Saturday, July 7, 2012
Personal Research Journey
Bilingual educatoin is a growing concern in public education. Families are more diverse, and there is a growing Hispanic population in my own area. As a result, teachers in the Head Start program are not equipped to work with bilingual children or children needing ESL programs. Currently, there are only four teachers in the Head Start program that speak a second language. Three of these teachers speak Spanish and are overloaded with Spanish speaking children. Therefore, I would like to research the benefits of bilingual education in the early childhood learning environment.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Debra,
ReplyDeleteI work in Head Start also. Although the majority of our non-English speaking children are Hispanic, I also have Africans, Asian and children from Burmese in my facility. I know enough Spanish that I can communicate with the children in the class, but if the parents cannot speak any English I get assistance from and older sibling that can translate. We have some teachers who speak Spanish. There are only two staff members whose main purpose is translating. We have 13 centers in two neighboring cities. They have to spread themselves around to accommodate all our families. This takes care of the Hispanic children. We have no one who can translate for the African and children from Burmese. I try to use the computer to translate information into their language, but sometimes even this is a challenge.
Great choice; bilingual education is important. The diversity of classroom is continuing to increase. When I was Director in a Child Development program, we utilized training, "Teaching Spanish in the Workplace". We were fortunate to have an Instructor come into our facility in the evening and teach us Spanish and important phrases that we needed to use with our families. At the end of the course, every teacher and staff were provided with the book to refer to help us relate to the children and family. It is great to ask parents to provide phrases and words that would help the child as well. I can't tell how many times parents felt appreciated when we used their language (or try to).
ReplyDeleteDebra,
ReplyDeleteOur Head Start program's population includes 29% who are Latino. However, not all are from the same country. Therefore, their cultures and dialects are different. Another issue is making sure that you have enough English speaking peers who can model for the Latino families. For translation, we use William and Mary students. We use staff (4) for interpretation because of confidentiality issues. We have also been adding children from India that speak Farsi. It has been a bit difficult finding translators.
Good luck with your study!