One thought on “English Language Learners with Special Education Needs: Identification, Assessment, and Instruction”
English Language Learners (ELLs) face the double challenge of learning academic content as well as the language in which it is presented. Teachers have traditionally treated language learning as a process of imparting words and structures or rules to students, separate from the process of teaching content knowledge. This approach has left ELLs especially unprepared to work with the complex texts and the academic types of language that are required to engage in content area practices, such as solving word problems in Mathematics, or deconstructing an author’s reasoning and evidence in English Language Arts. ELLs need to be given frequent, extended opportunities to speak about content material and work through complex texts in English with small groups of classmates.
I totally agreed that we should respect the students’ language and sometimes use the first language instruction to facilitate their learning. However, things maybe a little different for some ELLs in real world. Based on my experience, ELL in the bilingual program prefer to use their first language. Some of the students will even “shut down” during the English time even it is an enriched instructional context. So respecting their language too much will make their feel that there is no need for then to learn English since they will eventually turn out to get everything because you will translate the curriculum into their first language to help them understand. It happens a lot of times to me that I talked to an ELL student in English and they replied in Chinese because they know I can speak Chinese. They absolutely understood the English I was saying. However, they just don’t want to use it. I have several kids who were born in the United States but still can’t carry on a complete English conversation independently. They have been in the bilingual program since pre-K and the ideal dual language program somehow became a hurdle for their English learning. In that case, I somehow felt that the dual language program is not the best one for them since there has already been such a discrepancy among their language skills and the urgency for them at this moment is no longer keep their heritage language, but to learn English. We have been talking about the individualized instruction all the time and I feel for the kids as I mentioned above, the best education program for them is a transitional program: They need to be “pushed” and realize that they have to learn English.
Bilingual special education studies 
English Language Learners (ELLs) face the double challenge of learning academic content as well as the language in which it is presented. Teachers have traditionally treated language learning as a process of imparting words and structures or rules to students, separate from the process of teaching content knowledge. This approach has left ELLs especially unprepared to work with the complex texts and the academic types of language that are required to engage in content area practices, such as solving word problems in Mathematics, or deconstructing an author’s reasoning and evidence in English Language Arts. ELLs need to be given frequent, extended opportunities to speak about content material and work through complex texts in English with small groups of classmates.
I totally agreed that we should respect the students’ language and sometimes use the first language instruction to facilitate their learning. However, things maybe a little different for some ELLs in real world. Based on my experience, ELL in the bilingual program prefer to use their first language. Some of the students will even “shut down” during the English time even it is an enriched instructional context. So respecting their language too much will make their feel that there is no need for then to learn English since they will eventually turn out to get everything because you will translate the curriculum into their first language to help them understand. It happens a lot of times to me that I talked to an ELL student in English and they replied in Chinese because they know I can speak Chinese. They absolutely understood the English I was saying. However, they just don’t want to use it. I have several kids who were born in the United States but still can’t carry on a complete English conversation independently. They have been in the bilingual program since pre-K and the ideal dual language program somehow became a hurdle for their English learning. In that case, I somehow felt that the dual language program is not the best one for them since there has already been such a discrepancy among their language skills and the urgency for them at this moment is no longer keep their heritage language, but to learn English. We have been talking about the individualized instruction all the time and I feel for the kids as I mentioned above, the best education program for them is a transitional program: They need to be “pushed” and realize that they have to learn English.
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