New Rules Hurt Bilingual Students

By: Sarah Hesson and Rachel Toncelli 

Teaching Bilingual (Even If You're Not One!) 

By: CUNY-NYSIEB

Teaching Multilingual Children

By: Virginia Collier

Aria

By: Richard Rodriguez

(picture from here)

SO many articles! SO many thoughts! Here are my 3 talking points:

1. I started by watching the CUNY-NYSIEB videos first and what really stood out to me was the language. I absolutely loved how they refer to their students as Emergent Bilinguals, and learning "English as a new language". Just that terminology alone, I feel, would make students learning english feel more welcomed and included. I think that the usual titles that we hear of, "English as a second language" or "English language learners", in my opinion, don't sound as open to the child's original language as "English as a new language". EANL sounds like the child will just be adding more skills to the repertoire, rather than replacing their first language with English. I also watched the 2nd and 3rd videos in these series and I love that in the second video, their classroom's are co-taught with a teacher who is a fluent Spanish speaker and a non-Spanish speaker. I can only imagine the level of variety those students are getting every day in the ways that they are taught. On the opposite end of the spectrum was the Sarah Hesson article from 2017 that talked about RIDE wanting to cut the amount of time ESL students were spending with ESL teachers. I really hope that this didn't pass because it sounds like a nightmare for those poor students. I can't imagine spending a majority of my day being "taught" in another language, that I barely understood. 
2. I think the short but sweet Richard Rodriguez article perfectly articulates how important it is to assure students learning English that their language is valued, important, and should never be pushed aside. When frustrated me the most is how the nuns at his school probably felt that they had done so much good after visiting the home because things changed, when in fact it was the opposite. The nuns encouraging the family to speak English at home eventually led the family to become distant from each other and the only ones it benefited was themselves because Richard began to speak up in class, whoopdie do. 
3. "Do not forbid young students from code-switching in the classroom. Understand the functions that code-switching serves"(Collier article). I can't even begin to imagine all of the benefits of code-switching, but what I can imagine is how much skill and concentration it must take to be able to do that. I speak Spanish, not very well, but enough to hold a conversation. However, when I am trying my hardest to speak the language, that is all I can focus on. If I'm trying Spanish, I'm speaking only Spanish. The idea of being able to switch between the two to get your point across and be understood or get your needs met is incredibly impressive, and no educator, or anyone for that matter should downplay that skill.

Argument Statement:

The argument for all of these is pretty simple...we need to empower students learning English, while also encouraging their native language. Whether or not we speak the language of the student, there are so many things we can do to help them and it's our job to do that.