Week 10: English Language Learners

According to Maya Smart's article The Word and the World: Technology Aids English Language Learners, (http://www.edutopia.org/technology-software-english-language-learners), she references Reading Assistant, a program that seems incredible. She explains the benefits of the program that offers engaging stories, with multi-sensory facets that enable students to access definitions, illustrations, and pronunciations. Most importantly for teachers, she notes, is that 'the program can record audio of the students reading, makes corrections, documents errors, evaluates comprehension, and provides extensive data for monitoring student progress...With a password, she can access audio files of any district student reading aloud to monitor his or her progress over time. Teachers can even email the sound clips to parents.", (Smart, 2008). This is an incredible way to record and monitor progress of English Language Learners through the language acquisition process.

This method seems ideal for teaching small children the basics of the English Language, but it doesn't seem equipped to handle specialized, content-specific vocabulary. I have one student who is considered an English Language Learner, and he struggles with words like "less than", "complement", concepts like "probability" and "cumulative". He speaks Arabic at home, and knows very little English. When he sees a word problem in Algebra, he shuts down, and I struggle to make the content accessible to him.

I did find a glossary of content-specific words on the NY State Ed Website. Here, they offer similar "glossaries" for many different Regents courses in dozens of languages. Check to see if there is something that could help you or your students!!




Smart, Maya Payne. (2008). The Word and the World: Technology Aids English Language Learners. Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/technology-software-english-language-learners.