Transcript
I would say what teachers need to know is that they should look at two things in particular: one is language development and the other one is the development of literacy.
In terms of language, the thing to remember is it takes a very long time to develop language proficiency in the second language. Even when children appear to already be fluent in the language in terms of everyday language, they're still way behind their peers in terms of the knowledge of the finer aspects of language. For instance, what we call academic vocabulary, the kind of vocabulary that's used in books and on the internet when they study and when they read or they write. Language structure, morphological structures so that takes a long time to develop.
Related to that is of course the role of language in reading and in writing. One of the things that we know from quite a bit of research is that being fluent in the language is not so important to read the words on the page. What it is important for is reading fluency; it's for comprehension, for writing but not for the very basic components of letter-sound correspondence, of being able to decode words. You can do that even if you don't speak the language well.
