Prompt #3: Goldenburg

There are many distinct differences with the students in my classroom that affect their learning process. The teacher uses many different techniques in her lessons to help the students who have those linguistic, ethnic, and sociocultural characteristics understand what they are learning a lot easier. She is very responsive during assessments in the classroom, especially with linguistic and sociocultural characteristics.

The only tests that I have observed the students take are weekly spelling tests. The way that the teacher sets this up is that she gives each student a piece of loose leaf and has them number it one to twelve. Then she goes through each spelling word out loud, one by one. She says the word once, uses it in a sentence, then repeats the word one more time. I noticed after a while that she walked around the room as she went through this process with each of the twelve words. On some of the harder words, like conjunctions, she would say the word slower; making sure the students could hear the two parts of that particular word. Two or three students in the class always have a lot of difficulty with the spelling tests, and spelling in general. So as the teacher is going through the words, she sometimes stops at those kids’ desks and will quietly point out mistakes or give them a hint as to how to start off the word. Some of these students are bilingual, that is, they also speak Spanish when they are at home. I know this because I have observed a couple students speaking Spanish to each other. At one point, when one of the girls in my class was coming back from lunch, she answered her cell phone because her dad was calling and had to drop something off at the school. She had a conversation with him in Spanish; there was no English said at all. So English does not come first hand to them. So it takes a little bit longer for these students to grasp things like spelling and speaking in English.

The teacher notices that there are different sociocultural characteristics for each student and they all respond differently to assessments in the classroom. She responds to these characteristics in different ways, depending on the type of assessment; like for the spelling tests that I described above, she responds to the different linguistic characteristics in her classroom. This goes along with ethnic and sociocultural characteristics as well. The teacher is very good with recognizing these characteristics and coordinating her lessons and assessments around the differences in the classroom.

I connected this to Goldenburg because although none of the students are specified as English Language Learners, there are still some boundaries between these students and where they “should be”, according to certain standards. If a teacher ignores these boundaries and the different characteristics in his or her students, they are just holding them back from their full potential. Goldenburg says that teachers need to teach the students at a young age and give them support in order to break those boundaries and be looked at on the same level as students without this linguistic difference. The teacher in my classroom is giving her students the support they need by doing things such as giving a little extra help during assessments to those students who need it. The students need more attention by their teacher, in areas like language and spelling, instead of just getting ignored because of the label put on them and the culture they were brought up in.