program coordinator and a nonprofit organization, the National Association for Bilingual Education, have to say regarding the filed of English Language Learning. To gain more insight from a professional standpoint, I have had the honor to interview the coordinator of an afterschool program for immigrant children and families, where I have been doing my service learning for the past two years. The program coordinator’s beliefs are unanimous with the four literature review findings that using paired reading, gesture, and providing bilingual education are effective teaching strategies for English Language Learners. Furthermore, it is crucial to recognize the strengths of ELLs and being aware of their needs too. Paired reading will help with ELL’s English fluency because it encourages children to sound out the words to each other. It will also help them to stay focused on the books and to cooperate or foster social interaction skills. Using gesture, or even role-play or drawings can help children understand the readings and vocabularies in a more interesting way. Lastly, bilingual education is crucial in ELL’s learning. It helps children make connections with their native language and English while they are reading or speaking, and making connections between their home culture and the U.S. culture is a great way to help the children enjoy learning a new language.

Participants were recruited via snowball sampling from an urban middle school in Northern California to participate in face-to-face, semi-structured interviews. The school’s parent advisor contacted participants by phone calls. The sample included ten female parents with diverse backgrounds. Including 6 Latina, 2 White, 1 American Indian, and 1 Asian American. The participants were between the ages of 29 and 45 years, with an average age of 37 years. The highest education levels of the parents ranged from some high school to a Bachelor’s degree. In addition, Translators were used to communicate effectively with parents who did not speak English.

On June 4, 1998 Proposition 227 was passed by California voters, denying bilingual education to the majority of Spanish-speaking children in California (Ballotpedia n.d.). On November 8, 2016 Proposition 58 was passed, repealing much of these bilingual education restrictions (Ballotpedia n.d.). Taken together, these propositions emphasized two sides of the bilingual debate—on one side, those focused on the monolingual, nationalistic tendencies of “one nation, one language;” on the other side, those focused on multilingualism as important in indexing identity. Unintended social and linguistic effects resulted from these propositions, placing the bilingual education system deeper within the political framework of California’s language

The perpetuation of poverty occurs in many ways in America one of which is educational inequities. Unfortunately, poor schools produce students which are ill-prepared to deal with the demands of college. This may be attributed to policies which negate the importance of bilingual/bicultural education for Latino students, especially those who are nonnative English speakers (Casas and Ryan, 2010). Take for example Proposition 227, in California which establishes the official language as English, undercutting the importance and notion of bicultural education (Casas and Ryan, 2010), something which appears to show promise for nonnative English speakers as a means to possibly close the academic disparities between Latinos and other groups. Improvements

The definition to bilingual is the ability to speak two languages. Monolingual is the complete opposite. The fact that our world revolves around money makes this topic very important. The workforce prefers that when a person is hired for a job that they know both Spanish and English, this is recommended because in South Texas you will find both the languages used at a 1:1 ratio.

Education is a privilege offered in the United States of America that the children of

c. One weakness of Weislender and Fernald’s (2013) study is the sample they used. The sample consisted of only 29 children and by using only Spanish speaking families they have limited the extent of which their findings can be applied to the general population. If Weislender and Fernald had used a larger more stratified sample of children their results could have been applied to a population beyond low SES Spanish speaking

Is a second language a necessity in our world today? Should parents push for their child to learn two languages in elementary school? If we live in multicultural neighborhoods, trade with the global marketplace, and want to use all technology resources available, it is necessary to know two languages. Multilingual people and communities seem to have an edge over monolingual competition. This provides people of all ages an incentive to learn a second language (Genesee, 1998). In this research paper English and Spanish will be the languages referred to for bilingual education, although others are offered. The purpose of this paper is to compare the benefits and pitfalls of language immersion programs

There are many English Language Learners who may be at a higher disadvantage because they are learning English as a second language. Being introduced to any language is a challenging task for all small children; consequently, students who cannot communicate with any school staff members are often left behind. Due to the variety of languages in a school setting it would be difficult to have a dual immersion program set in place. However, in Kern County, there are many small towns whose population is primarily Spanish speaking. These town’s students are faced with many difficulties as they try to adjust and transition to English because a lot of their parents do not speak English themselves. Schools with a high population of Spanish speaking students should offer a dual immersion program because it will provide their students the necessary tools to become proficient English language learners.

A. Researchers Armstrong, P. W., & Rogers, J. D. said “Third-grade students were randomly assigned to receive 30-minute Spanish lessons three times a week for one semester. These lessons focused on oral-aural skills and were conducted entirely in Spanish. Students in the Spanish classes scored significantly higher than the group that did not receive Spanish instruction in math and language on the Metropolitan Achievement Test.” (1997)

Native Language: Spanish. Target Language: English. Background Information: Pre-adolescents, born in Mexico, living in United States. Data Source: Responses to a