ELL students

Some concerns I have for dealing with ELL

Honestly, I do not really have that many concerns. The primary concern is not scaring them or making them afraid to come to school. I also fear communication and the language barrier. Luckily for me, working with ELL is actually my favorite and I have always naturally gravitated towards them. I have learned that a smile goes a long way. I experienced first hand the language barrier when I spent a couple of weeks teaching in Panama. The children there knew no English and my Spanish isn't exactly the best. But that experience really taught me a lot because I was placed in a situation where I had to directly deal with it.

In the classroom, I foresee a problem with time and the problem of one on one time. As much as you want to work with them one on one, it is extremely difficult when you are responsible for twenty or twenty five other students. So probably, balancing time and being fair to everyone. Furthermore, being able to connect to the ELL's outside of school literacies and their cultural identities and giving them the opportunity to share their cultural identities with others in the class.

I do not have a classroom yet and I probably will not have one in the next year or two but I would plan on making things meaningful for them the same I would do it for non ELL's. I would try to integrate whatever it is they are interested in, in the classroom. I would also give them opportunities to share things about who they are and where they came from with the class so that students could understand them better. I could pair them up with others in the class to ease the learning process and make it more bearable. And always keep communication open so that they know that can come to you if they ever need anything. I would teach them using multimodality so that they could hopefully make some meaning from the different modes and learn something, and always model what it is I want them to do. During the Japanese lesson in class, I had no idea what it is you were talking about but pictures were used, body movement was used, number images, etc and you even modeled what you wanted to do and because of that I was able to do it. I will always keep the Japanese lesson in the back of my head when teaching ELL's as a gentle reminder of how difficult it is and can be for them. Trying to empathize with them and put yourself in their position. I onced as an ESL teacher what his teaching philosphy was and he responded with "empathy." He said that was really all you needed and once you have empathy towards those students, you can really feel what they are going through and that feeling will guide you in your instruction. You have to take into consideration who they are, recognize it, accept it and embrace it.