For
this blog, I read “Teaching Multilingual Children” by Virginia Collier. This
blog assignment gave us two different options to speak about and I chose this
one because it closely relates to situations close to me. Having just begun my
Service Learning Project, I am currently exposed to some children who speak
languages other than English. Although the two students I work mainly with
speak English, some parents of students in the class do not. I am lucky that
there is no language barrier between the students I am tutoring and myself.
However, many teachers are forced to deal with this struggle on a daily basis,
making their job even more difficult. In this reading, Collier discusses the different guidelines for teaching a multilingual child and why those guidelines are important.
Teaching multilingual children is not just a struggle the teachers in Collier's reading deal with. Teachers around the world are forced to teach a different way to these students. This site displays easy and fun ways to help a bilingual or multilingual child learn to read and write in more than one language. This can be a real challenge and may cause the child to be confused and mix up the different languages. Another helpful tool is a video I came across. The woman in this video is a bilingual speech therapist who focuses on teaching children multiple languages at home. She discusses key aspects to successfully teaching another language. I believe Collier would appreciate this video because they focus on similar rules such as Collier's third guideline. This states "Don't teach a second language in any way that challenges or seeks climate the first language" (227). Virginia Collier raises many important issues in this reading that are on the more professional side of this issue. In my research, I found other scholarly articles that do the same. For instance, the article "Effective Teaching Strategies for Middle School Learners in Multicultural, Multilingual Classrooms" by Barbara N. Allison and Marsha L. Rehm. This article along with Collier's text discuss ways to go about teaching multilingual children. Allison and Rehm's article focuses more on teaching this on the middle school level. QUESTION: As I said earlier, I am lucky enough not to deal with this issue personally. For this blog, I would like to ask my classmates if any of them have to teach a bilingual child. If so, what is the most difficult part? Are the students able to communicate clearly? I would absolutely love some feedback on teaching multilingual children.
I really liked your blog, I loved the video you posted its really cool. I really do not have anything to help with the multilingual children sorry but good luck with that, or maybe ask the teacher of the class how she does it maybe.
I really liked your blog also! I have tutored a 5th grade student before who spoke only Spanish at home, she also spoke fluent English while at school. So although I never had significant problems communicating with her, I did witness slight miscommunications and cultural differences. For example, while reading with her she would skip certain words because they were "bad words" in the Spanish language, what I would do is try to clearly explain what the word means as best as I could. I would never tell her she was wrong I would just explain that a word can mean different things in different languages. What helped too is what we keep talking about in class, using clear simple directives when telling students what they need to do instead of using ambiguous questions. Hope that helps!
I really liked your blog, I loved the video you posted its really cool. I really do not have anything to help with the multilingual children sorry but good luck with that, or maybe ask the teacher of the class how she does it maybe.
ReplyDeleteI really liked your blog also! I have tutored a 5th grade student before who spoke only Spanish at home, she also spoke fluent English while at school. So although I never had significant problems communicating with her, I did witness slight miscommunications and cultural differences. For example, while reading with her she would skip certain words because they were "bad words" in the Spanish language, what I would do is try to clearly explain what the word means as best as I could. I would never tell her she was wrong I would just explain that a word can mean different things in different languages. What helped too is what we keep talking about in class, using clear simple directives when telling students what they need to do instead of using ambiguous questions.
ReplyDeleteHope that helps!