Teacher Discussion Forums

I just started a job as a teacher in L.A. this week. I have never taught before (except for my student teaching), so this will be a new experience for me. Since I am starting in the middle of the year, they decided to have me work with the "newcomers" (students who have recently arrived from Latin America/South America) teaching Open Court (a rigidly structured Language Arts program). I haven't started working with the students yet, but when I do, I will have 5 third graders, 2 fourth graders, and 8 fifth graders, all at the same time and at varying levels of English proficiency. A couple have no English at all, and most of them can speak a little, decode a little, and are VERY low in comprehension. Did I mention that I don't speak Spanish and didn't receive ANY instruction in teaching ELL students in my teacher prep program? Right now I'm trying to determine how to manage a classroom when I can't understand the students and they can't understand me. I also need to figure out how to teach upper elementary students the basics of English without speaking Spanish and without relying on my two more proficient students to translate everything. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I think the first thing you need to do is group the students into proficiency levels. Once you do this, you can design lessons for each level and set up tutoring partners to provide support and occasionally do activities together.

you can create a simple questionnaire that asks about their likes, dislikes, background, dreams; use a variety of tenses in your questions and see how well they can express themselves. It would also help to develop a similar questionnaire for an oral interview since some students can speak and understand well but not read and write, or vise-versa.

There are also English proficiency tests out there you can buy. It would be handy to buy some sets or versions of the same test to not only place the students, but to measure progress.

Well, I met my students for the first time yesterday and all but 3 or 4 (out of 15) have only a couple of words like "Hello", "teacher", and "goodbye". So, it's going to be interesting...