" I guess my brain couldn't imagine how kids could not be literate in English after a few years of US high school not to mention why we would worry about their Spanish literacy if they weren't even literate in English. If they're not literate by then in English, there is no hope for them in Spanish. "
Flat out wrong
A few years of high school and they will be literate? I don't know what planet you are living on, but here, in reality town, the recent Hispanic immigrants have at least a full year of ELD instruction before they are even tossed in to regular classes- and most kids have two (maybe three if they need a year of sheltered English). Even THEN, they are not "literate"- and often they are not literate in Spanish either so basically you are building a reader from the ground up in two languages- and no, you can't cut off the Spanish, because we have the tests that show that if you do that, it is likely they will never achieve at a normal level.
Basically, many of them cannot read Spanish or English when we get them.
These are not the kids taking AP, but there IS hope for them, if they are educated in Spanish alongside the English. But it's going to take a while. So you are wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. Wrong. There is hope for them, and thank goodness people who know what they are doing are trying to help.
You are just so our of your depth here. I hope you give up, because you just don't know what you are talking about.
You might want to recall that when YOU took a foreign language you'd had years of instruction in English. You understood grammar. You knew how to read. You had mastered the acquistion of your native language at both the spoken level, and at the level of writen and read academic language. Guess what? We get kids with none of those skills. They cannot read or write in Spanish- although they can speak it. Their Spanish literacy is one of the keys to their English literacy. And you'd think they'd be literate in a couple years? |
