EL Teacher

I covered for Amanda, our English Learners (EL) teacher on Halloween.  The number of EL students in our district has increased significantly over the past few years and Amanda has needed to stay flexible in her job duties.  At the beginning of the 2015-16 school year she was a 40% EL teacher and now she is 80%.  Amanda also works as a response to intervention (RTI) teacher.  She has worked hard to learn the EL job and in turn, I have learned a lot from her about EL education.

For this period, I worked with two 6^th graders and an 8^th grader.  The lesson started off by choosing a card from a deck of thought provoking questions.  Each student answered the question around the table and then we looked at an interesting photo without a caption.  The students were asked to write a caption about the photo.  When students had a question about the spelling of a word, we added it to Amanda’s word wall.  We were all left in suspense as the real caption wouldn’t be revealed by Amanda until they met again next week.

The meat of the lesson came when we chose a current event article to read together.  The article was about giant pandas born in the United States being moved back to China for breeding.  I have to admit, it was a tough read!  We took turns reading around the table and I helped out with the pronunciation of difficult words as well as the definition of new words.

I was struck by how hard it was to explain the meaning of a high level vocabulary word.  I caught myself several times defining a word by using an equally difficult word in my definition.  I frequently stammered as I struggled to find meaningful definitions.  It was a powerful exercise for me, and it confirmed something that I already knew – that learning the English language is a complicated task!  So many words break the “rules”; it must be so challenging to learn the nuances of the language.

The students worked hard and I complimented their efforts as I dismissed them.  In all of my years in education, I had never delivered a lesson to EL students.  I gained a better appreciation for the job, the students, and the difficulty of learning this language.