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! 

Reflections on Teaching ESL

Having a classroom with 50% ESL students can be a big challenge. It changes the dynamic of the environment, but I think it changes it in a good way. From focusing on how I need to teach to meet their needs, I find that many of my other students need similar support, even if they are native English speakers. I love the diversity and variety of students, families and cultures in my classroom.

As I move through my grad classes, I find myself thinking more and more about the ESL kids in my class. I thought I was doing a lot of the right things with them, but my eyes are certainly being opened to things I never considered. As the summer flies by, I am eagerly awaiting Pre-K registration. I look forward to finding out what little stars will be in my class this year and finding out how many ESL students I will have.

Welcome to SES Easy ESL!

Hello, and welcome to my new blog! This is my first blog, and it is one of the fun requirements of my graduate program in ESL.

I currently teach Pre-K and have a large population of ELL students each year. I am very excited to be in the Master's program. I look forward to adding to this blog through my class Reading, Writing & Learning Methods for ESL. I love teaching my ELLs and am just amazed at their ability to acquire a second language and move seamlessly between worlds. :-)

Join me as I navigate the blogging and ESL worlds simultaneously! Comments and suggestions are always welcome! :-)