Week 5 - 6/30/2017

The article I read this week was titled When ELA Tools Can’t Adapt to Students’ Native Language. It was written yesterday, June 29, 2017, by Jen Curtis.

I was instantly engaged by the title of the article. A lot of the articles I have read and research I have done has focused on the great things going on in education to support and enhance the learning for ESL students. This article focused on a real issue that is taking place across the country, but is not as widely discussed.

Carmina Mendoza is a fifth-grade teacher who teaches a full inclusion classroom, consisting of both native English and Spanish speaking students. Her biggest concern she is seeing with Edtech is the discrepancies among translation. Mendoza is familiar with the struggles her ESL students face daily because she grew up in Spain and has a strong understanding of the differences the two languages have. She expressed the main difference is in the translation piece between the two. If you translate English word-for-word to Spanish, an entirely new meaning could come out of the sentence. This is because there is such a deviation among the Spanish language alone.

There are some popular Edtech companies listening to the struggles that are being voiced and working to better their software and programs. Achieve3000 is an ELA tool used to help readers using Lexile leveled reading passages. The company has now created an entire suite for the Spanish language. The Lexile levels are appropriate to the content and include directions in Spanish.

On the contrary, another popular program, IXL Learning, is not providing additional translation support for their reading materials. One of their learning specialists, Eryn Barker, explains that students should be working to improve their English reading skills, especially since most of the Spanish speaking students come in with low literacy skills in Spanish as well. She believes students should be given reading passages at their current English reading level to improve on those skills. If they are reading at a kindergarten level, then they should be provided with a kindergarten level reading passage.

I feel that both sides have very valid points. This article brought to light the issues taking place in the Edtech world regarding the support being provided to our ESL students. As teachers, we need to be mindful to the programs we’re using and if they are actually benefitting our students, especially the ESL students.