This week in our July series of profiles of diverse English Learners (ELs), I’m going to turn the spotlight on our youngest newcomers – those who were either born in the United States to immigrant parents, or arrived just before starting school, and are still developing their English.
This week I’m going to introduce you to Samira (*not an actual student), an adolescent newcomer with developing literacy.
What is oral language? How do we acquire it?
THANK YOU New York City teachers (and ALL teachers everywhere). You went above and beyond the call of duty to serve your students during the unprecedented-in-history COVID-19 school closures, despite frightening illness, deaths of colleagues and loved ones, social turmoil and the sheer exhaustion of doing your job in a new way under incredible pressure. As a parent and advocate for Emergent Bilinguals and Students With Disabilities, I sincerely thank you.
We need to stop giving kids texts they can’t read and expecting them to complete tasks through them. Instead, we need to give them the fundamental tools they need to get reading: oral language development, background knowledge, and decoding practice.
We are hard-wired for speech, not for reading. It’s called phonological awareness – our neurobiological ability to perceive speech sounds – sounds that carry meaning – from other sounds.
Because October is Dyslexia Awareness month, this week I’d like to focus on this particular learning difference. Dyslexia is a neurobiological condition that affects the brain’s ability to process the written form of language (orthography) and results in an unexpected difficulty with reading (and writing).
English Language Learners (ELLs) or the preferred label of NY State and academia – Emergent Bilinguals (EBs) or Multilingual Learners (MLLs) –are an ever-increasing group of students in our schools (about 5 million nationwide, or 10% of the U.S. school population) who are continually underserved, undervalued, and underestimated, along with their teachers, who are struggling to do their best.
I’m going to ‘blog’ my way through my introductory course, Linguistics for Teachers of Emergent Bilinguals to provide teachers with the information about language and literacy acquisition they need to support diverse groups of ELLs – including newcomers, SIFE, LTELLs, and ELLs with disabilities – in the classroom.
With the population of Emergent Bilinguals continuing to grow (it is predicted that by 2030, ELLs will make up 40% of the nation’s public school students), the education of our Emergent Bilinguals is one of the biggest social justice issues of our time.