Entry 3: ELL Teacher Interview
Hi everyone! For my third entry, I interviewed Ms. Narang to learn more about ELL students. Ms. Narang is a fourth-grade teacher that teaches reading, writing, and social studies. Her parents speak Hindi at home, but her second language is Spanish. Ms. Narang learned Spanish throughout high school and taught abroad in Costa Rica. Although her Spanish is not completely fluent, she knows enough Spanish to have conversations with others. In her classroom, she has several ELL students who are at the advanced and advanced high level on the TELPAS scale. This year, three new students joined her classroom. Since they are brand new to the country, they are just beginning to get used to the language and culture in America. These new students would be considered sequential bilinguals “because they did not start learning English until they arrived in the United States” (Wright, 2015, p. 5). Since her ELL students are still acquiring the English language, she uses a variety of strateg...