Transcript

The relation or the collegiality between the ESL teacher and the homeroom teacher is so important. It's imperative that the communication is there. Basically for my position, the ESL position I focus on the language assessment and the language acquisition but for students that's not the only subject that they are doing in school. So, you have science, you have social studies, history, geography, math, and math is so language based that ESL students need that second language support no matter what classroom they find themselves in. So, the main communication between me and those ESL students when they are in those other classes is the teacher. It could be the homeroom teacher, it could be the rotary teacher where the teacher is solely responsible for, let's say geography or solely responsible for history, or even phys-ed, it's all language based. 

So what I often do is I'll send some strategies that they can use. I'll send a profile of the student to the teachers that they will be working with, basically outlining their history, where they've come from, their English levels as well as their communication level. So can they read the instructions? Can they understand your instructions verbally? Can they write if you want to do an assessment with them for math, or whatever subject it is? Are they able to write the response or is better to assess them on a verbal base. Extremely important. So I like to get the homeroom teachers or the rotary teachers involved in the teaching of these students. 

At the same time, I try to get the teachers to be a little more empathetic. So for example, picture yourself in another country just traveling as an adult, not being able to understand anything that another person is saying or reading; reading a newspaper in another language or a story in another language. It's exactly the same thing. So I think sometimes teachers do tend to forget that. You have to remember that they are ESL students, be empathetic above all.