My general goal is to gain more confidence with English
Language Learners. Growing up, I didn’t go to a school with too much diversity.
If there were children who were different from me, they usually always spoke
English. Sometimes being around children who can’t fluently speak English makes
me nervous. I always feel bad having children repeat what the say, because I
can’t understand them. On Wednesday, I went into the bilingual Kindergarten
classroom for the first time. It was certainly a new experience. After
completing the module on culture, I was expecting to encounter students who
didn’t speak English very well. Although most of the children spoke English
pretty fluently, they most certainly still had an accent. This was difficult to
understand at some points. In order to reach my goal, I tried to talk with as
many students as I could. I was hoping
that if I pushed myself to be in those situations where I feel uncomfortable,
it might eventually start to feel more comfortable. Some of the children were
much easier to understand then others. We talked about what they were drawing,
what their scientist looked like, etc. It made me feel uncomfortable when I
wasn’t sure what the child said to answer my questions. For example, I talked
to one little girl about her picture. I asked her what she was drawing, and
when she answered me, I didn’t understand anything she said. I tried to look at
her picture to see if I could connect what she said with her drawing, but her
picture didn’t look like a scientist to me. I had to ask her three times to
“tell me again”. During this interaction, another teacher was nearby and heard
what was going on. After the third time I asked, the other teacher told me she
was saying “volcano”. Once I knew what she was saying, I was able to connect
her words with the picture. Her accent was very thick, so it was really
difficult for me to understand what she was saying. I felt really uncomfortable and awkward for
having to ask her three different times what she said. I don’t want to make a
children feel bad about themselves just because I cannot understand them, and I
feel like that’s what happens when I have to repeatedly ask them what they’re
saying. The diverse linguistic module prepared me for this experience, because
I went into the classroom with an open mind. I knew going into this that
Spanish was the second most common language following English. However, since
we learned in the module that Polish was third most prevalent, I thought I
might encounter that language as well. As far as I know, however, that didn’t
happen. Also after completing some of the modules related to diversity, I
expected children in a bilingual classroom to be speaking two languages
interchangeably or regularly. However, that didn’t happen in this classroom. In
fact, I don’t think I heard any of the students speak Spanish while we were in
there.
Exceeds: Will comment on more than 2 classmates blog posts.
