Communicating with Parents

Another topic that I wish to discuss is the importance of communicating with parents. This is obviously a necessary factor that plays an important role in the students education. The parents need to be involved and informed about what is taking place in their child's education, and if they are not informed how can they help the student with homework or projects that need to be completed outside of the classroom, etc?

Although with ESL students who have low English proficiency, it is most likely that the parents as well do not have a high level of English proficiency either. This complicates the communication process, since one ESL teacher can not know and be fluent in all of the home language of each of his/her students.

This Wednesday I am traveling to Little Village to be a translator for parent-teacher conferences. To me this is interesting and I am excited to see what it is going to be like, what the teachers are going to discuss with the parents, what the parents have to ask about their students learning, etc. I am really excited to use my Spanish as well obviously. The reason that I bring up this upcoming event, is because it is making me think about what it will be like if I have parent-teacher conferences with my ESL student's parents who have difficulties communicating in English. Very lucky are the students who's home language is Spanish because there is an abundance of ESL teachers who speak Spanish themselves. But what about the students who have parents that only speak Korean, or French, or Arabic, etc? It must be intimidating for the parents to come and talk with the teacher who does not know their language, whereas the Spanish  speaking parents are comforted because there is a translator present, or the ESL teacher speaks is already an native speaker of the language.

Stay tuned to see what I discover on Wednesday when I make my trip....