The English language learners (ELL) population has been and will be growing as time goes by; due to that reason teaching and instruction need to be suitable for all students including ELLs. In the article Teaching English language learners in the content areas by Joy Janzen, we can see how ELL students make 10.5% of the school population, and these same students are at a high risk of academic failure (Janzen, 2008). A very important factor about ELLs is that a vast majority of them have low scores in all the categories of achievement, those categories are the ones we categorized content areas in school. Content areas are the traditional reading, writing, history, science and math. One thing that Janzen (2008) notes on his article is …show more content…
I am all for inclusive classrooms because I believe that children learn more and better when they are exposed to situations. I wonder how prepare teachers are in teaching ELL’s? In Janzen (2008) article we saw that teachers are not prepare or trained in teaching ELL’s. There are 3 misconceptions about ELL’s, the first one is that “exposure and interaction will result in English language learning” (Harper & De Jong, 2004), hint this is why most ELL students are place in mainstream classrooms but learning a first language and a second language is not the same. The second misconception is that “all ELL students learn English in the same way and at the same rate” (Harper & De Jong, 2004), if this would be the case then teachers will not have the need of training to teach ELLs. The third misconception states “good teaching for native speakers is good teaching for ELLs” (Harper & De Jong, 2004) when reading this I cant help but to think how wrong this is, I was an ELL student and had to go through the mainstream teaching while learning English and while everyone else got A’s I wasn’t able to get a grade like that. My teachers were good teachers but lack the …show more content…
Schools are now composed with a large number of ELL students and one thing everyone thinks in ELL equals Spanish speaking students. This is wrong according to “The progress of education reform: English language learners, a growing – yet underserved – student population” by Zinth ended the majority of ELL students are Hispanic but we also have other languages besides Spanish of students that ELL, in fact 25% of ELL students do not speak Spanish. (Zinth 2013) Comparing this information to the article by Janzen (2008) they mention ELL students but do not specify their native language. They also talk about the importance of the native language and how teaching dually can help students learn, but not all schools have teachers that can speak another language, and if they do I do not believe that schools will have people that can translate Hindi or maybe Russian. What do we do with students that lack a person to communicate in this case? Zinth (2013) states that teachers play the critical role in teaching students English and to make sure they are proficient in Speaking, listening, reading and writing domains. (Zinth, 2013) Janzen (2008) does a great job explain that in each content area the teacher not only has to teach the subject but they also need to be teaching language. This is the only way that students can become