The Consent Decree addresses English Language Learners (ELLs) educational civil rights. It ensures that ELLs are identified, assessed for appropriate educational services, and have equal access to educational resources and programs. According to the textbook “no federal laws exist that mandate a specific type of program to serve the needs of ELLs” (Ariza, 2010, p. 22). That decision is left to the school and an LEP committee to place the student into the best fitting available program at the school. If I was on the LEP …show more content…
Green should implement Culturally Responsive Teaching pedagogy in her classroom. Culturally responsive teaching recognizes that people from different cultures learn in different ways. “Children from homes in which the language and culture do not closely correspond to that of the school may be at a disadvantage in the learning process. These children often become alienated and feel disengaged from learning” (Brown University). This may explain Juan’s behavior in the classroom. Mrs. Green can address this by communicating clear high expectations for her students and creating an environment where all the students give respect and are given respect of their beliefs, culture, and abilities. Allowing students to learn within the context of culture is another aspect of culturally responsive teaching. Mrs. Green should incorporate teaching strategies that are familiar to Juan as well as varying the other strategies used to help build on the students’ understanding of a new concept. She could also assign the class a research project where she would allow students to pick a topic or issue that relates to their own community or cultural group. This kind of project would allow for all the students to learn about each other’s culture and help to build cultural respect among one another. Other culturally responsive teaching methods would include student-centered instruction, culturally mediated instruction, reshaping the curriculum by utilizing non-textbook resources, offer learning …show more content…
For example the word spot begins with the s cluster /sp/ which does not occur in the initial position of Spanish words, but instead in the mid position in Spanish. This explains why he struggles to say words such as this. Non-English speakers also tend to have problems with two and three-consonant clusters in a word’s final position such as caught, word, text, and instant. The interference caused by the difference in the amount of vowel sounds between English and Spanish also commonly causes problems for Spanish speakers of English. Useful instructional interventions that Mrs. Green could utilize to help Juan develop phonological awareness skills would concentrate on sentence segmentation, rhymes, syllables, and phonemes. Giving students’ counters to use in order to determine how many words are in a sentence is useful in helping ELLs learn sentence segmentation. Using a variety of rhyming activities helps to teach ELLs the concept of minimal pairs and help them distinguish sounds such as /b/ and /v/ from each other. ELLs can learn syllables by clapping the part of a word. This is an important skill because it helps the ELL identify what part of the word should be