As I looked at my schedule the day before school started, I noticed that one class was titled “US 1 LEP.”  I thought “Hmm… LEP?  Does that mean what I think it means?”

In my interview, I talked with the vice principal and supervisor about my experience working with students who had poor reading and writing skills.  I talked about my experience working with inclusion classes and students with IEPs.  Nowhere did I tell them I had any experience working with ELLs… and that’s exactly what I got.

This is all new to me, and it’s quite frustrating.

The class has about 20 students.  Of those students, about 25% speak Spanish and the other 75% speak French or Creole.  Then, of course, there is a variation in ability levels between those groups.  Of the Spanish speaking group, two students speak almost no English and the rest seem mediocre.  Of the French speakers, there are at least two or three that speak almost no English and another three or four that speak barely any.  It seems that only about half the class can communicate with me effectively; the rest are always at a loss for words.

So what do I do?

Trying to speak to the class as a whole is generally pointless.  At least half the students stare at me blankly and probably don’t understand more than 5-10% of what I say.  Some of these students understandably become rambunctious and start talking with one another.  I try to avoid lecturing for more than 10 minutes or so on any given day, but I can’t avoid trying to speak to the class as a whole and giving them instructions.  Trying to give out instructions and then wait for them to be translated takes up far too much time.

I’ve tried putting the students into groups, hoping that they would be able to help each other.  For the first two weeks, I didn’t know much about who could speak English well and who couldn’t, so I let them choose their own groups.  It seems that the advanced English speakers stuck together, and the least English proficient students also stuck together.  As a result, a few of the small groups were able to do the task but the majority couldn’t read enough of the text to get anything done.

In the next couple weeks, I think I’m going to experiment with placing them in small groups of my own creation.  I know a little bit at this point about their English abilities, so hopefully I can pair the stronger students with the weaker ones.

It would also be nice if I had non-English resources to use with them.  The textbook company was nice enough to provide translations of everything in Spanish… but only a quarter of the class speaks Spanish!  This district may be a bit odd in that respect, but it leaves me at a loss for resources.  I have nothing to give the five or six French speaking students that can’t read the English text.  Do I provide the Spanish resources for those students, and then provide nothing for the French ones?

This is definitely one of my toughest classes and it gives me a headache every day.  I get the feeling that I’m talking to myself and getting nothing accomplished.  Hopefully I’ll get better at it as time goes on, but this will probably be my biggest challenge for the year.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Education, Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.