Laredo: English Language Learners

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Recommended: Roles of first language acquisition in second language acquisition

Laredo has seen the growth students who are English Language Learners’ (ELL), due to the problems in Mexico. Teachers are being trained to help develop programs that can be applied to this students. The number of Spanish speakers in the U.S. has increased to nearly 41 million, making it the fourth-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. As compared to Mexico 121 million, Colombia 48 million, and Spain 46 million, but 22 million of these Spanish speakers are bilingual and can speak English well, while only 16 million don’t speak English that good. “Spanish, obviously, because we have a lot of Spanish-speaking people in our country.” That’s how Hillary Clinton responded to a question by Rachel Maddow of MSNBC about what language …show more content…

It is disheartening when the writing of even advances-level second language students often contain many awkward sentences and non-English like patterns. ESL writers face various linguistic challenges as they write, and they should be allowed to navigate through the writings of others to attend to the linguistic features they may need in order to accurately express their thoughts. ESL writing teachers can help students by providing language support, through models and prewriting activities that will encourage students to recognize certain linguistic forms and stock phrased used by native English speaking writers. They support of a writing center is also essential because a writing center not only introduces students to the academic community, but also serves as a forum where students can negotiate meanings and discover correct language forms so that they can then convey them (doi: 10.1002/tej.2). Most districts have implemented such programs to help students learn how to write in English, so they can be able to take the STAAR exam, which is required by the state of Texas in order to graduate High …show more content…

However, there is big difference between elementary school, where most of the programs designed to scaffold the linguistic and academic needs of ELLs, consequently, elementary teachers are likely to be better prepared than their secondary colleagues (Rubinstein-Avila and Lee, 2015). Nevertheless, because the language of a child is not as extend as a middle school student, they tend to retain more vocabulary than the young adults. One of the advantages of an elementary teacher is that they receive more training on how to prepare to teach ELLs than a secondary teacher since single-subject teachers receive limited preparation for teaching content to ELLs, and as a result are likely not to use the instructional strategies needed to teach this population effectively (Rubinstein-Avila and Lee, 2015). (Rubinstein-Avila and Lee 2015) found that not all teachers showed interest or concern about teaching ELLs in the secondary school. Teachers’ should not be held accountable if the students doesn’t succeed in learning a new language, because ELL students’ success comes also from good behavior and social emotional skills that are developed at home. (Winsler, Kim and Richard 2014) describe that the child’s skill and fluency in the first language-spoken can be an important factor in successful second language acquisition because they use aspects

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