Cheyenne's Writing Journey

The most important task we need to accomplish as educators is making sure our classroom is a comfortable and accepting environment. Multilingual students need to feel just as comfortable crafting their literacy in their native tongue as well as English. In fact, it is a law in Rhode Island to include our multilingual students’ native language in their lessons. Many people try to overlook this law and say that ELL classrooms have to be English only, when in reality that is not how they learn best or what the law mandates. A great idea that I learned in a professional development conference was to provide side-by-side translations for assignment notes or instructions. This way, students can compare their language to English and also know exactly what they have to do for the assignment. We can and should let them write their first drafts in their native language so they can think more clearly. This helps them work on their literacy in both their native language and English and helps...

The very first day I went to my observations this semester, my cooperating teacher was very excited for her English II class to come in. She had recently found out that a couple of her EL students had given her English names instead of their actual names, so she spent all weekend practicing their pronunciations and even had them taped to her fridge. When they came into class, she called them by their names and told them that she would be calling them by their names for the rest of the year. The students were shocked and happy that she was doing this. They tried to tell the teacher that she did not have to use them because they were hard, but she told them that they deserve to be called by their given names. Stewart states in chapter one, “we should consider very practical ways of affirming our students, such as pronouncing their names correctly, even if doing so requires a lot of practice.” I had thought about this very little before my cooperating teacher had brought this to my ...