Week 2 Questions

1. What is your experience in terms of working or friends with people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds?

I have been fortunate to get to know and work with people from many diverse cultures and linguistic backgrounds. When young, I was fortunate enough to spend summers in Germany, where my mother was born and members of our family still live. I spent time in Australia in my late teens and early twenties and toured a good deal of Europe. My brothers have married girls from other countries, one from South Africa and one from Germany and I was able to go to both places for their weddings and I continue to have very nice relationships with them both.

Professionally, I worked with many people from diverse backgrounds during my time at Computer Associates, mostly from India, China and the Middle East, but also from Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe. I really enjoy meeting people from different places because you can learn alot about their cultures and compare their experiences to those that you had growing up in the United States but the thing that always amazes me is how similar we all are as human beings, no matter where we are from!

2. Do you have experience in working with ELLs?
Not much, just from my observations last semester while building my ELL case study.

3. Do you have experience in teaching ELLs?
No.
4. What is your perception on ELLs in terms of their learning motivation and
performance in general and in reading and writing specially?
I can only speak from my experience last semester where I observed children at the primary elementary level, but it seemed like the students were motivated to learn and tried their best to read and write.
5. What learning difficulties do ELLs usually encounter in schools?
I think when students are pulled out of their mainstream classrooms and they are given services or interventions that don't relate to what they are doing in their main classroom, this prevents them from being able to transfer the information.

6. In your observation, how do classroom teachers resolve ELLs’ learning difficulties and improve their learning motivation?
I didn't have any experience with this yet.

What strategies do they often adopt? Not sure but if I had to guess just based on what I've learned so far, I would say read-alouds, guided reading and maybe grouping students with peers depending on the age group.

Are these strategies effective? Are you familiar with these strategies? Are family and community involved? I think if a variety of strategies are used, the chances increase of finding what works best for different students. Also, when a variety of strategies are used I think you get a more well-rounded view of the strengths and weaknesses of the students.

7. What intervention strategies would you adopt if you have ELLs in your class? How do you go about teaching the child? How do you go about reaching out to the family and the community?
I think that I would try to provide the students with culturally relevant materials or find out what their interests are so I can make the learning as interesting, motivating and relevant to their lives as possible. I would also try to incorporate the students first language as much as possible in our classroom environment and also have them work in homogeneous and heterogeneous groups so they can benefit from working with students who are very similar and also those who can provide additional supports. I guess I would try the RTI probes that are research-based as much as possible.

I would request to meet with the student's parents and also work on keeping the lines of communication open by sending home work that can go back and forth and will allow them to see a progression and have a role to play to help their child.











































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