I had the pleasure of interviewing my partner teacher, Mrs.
Reyes. Mrs. Reyes is Kindergarten bilingual teacher in the district of
Alief ISD. She has always taught bilingual students so she has a lot of
experience with them, fourteen years to be exact. Bilingual kids learn every
content area in their native language, except mathematics. This has been where
she has seen them struggle the most. The reason probably being that this is the
one and only thing they must adapt differently.
One of the struggles she
thinks ELL's struggle with is timing. Time for the little ones need more than
just focus on exams. We as teachers do not always allow the practice to happen
because of higher up demands. A way she thinks we can deal with this directly
is acknowledging that we need to give them time to practice the language and
have visuals to facilitate that practice. Visuals are really important because
they need to have a point of reference in learning. According to Ortega, two
key questions of interest are how the two (or more) languages are represented
in the brain and how bilingual speakers switch and alternate between their two
(or more) languages, depending on a range of communicative needs and desires (Ortega, 2013, pg. 6). This is why being able to
work with the social part of speaking is crucial as well.
I really liked that she tied the social part of
speaking to their development. I strongly feel that in primary grades such as
Kindergarten this is a lot easier than the higher grades. I feel like she said
that small group conversations are key to interaction to doing so.
The reasoning for her choice
of bilingual program is because she likes to be flexible in how much of the
other language she can blend. She did say she follows her guidelines
nevertheless, she takes to her advantage when kids want to go further. In my
opinion, this is so amazing of her. I feel like she does this because she is
aware of the signs that her students are giving her and she listens. She thinks
that their opinion and when they are ready she will move on but she still puts
their reediness
first because the bilingual program lends
itself to that.
