VirtEd

E-Learning Opportunities for ESL/ELL Students

Education Week reports on e-learning opportunities for ESL/ELL students and notes that this is an underrepresented population in the online learning sphere for a variety of reasons.  The article also mentions on campus resources that are helpful for the ESL/ELL students. 

With the dual challenges of grasping a new language and keeping up with other academic studies, ELLs would seem poised to benefit greatly from the prospect of self-paced study, direct teacher correspondence without other students observing, and an adaptive curriculum. Yet, such students appear to represent one of the smallest slices of virtual student enrollment, and they typically encounter online learning through pathways that differ from the experiences of most online learners.

 

Using Google Translate as a classroom tool

While looking over the statistics for my VirtEd accessible educational websites, I noticed references to visitors from links not related to those linked within the sites.  Upon further review, I found out that the site pages are being accessed via Google Translate in countries around the world in a wide variety of languages.  I have now even included links in several languages such as Spanish, French and Italian on the main VirtEd site page.  

There is no question that Google Translate is a powerful tool but that has limitations as far as its ability to translate some idioms or local, regional or national nuances assigned to certain words or phrases.  However, it is valuable when used with non-fiction content reading in such subjects as science, social studies, math and some language arts areas.  

Where this has great potential is in providing an option for teachers who have English speakers of other languages in their classrooms.  Links to classroom and reference materials can be keyed in as well as the instructors own text.  Given the number of students speaking multiple languages educators have to deal with, particularly in the nation's large, urban school districts, this can literally be a bridge technology to be utilized until ESL students have a better grasp of English.  

This is also a valuable tool for parent communications.  A teacher could input a message to be e-mailed or written to a parent into Google Translate and then copy and paste it into the desired document.  Once again, it is important to avoid slang or idiomatic phrases to minimize confusion.  The parent could do likewise in response to the teacher.  If the parent doesn't have access to the appropriate technology, the parent information could be keyed in at the school.

Of course, Google Translate has applicability for students and instructors in the foreign language sphere - some of them perhaps not desirable as students could use the site to assist with foreign language homework assignments.  However, fair warning from the instructor about the pitfalls of doing this would help forestall this practice.  However, as with technologies such as calculators and software that can be used to check math and science assignments, Google Translate can be a useful tool in this area as well.  

Chinese Teachers Arrive in US to Teach Mandarin to US students

In an effort to instruct American students in Chinese, several hundred Chinese teachers have arrive in the US for in-service training before they are dispersed to their various districts to teach US students Mandarin. 

It is notable that they are apprehensive about classroom management of American students - something not a problem in China.  

But the participants, speaking in rapid-fire Mandarin, were not children. They were dozens of Chinese teachers in Los Angeles for a nine-day crash course to prepare them for what they consider the opportunity of a lifetime: to teach Mandarin in American schools.

In a few weeks, 176 Chinese teachers will head to kindergarten through 12th-grade classrooms across the country, from rural Kentucky towns to the tidy suburbs of Salt Lake City. Only two will remain in California, assigned to schools in Redding and Ojai.

Most had never before left China. They had come armed with hopes of succeeding in the classroom, with fears that American students would be difficult to manage and with impressions of U.S. culture based on a diet heavy in Hollywood films.

The guest teacher program, started in 2007 and partly funded by the federal language initiative, Startalk, is an effort by the College Board and the Chinese government's Chinese Language Council International, also known as Hanban. The agencies want to expand Chinese instruction in the United States. UCLA's Confucius Institute is in its second year of hosting the program.