Literacy and ESL Students

Well, my second graduate class is coming to a close and so is my summer. I am getting ready for a new school year, and I am realizing I have some big challenges before me. This last unit we focused on literacy and ESL students, and while I am not in a position to teach fluency, I need to work on phonemic awareness, phonics (with those students who are ready) and vocabulary! I need to be conscious of working on vocabulary and listening comprehension with stories so that my ESL students will be ready to make the transition to reading when it is time and developmentally appropriate for them to do so.

Reflection on Unit 3 and ESL Assesments

As my classmates and I move through Unit 3 of our graduate course, we are discussing more challenges related to teaching ESL students. One of the challenges before is is accurate assessment. A group of us worked together to compare our results when evaluating the same clip of student speech. We all gave different scores with the same student and same assessment. This experience definitely created an awareness that the training of the assessor (me!) is key, and also that no assessment (or assessor) is perfect. We all agreed that the subjectivity of certain rubrics and evaluations can be very helpful because the teacher can consider the student's typical, overall performance and not just a snapshot of a one-time performance.

Beyond assessment, ESL teachers and any teacher working with ESL students has the added responsibility of  modifying texts and literature and finding those texts that are most appropriate for ELLs. Working with ESL students can be a big challenge in all areas from instruction to assessment, but it is a challenge worth facing every day!