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For my 3rd blog entry, I had the opportunity to interview Mr. Fonte. He is an ESL teacher at Southmore Intermediate. He has more than 20 years’ experience in teaching. He was a teacher in Philippine his mother country, he taught ESL and American culture at refugee camp back in 1980s for Vietnamese. Wright has mentioned, “Young school-age children often have greater motivation, pressure, needs, and opportunities to develop second language proficiency than adults” (p. 50); Mr. Fonte is also agreeing age is matter in learning a second language. During his experiences teaching ESL to refugees, most of his students was at 40s-50s of age and it hard for them to learn English.
According to Wright, “ELLs
face the challenge of learning to listen, speak, read, and write in English at
the same time they are also expected to meet the same grade-level academic
content standards as their English proficient peers.” (Wright, 2015, p. 263).
Mr. Fonte makes a good point about the challenges that his students faced. Because
of the transmigrate, he said in the same time learning English, his students
also have to adapt with new culture and new school environment. Some students
have a big gap in their education compare with others and in some cases those
students weren’t receive education in school systems in their country for few
years.
When I asked Mr. Fonte about some techniques or strategies to help ELLs students, he told me that classroom environment is very important, knowing your students background and let's the student try- if they're not trying, they're not learn from it and as a teacher we should tell our students that "it's ok to make mistakes". I learned a lot from Mr. Monte how to help my ESL students and I enjoyed the time that I had after the interview to ask him more about his experiences teaching at the refugee camp. It's very interesting to me.
When I asked Mr. Fonte about some techniques or strategies to help ELLs students, he told me that classroom environment is very important, knowing your students background and let's the student try- if they're not trying, they're not learn from it and as a teacher we should tell our students that "it's ok to make mistakes". I learned a lot from Mr. Monte how to help my ESL students and I enjoyed the time that I had after the interview to ask him more about his experiences teaching at the refugee camp. It's very interesting to me.
Reference
Wright, W.
E. (2015). Foundations for teaching English language learners: research,
theory, policy, and practice. Philadelphia: Caslon Publishing.
