In Virginia I have noticed there are a lot of ESL students within the school systems. However, as a teacher of Virginia you are not required to take a foreign language. I find this extremely odd. If teachers are not required to know any other languages how will they be equipped to teach the ESL students withing their classrooms?
Through my practicum and my work at Second Home (an after school program), I have been able to use my knowledge of Spanish to speak with some of the children. I have taken Spanish since 5th grade. By no means am I an expert, but I do like knowing the basis of the language. Most all of the children at Second Home are ESL students and this is where my Spanish comes in handy most. I am the only volunteer that knows any Spanish, in my opinion that is ridiculous. I think teachers should be required to take some Spanish courses for education purposes. As of now where should teachers get the adequate information on teaching these students in their classroom? The website iteslj.org/links/ is a website for teachers of ESL students. I thoroughly explored this site and found great information. For the context of this class I spent most of my time looking at the teaching writing section. In this section of the website I found great articles, and resources to help me teach writing to ESL students. There were also links on the writing portion which the students could use as well, which I found helpful.
As I was browsing through the articles, I found one about conferencing. We have discussed this topic in class but never thought of it in terms of ESL students. It said the most common form of feedback teachers give on papers is written feedback. We also discussed this is class. There are various ways to write the feedback but for the most part it is in terms of written feedback. The article discussed hoe problematic this could be for ESL students. If they are having trouble writing in english to begin with, they are going to have trouble reading the comments made by their peers or teachers. This article purposed the idea of face to face oral conferences as the best way for these students to recieve feedback on their writing. I agree with the author. There are also so many different ways in which you could have oral conferences to change up the dynamic. It could be one on one with a teacher, one on one with a peer, or it could be a group conference. This is just one of the articles I found compelling on the ESL website. I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of resources available for teachers of writing, the website was extremely helpful.
