I survived my first kindergarten ESL lesson! Student teaching started the day before school actually began, and mostly I've been observing and helping out a lot. My assignment for the elementary part of the certification process has been to a kindergarten ESL teacher. (I've already satisfied the adult teaching requirements, and high school comes next. When I'm done, I'll be licensed to teach ESL pre-K through adult...it's pretty comprehensive.) As I have been used to teaching mainly 5th grade and up, except for my one-on-one private music students, I was really scared of teaching the little ones.
We started by administering the LAB-R, which is the test all incoming students must take if their parents indicate on their home language questionaire that a language other than English is used at home. That, in itself, was a real learning experience. Forget your preconceived notions of what an ESL 4 or 5-year-old looks like. This particular district had entrants which were fluent in Russian, Indonesian, Urdu, Farsi, Ashanti, French-Creole, Italian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Korean, Chinese, and a lesser amount than I expected of Spanish.
I have a 4-year-old, and he has quite a few friends, so I have a pretty good idea of what 4 and 5-year olds really know. I was blown away by some of these kids whose parents had checked off the boxes that said "speaks, reads and writes English only a little." Well, many of them did have some difficulties with speaking English as fluently as their American-born peers, but their reading ability was way above the average English speaker's. When interviewed, they indicated fluency in their first language, including reading and writing...and you have to realize that the Korean, Chinese and Russian kids are doing this in a different alphabet (or in nonalphabetic characters)...as are the ones with Arabic-based languages. Amazing.
Of course, there are those who barely speak or understand English, and who have no literacy at all in their first language. This is sad, but not representative of the ESL population as a whole. Just to see how far their education thus far had progressed, I experimented with the advanced group (1 Spanish-speaking 4-year-old, and 1 Korean and 1 Russian speaking 5-year-old.) Since they whipped through the lesson for the day, all about apples, we continued into math (counting, adding, charting the results of our survey) as ESL has to also teach English skills in all the content areas. I couldn't believe their skills were equal in that, too.
There are a lot of challenges, teaching a linguistically diverse, multi-proficiency population of students...but so far, I'm finding it very rewarding.
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See I would have thought you mainly would have under-educated, Spanish-speaking children in your ESL classes. Just goes to show you how much we take for granted and think we know when in fact we're just ignorant--or at least I am. How lovely you get to be with children from all kinds of places. How interesting that their skills tend to be so advanced...
Jean-Marie, you're a real eye-opener, you know that?
And congratulations on your accomplishments.
Thank you! There is light at the end of this particular tunnel! I've started sending out resumes, so I am hoping a PAYING position will open up early 2008.
Not all the kids are so advanced. Today, I delighted in the advanced group, again. After whipping through the lesson, we sat together to read a book about apples. "Does anyone know where the name or title of the book is?" Yes, of course they did. They made predictions about the book's contents, based on the cover, then pointed out the name of the author ("that's who wrote the book, Mrs. T.") and the illustrator ("that's the person who makes the pictures, Mrs. T.")
But I also worked with a beginner group, which had some who seemed to never have held a writing utensil before, or scissors, who can't verbally spell their names, much less write them. It is so obvious which children come from homes where somebody works with them, and those who don't. Whether they can speak English or not, their overall knowledge, or lack thereof, is evident. Sometimes it is very sad.
JM, I can't imagine a more challenging task, kudos to you for being a soldier. Those kids need you. Good luck!
thanks. think I'm gonna need it!
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