Academic success for the ESL student

Working with English language learners is a reality in the teaching field and becoming more common in Josephine and Jackson county. I found this really cool web site that offers helpful hints, lesson plans, handouts, and other resources that can be used in the classroom when working with ESL students. Although it is inevitable that I will have ESL students in my classroom and it will be my job to assist these students to the best of my ability , I do believe there is too much of an emphasis placed on the schools to get ESL children mainstreamed as quickly as possible. Language should been seen as an individual right. I believe schools should not encourage a family to speak only English if it is not the home language, in order to keep parent child communication lines open with one another. My idea about ELL students was to have more effective ESL programs in schools to better equip students. However, I currently see the ability to be bilingual as an asset and it saddens me to watch many school systems suppress language minority students instead of utilizing these languages for educational, economic, commercial, and political growth. If funding was not an issue I would like to see more programs that support home language instruction along with English instruction, with the end result of these programs being bilingualism and biculturalism.