English Language Learners and Special Needs

[Emily Brooks]

Hi All,

For this last discussion post I decided I would pose a topic/question
that I find challenging on a day to day basis. I work at a bilingual
school where almost all students are English Language Learners. There
is an over-representation of ELL students in special education. Even
at my school is hard to tell whether a student's lack of progress or
growth is due to their linguistic ability or their cognitive ability
because acquiring a language is so complicated to understand. As I
continue to study language acquisition, I am continually able to serve
my students better.

Please take a look at the following article about ELLs with special
needs:
http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/0108ortiz.html

I think the article gives a good overview and I agree with their main
points that we need to first and foremost offer early interventions
for our ELL students, and we need to offer linguistic remediation to
our students, not just learning and behavior remediation. As
educators, though, how do we ensure we are giving our students the
early interventions they need to succeed when the language acquisition
process takes years and has many complex stages?

Thanks!
Emily

[Emily Machado]

Emily,
As an ELL teacher, I constantly struggle with this question. Because
there has been a history of misidentifying ELLs as special needs
students, it often seems difficult to help an ELL who genuinely has
special needs get services. During my first year teaching, I spent
almost an entire school year with a struggling student assuming that
his difficulties in reading were a result of his English acquisition.
It never occurred to me that he needed special education services.
Early the next year, he was identified as having dyslexia.

I agree with you about early interventions that are focused on the
four domains of language. We cant afford to wait 7-10 years while our
students acquire English before determining that they need extra
support. I think that we need to advocate for bilingual testing so
that we can be sure that the "disability" exists in both languages,
not only in English.

[Neelu Sree]

I am a english language learner,i have a great interest in learning english as english is an international language.I am learning english spoken skills with videos like this one http://youtu.be/maYZsq--55U