Prompt 2 --Goldenberg

As I entered my classroom, the students in my assigned class surprised me. As I looked around at the students, I only saw one white student and one Asian student. The rest were African American, or so I thought. As I started working with the kids and playing their favorite game (Candy Land, but with a reading twist) I realized many of them were actually Hispanic. I should have expected this as many of the signs in the front of the building are in both Spanish and English, but judging by looks alone, it didn’t seem like it. According to the Infoworks website, 54% of the students at my school are Hispanic and 28% are African American. Only 18% of the students are white or Asian. Out of all those students, only 23% receive ESL education.

I was very surprised to see that only 23 % of the students at my school receive ESL services. This surprised me because while I was playing the games with my students, one of the students, John, got distracted and wasn’t paying attention until one of the other students, Bob, started speaking to him in Spanish. Knowing a bit of Spanish, I could understand that Bob had told John something along the lines of “sit down and play the game.” After he went back to sitting down and playing the game with myself and Bob. As he moved the spaces on the board, I could hear him mumbling in Spanish. “uno, dos, tres” This event made me wonder why more of my students do not receive ESL services.

This experience relates to Claude Goldenberg. In his article “Teaching English Language Learners,” Goldenberg discusses how we as teachers should help ELL’s (English Language Learners) learn English and their other subjects as well. He states that we should teach the children in their primary language, then help them transfer what they already know in their first language to things they are learning in English. He also states that we shouldn’t only focus on teaching English and reading, but teach other subjects again.

At my school, very few of the children receive ESL or ELL services. The example with the two boys I previously wrote about shows how much these services are need in these schools. These children are having a difficult time learning to read and it is probably because they don’t understand what is being said in the class. This puts them behind in the classroom and then on state testing. This school should be using more ELL techniques in the school. This would definitely help this school raise the test scores and help these children in the future.