Prompt #6

A very difficult task that most of the teachers face is communicating with the students in ways that demonstrate sensitivity to sociocultural and linguistic differences. First of all, most of the teachers aren’t fluent in the languages these students speak besides English. Teaching assistance is often need, and unfortunately not available all the time, due to the poor funding of the school. The teachers must come up with verbal and non-verbal communication techniques that encourage positive social interaction and support learning in their classroom. Most of the time this isn’t an easy task because the students must also participate.

In the classroom that I tutored in, a lot of the teacher’s assistants deal with students who have different sociocultural backgrounds. I’ve noticed the teachers purposely split up groups so that the students that don’t speak fluent English get explained the assignment in their native language then later on they go back to the teacher so the teacher can help them out in English. This was a very effective strategy that the teacher used.

Also, when the teachers would set up partner assignments they would put the students that fluently speak English with another student that would have trouble with English. This was also effective because the teacher could use the students that were fluent to help out the other students, which saved a lot of time.
Trying to deal with this problem myself, I would first try to get the students to “break the ice”. I would ask a lot of question about their background and sometimes ask them how to say some things in their language. I also could speak Portuguese and one of my students spoke Spanish and we would compare words because most of the words sound similar. I wanted the student to feel comfortable around me because I was once in their same position.

The very sad thing is the lack of teacher assistants they have, and I feel honored to come in and tutor this children that need it because there is only so much staff to go around. I can relate to this problem to Johnson. Coming from an area like these children do, the school budgets tend to be low and tight. Hiring these teacher assistants that are fluent in two languages can get costly. It sometimes isn’t fair because the rich schools get assistance and extracurricular activities that sometimes are unneeded, when these assistants can really make an impact on these children’s learning experience. They have the disadvantage because they don’t have what the other kids have, and it is really crucial for their learning.