Teaching is universally a rewarding but challenging job. For ELL teachers, a unique set of challenges present themselves.

Students with Diverse Abilities and Needs

A current ELL classroom in the U.S. can contain students of varying countries of origin, English speaking and writing abilities, and cultural identities. An ELL teacher has to assess, get to know, teach, and support all of these students, often on a tight schedule. In the Colorín Colorado article, Oral Language Development and ELLs: 5 Challenges and Solutions, Lindsey Moses Guccione shares the importance of differentiation as a powerful tool for ELL teachers taking on this challenge, “Differentiation is the key to effective instruction for all students. Students of varying proficiency levels can learn the same content when the teacher provides a wide range of learning opportunities for students with different academic and linguistic needs.”

Lack of Resources and Training

The number of ELL students in the U.S. has been growing rapidly; however, schools and teachers are simply underprepared. The Migration Policy Institute states that over the last 30 years nearly 30 million immigrants have settled in the U.S., many of them bringing families and children. In order to provide differentiated instruction to their students, ELL teachers, and indeed all classroom teachers, specialists, and administrators working with ELLs, need greater access to high quality, research based ELL instruction professional development and assessment tools. “Lessons Learned: New Teachers Talk About Their Jobs, Challenges, and Long-Range Plans” is a report from the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality and Public Agenda that surveyed new teachers dealing with students of increasingly diverse backgrounds and abilities. This report finds that new teachers, particularly in less affluent areas, felt under-supported in dealing with student diversity, and that “teacher preparation programs and new teacher support systems need to be reexamined and updated for the 21^st century.”

Poor Communication Systems

Parent and community involvement and parent-school cooperation has been repeatedly proven to benefit student academic success, and this is true for ELL students as well. A National Education Association (NEA) policy brief shares that in a 2004 study, California teachers reported having a serious issue with “poor communication among students, teachers, parents, and the community.” Because ELL teachers are often dealing with families from multiple cultural backgrounds and languages of origin, successful and meaningful communication can be particularly challenging, though not impossible. School systems can provide translators, opportunities for teachers and families to meet, and structures that support collaboration for improved communication between ELL teachers, the greater school community, their students, and the students’ families.

Helping ELL teachers to face these challenges has to be a concerted community endeavor. In their article, “Challenges confronting teachers of English language learners,” Thi Diem Hang Khonga and Eisuke Saitobwhile say that while strong ELL teacher education programs will help ELL teachers face these challenges, “concerted efforts by educators, local and central administrators, academics, local communities, and lawmakers are necessary” as well.

Seeing the increase of students from many diverse backgrounds underscores the need for multicultural books. Multicultural books allow students of different backgrounds to be able to relate to the story and be more inclined to read and retain the information.

Lectura books provides award-winning multicultural books. Their books are a great tool for students of different backgrounds. The multicultural stories help to engage not only the students but their parents as well. This encourages more reading and speaking of English at home. Visit Lectura Books YouTube page to see some of their most popular book titles.

The Latino Family Literacy Project are experts in working with Spanish speaking parents and can train your staff to work specifically with parents of diverse backgrounds at your school. The company offers both online webinar training and in person workshops.

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The post What Issues do Teachers of ELLs Face? appeared first on The Latino Family Literacy Project.

Hispanic culture is known to have strong oral traditions, expressed through storytelling, lyric poetry, riddles, jokes, folk prayers and incantations, songs, and many other formats. Samuel G. Armistead, author of Pan-Hispanic Oral Tradition, defines oral tradition as “any manifestation of folk culture that includes the use of language. Creativity, ongoing evolution, and chronological depth are also essential factors.” The University of North Carolina School of Education shares that “Mexico has a strong oral tradition, in which knowledge is passed down through generations via storytelling and the use of proverbs.” Proverbs are statements that share common sense advice in a sometimes metaphorical, concise, and pithy manner. The spoken word being used to impart knowledge and understanding through the use of proverbs, fables, songs, folklore, and other mediums is a central and enduring part of Hispanic familial and cultural routines and structures.

Oral Traditions Share Family Values and History

Oral traditions, such as storytelling, are different from the act of reading aloud because the storyteller knows the story, rhyme, or song by heart. The absence of a book and the storyteller’s use of variations in voice and gesture create a vividness and intimacy between the storyteller and the listeners. In an article called Building Bridges with Stories in The Storytelling Encyclopedia, Melissa Heckler and Carol Birch write, “The longevity of the oral tradition is a testimony to the power of the told story. Stories improve understanding by building bridges of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual connections among peoples.” One of the ways these powerful connections are built in the Hispanic storytelling tradition is within families. Stories may be shared while the family is resting, carrying out domestic tasks, gathered for socialization, or at other times. Many tales are passed down through generations from the old to the young. The young can learn about their family history, family roles, and the expectations and hopes that their family has for them through these stories.

Oral Traditions Transmit Culture

Oral traditions in Hispanic culture can also share information that extends beyond the immediate family to the culture as a whole. Young people may learn about roles in their community, cultural holidays, and important traditions. Members of a culture with a strong oral tradition use these narratives to better understand how to orient themselves in their culture. They will also begin to memorize and learn the songs, stories, and proverbs, which they in turn will pass down to the next generation, possibly with personal, contemporary changes or interpretations. As children’s author Uma Krishnaswami says in a video about the importance of intergenerational storytelling on Colorín Colorado, “The world is diminished in some way if stories from a number of groups of people aren’t shared and made available to everybody…storytelling is our heritage.” Oral traditions, such as storytelling, endure and evolve over time as the cultures they belong to evolve, and oral traditions continue to both record and affect people’s communal and individual identities and lives.

When Hispanic oral traditions are respected and integrated in classroom settings, all members of the educational community can benefit. The Hispanic members are able to feel culturally respected and supported by their school, while members from other cultures are given the opportunity to hear new stories, songs, and jokes and to experience diverse ways of learning.

Lectura Books  is a leading publisher of multicultural books and bilingual books with authentic stories. One popular book title is Maria de Flor. This book has a beautiful story about a family from Oaxaca, Mexico, that describes their deep-rooted tradition of how they celebrate their family members who are no longer here, but who they will always cherish. The Day of the Dead is a popular tradition and celebration from the Oaxaca region.

Visit Lectura Books Youtube page to watch a short clip of the book, Maria de Flor and to see many more examples of bilingual and bicultural books.

The post The Oral Traditions of Hispanics appeared first on The Latino Family Literacy Project.

The Latino Family Literacy Project helps parents to establish a family reading routine, and to build strong Spanish and English skills.

An anti-bias preschool curriculum is one that seeks to acknowledge and challenge prejudices in education and works to remove them from the teaching and learning environment. Schools using an anti-bias curriculum are acknowledging that many Western societies, though growingly diverse, continue to function with inherent inequity and racial cultural bias, and that this naturally carries over into education, which is intrinsically a sociocultural institution. Louise Derman-Sparks and Julie Olsen Edwards, authors of Anti-bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves, write that “Inequity of resources in society, and the biases we use to justify that inequity, have an enormous impact on children’s lives. The dynamics of advantage and disadvantage, deeply rooted in our history, continue to shape the degree of access children have to education, medical care, security . . .”

Their work, at the forefront of anti-bias education, seeks to reduce cultural bias and misinformation in classrooms and to help children and the adults who work with them in schools to respect each other and to respect people in general.

Anti-bias education encourages educators to examine their own biases and cultural identities so that they may have strong self-awareness and also be aware of negative messages they may inadvertently be sending to students. This process allows teachers and other staff to model having a positive cultural self-image for students and encourages adults to begin to counteract their own biases in the classroom. Children can notice differences between people early on and will notice how adults treat others, so actively teaching them to respect all people is a powerful and important choice. One of the central ways that teachers put anti-bias curriculum to work in early childhood education settings is by exploring and honoring each person’s identity and fostering acceptance of diversity in the classroom and community.

Ellen Wolpert, long term preschool director and author of Redefining the Norm: Early Childhood Anti-Bias Strategies, shares this description of the anti-bias curriculum at work with young children:

“Children make comparisons among themselves, looking at the ways they are both similar and different. They learn that different is OK. This creates the foundation for respecting and valuing differences beyond their own families and communities.”

Children who share stereotypes and biases can be engaged in conversation about the bias and presented with visual and narrative examples that contradict the bias. The site, Teaching for Change, which focuses on social justice in education, shares a wealth of anti-bias articles with activity recommendations and professional development activities covering identity development, anti-bias curriculum, language development, and family resources.

The focus in an anti-bias program is on encouraging everyone in the educational community, young and old, to learn about and explore cultural identities and to get to know one another and the world around them with an open mind. Dr. Francis Aboud, who studied prejudice amongst youth, found that “after age 9, racial attitudes tend to stay constant unless the child experiences a life-changing event.” This trend underscores the importance of the implementation of preschool anti-bias curriculum and the promotion of tolerance.

Lectura Books is one of the leading publishers of multicultural and bilingual books, focusing on publishing for Parent Involvement with Latino parents and kids.

The post How an Anti-bias Curriculum Benefits the School Community appeared first on The Latino Family Literacy Project.