Thread: Bilingual, Trilingual Kids

OK. The American child didn't speak in English, cause he had been told to speak only in Bulgarian in the nuresry school- his mother told me this.

Do you have any bilingual kids and how do you cope with their problems?

In the U.S. we have many, many bilingual children. How we serve them depends on the laws in the particular state we teach in. One of the biggest challenges we get are children who are not fluent in ANY language; their home language is Spanish (or one of many others) and they've learned some conversational English from their neighborhoods, and from school, but they aren't fully fluent in either.

What we do with them depends on state and local policies and resources.

For myself, my ELL students leave class for 40 minutes of English instruction from a bilingual teacher each day. I have translators who translate letters, make phone calls, and show up for parent conferences so that I can maintain contact with parents. For the rest of the time, they are in my room, and since I have no more than a smattering of Spanish, we work in English. Which is the way the law reads, anyway.

There are a variety of strategies we use to help non-English speakers; training in those strategies is mandatory for every teacher in our district, and usually included in the teacher certification process.

I think I'll need a trilingual teacher (although in BG we don't have such 40 min classes) for that American child I mentioned of- the child pronounces "apple" with an "a" not close to "e" like in Edward. What's that English pronunciation? And why does he know London Bridge Is Falling down so well... Do they have an EN baby-sitter or the song is famous in the US?