Teacher Discussion Forums

I teach in a small rural high school (about 500 students). The small minority population we have is almost all Hispanic. I just got a new student, age 14, from Vietnam who has only been in the US for less than 2 years.

He speaks a little English (mostly from watching TV) and was placed in my reading lab class. I'm looking for any suggestions on how to help him learn to read.

Our building has NO ESL materials in Vietnamese--only Spanish. He is a very hard-working kid.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Does he already read some English? I'm sorry, being an ESL teacher to adults I'm not familiar with what your situation may be in high schools, but why do you have ESL materials in Spanish? I can understand bilingual materials, if that is what you are doing. Why use Spanish material for teaching reading in ESL? Anyway, there are a lot of ESL reading books written in English for different levels with different word counts. I don't know what kind of access you have to new materials. There are also a lot of suitable materials (if he can read some already) on various Internet sites.