Prompt #3 - Goldenberg

Hi everyone!

The month of April describes numerous things for me: Busy, busy, flooding, busy, and a little bit of sunshine! However, aside from dealing with the flooding and water damage in not only my home but also my tutoring classrooms, I have come to realize certain things. Last week I was forced to deal with slight changes in the students I was tutoring. Due to the weather, most of the teachers and students were absent therefore, LET THE CRAZINESS BEGIN! Students were moved around due to conflicts with missing teachers, teachers were forced to substitute classrooms, etc. My kindergarten class had several students absent as well as the teachers' assistant. That is where I came in. I helped the teacher take attendance, monitor the children before their tutoring sessions, as well as monitoring the children monitoring the new class pets (Did you know that goldfish and freshwater snails do NOT get along well in one tank? Get two separate tanks = problem solved).


The point of this blog is to focus on how the culturally competent teacher should be able to use a variety of assessment techniques appropriate to diverse learners and accommodate sociocultural differences that affect learning. Within both of my classrooms are language barriers of some sort. More significantly with my kindergarten classroom the language barrier is between Spanish and English. I would say about 95% of the students in class are of Spanish background and speak Spanish fluently. According to Info works of RI, more than half of the population in the elementary school is of Hispanic decent. The remainder include 27% African-American, 8% White, and 6% Asian (infoworks.ride.edu). With reasons unknown to me, there are no ESL (English as a Second Language) programs being offered in the school. However, the school managed to create what is known as “Walk to Intervention”. This program focuses on student’s deficit in skills across reading on different levels. Teachers and tutors focus on skills such as phonemic awareness, short vowel sounds, phonics, etc.



In order to reach proficiency in a second language, theorist Claude Goldenberg explains, "Students (English Language Learners) should learn to read in their first language (Spanish). This promotes higher levels of reading achievement in English" (p.14, American Educator). Accommodating socio-cultural differences that affect learning are very important to a student's success with learning a second language. Linguistically, students use the method of "transferring". "Studies show that literacy and other skills and knowledge transfer across languages" (p.15, American Educator). Goldenberg also clarifies that this learning achievement is not only a difficult task for the ELLs and their teachers, but also the ones who create a curriculum based on what worked all along. If learning a new language at a young age will help with literacy and other knowledge for the child's future, then that curriculum will most likely help other ELLs as well.


Being aware of a student's background will help the teacher or any instructor learn what needs to be focused on with literacy skills. Observing the kindergarteners in the classroom before "Walk to Intervention" truly shows me their personalities and backgrounds. They all play with one another and never single a student out from reading stories together. With most students in the classroom being of Hispanic decent, I hear them speaking Spanish to one another with the teacher saying words like "mucho ruido!" (A lot of noise), when the noise level reaches a certain point. These habits tell me that the students will most likely use what they already know in Spanish when learning to read in English. They speak fluent Spanish and will hopefully use those grammer and langugage skills to transfer that knowledge to their English.

Until next time...thanks for reading!