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Emergent Bilingual Students Essay

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Effective Instruction for Secondary Emergent Bilingual Students in Content Classrooms English language learners are becoming a huge population in New York City public schools. This population is only going to increase in the years to come. There are many programs out there for schools including ESL, dual language, and bilingual programs. Although bilingual programs are increasing and the research being developed promotes and encourages bilingual education, it is not yet a reality for many New York City schools. Some schools service students that speak over twenty languages therefore dual language programs will not be able to support all native languages. Most teacher education programs for content teachers do not provide adequate preparation for teaching their area of content to emergent bilinguals. Additionally, once teachers are in the classroom with emergent bilinguals there are expectations to service those …show more content…

First, content teachers need to recognize that their role as a teacher is not restricted to their content; all teachers are responsible for teaching literacy, which in the case of an emergent bilingual is at the basic level or learning English. According to Dong, all teachers must teach content and English at the same time (2004, p. 5). For content area teachers that often involves vocabulary instruction. Emergent bilinguals require more explicit vocabulary instruction than their English as a first language peers (Nisbet, 2010, p. 10). Nisbet explains that in order for a student to understand a text, 98% of the words must be understood; “understanding” a word means the student is able to define it, decode it, spell it, pronounce it, know it’s multiple meanings, and gather it’s correct meaning using context clues (p. 10). Not understanding vocabulary can hinder a student’s ability to understand a text or

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