Posted on 07/15/2006 11:00:12 AM PDT by calcowgirl
How should California teach roughly a quarter of the state's public school population -- students who are not native English speakers -- how to read and write?
WE shouldn't. Most of these students should be home in Mexico learning their lessons in Spanish.
Perhaps there's some merit in the equity issue though I suspect it's more than blown out of proportion.
I do fairly strongly believe that ESL learners do best with the MOST POSSIBLE CUES for meaning provided in initial levels and stages . . . e. g. pics, sound, color, context, sequence etc.
And, the greater variety, diversity of pairings used, the better.
Guess I'd be most for an initial year or 3 where both traditional and SOME ESL focused strategies were used with later Jr High and High School classes being more traditional.
BUT WHO ARE WE KIDDING. We don't teach native English speakers diddly squat about English traditionally or otherwise. It's deplorable. I'm shocked at what clerks in stores fail to understand.
And some of the writing and reasoning hereon is sometimes shockingly lacking as well.
Yep!!! My daughter has started struggling this past year (3rd grade) with reading. She has brain damage with speech and language problems, and it is no surprise that she is having problems with reading. There are several multi-sensory reading programs available that are recommended for kids like my daughter.
The public school is denying her these programs because she is only 6 months behind. They will not give them to her until she is 2 years behind.
We even had an independent evaluation done by a neuropsychologist, learning specialist, and a speech therapist who all recommended a multi-sensory reading program.
Of course the poor ESL kids get tons of help at the school. It pisses me off because those kids don't need anything special to learn to read.
My daughter will not read unless she has special help.
We're pulling my daughter from public school and putting her in private school with the reading program she needs.
(We're also going to sue the school district to pay for the private school and reading program. We should win.)
If all that little girl knew was "Hamburger" that means she's probably only been there a couple of days, tops!
Send Mexico the bill for the lessons.
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