Emergent Bilinguals

Emergent Bilinguals 

On the average day I teach 35 emergent bilingual students in my chemistry class. These resources were very refreshing because they either provided reinforcements to strategies that I am already using or they suggested a new method that I am looking forward to trying.

One method I wanted to discuss a bit was the idea of creating a classroom culture that is able to acknowledge all student language identities. At my school, the larger culture is very divided. For instance we have our emergent bilingual students and then we have the "English" speaking students. The student rarely every communicate to one another and instead, stick to their groups. This larger school culture finds it's way into my classroom and battling against it is difficult and I can't say I have done a good job. My classroom does not look like the classrooms in those episodes, which is disappointing.

During my first year teaching a fight broke out in my room because an emergent bilingual student and an "English" speaking student had "beef". That year I didn't have assigned seating (I had no idea what I was doing) so the students always sat divided. When I tried to get the students to interact I would here a refusal in Spanish and my "English" speaking students would say things like, "no miss, I'm not working with them" or "they will slow me down miss, no". The hate and dislike was so strong you could cut the tension. At the end of the year, I knew I didn't want a repeat of last year.

Going into my second year, I immediately had assigned seating but the makeup of my classes are not helpful. Instead of having equal numbers in one class, I have one class that is 90% emergent bilingual and one class that is 10% Emergent bilingual, so assigned seating doesn't help. However, what has helped is that I have taking on more emergent bilingual strategies.

So even though the culture of my classroom is still at times dicey, the overall tone is acceptance, which I model everyday. I do this by using more emergent bilingual strategies. For instance I try to learn their language while I teach them a concept, so we are constantly going between the languages. This is done either whole class or one-on-one. I provide my emergent bilingual students to use both their languages to complete work, they are to write what they can in English and write what they can't in Spanish, this way I can help them acquire the skills for what they don't know. I also try to pay close attention to the behavior and emotions of each student and the classroom as a whole, this way I can get in front of any upsetting or negative behavior. I make sure to provide everyone scaffolds, this way scaffolds is an accepted way of learning, instead of a sign that a student is an emergent bilingual. I am by no means perfect, and I still have so far to go but I am happy with the little bit of growth from last year.

Quickly, I wanted to discuss something that has been bothering me for a while. What I don't understand is this... If I was to be bilingual, I would be congratulated on my intelligence. But when my students become bilingual, they are not rewarded and instead are chastised for not doing it fast enough. What also upsets me is this idea that emergent bilingual students feel like they lose a part of their identity when they acquire English, and are meant to assimilate to the "better" culture. I hate this. It makes me so upset. I hate that, I as a white women get to learning as many languages as I want and I get to keep my identity! This really needs to change! 


Thank you for listening to my classroom struggles and personal beliefs. This topic in particular brings up a lot of emotions. My Emergent Bilingual students face an injustice everyday and I know that as their teacher I am not always providing them what they need and the education they deserve.