ELL in the Classroom

The reading this week evoked many ideas in me that I’ve had for a while. The school I worked at for four years had a heavy population of ELL students who speak Spanish or Portuguese.

Fu made many great points that hit home with me after working in a school with many ELL students. There does seem to be this expectation that students will enter schools and only be writing in English even if it isn’t their first language. At one point Fu mentioned a gentleman saying to her that he was told “… one should only think in English when writing in English.” This made my heart break because it seems to devalue the original language of a person. When a student comes into a school, of course they will want to write in their original language to express their ideas. I found Fu’s stages of writing very interesting in how she things it is great or students to slowly start writing in their language and then merge English into their writing as they learn.

I like that she also pointed out the horrible idea that it is frowned upon to write something in one language at first then translate it later. In Spanish class, that is how I learned to write. I’m not fluent in Spanish, but that helped me to learn the language faster rather than being forced to only write in a language I didn’t know. This is where the gentleman said that he was told to write in one language only. How is that possible when you aren’t familiar with it?

This also links later to a section in Pahl and Rowsell’s article where they mention literacy and power. In this section they mention that there are students that are not as literarily advanced as other students. I couldn’t help but feel that the ELL students are a large percentage of these students. They say they looked at the relation to literacy in “ethnographies of neighborhoods” and this felt like the polite way of saying they looked at the different cultures and ethnicities in the area of schools. In this case I would be willing to guess that there are many in those areas that may be ELL students and therefore lack power in literacy.

In their passage, Pahl and Rowsell said something that caught my attention. “The word literacies signals that literacy is multiple, diverse, and multilingual and spans the domains of practice, from home to school to community, and in each domain there are different literacies.” This idea seems to be forgotten at times. Literacy is made up of so many parts, including other languages. English was not always around; it was made from different languages put together slowly over time. So many of our words come from Latin roots, yet we still refuse to let people speak their language that may have influenced out own language.