Yocrinsder, Ernesto, Alitzel, and many other students at my school are English Language Learners. With English as their second language, they sometimes struggle with communicating their ideas. These devices will help them navigate their world and share their ideas.
Very often my ELL students want access to technology to translate academic vocabulary. I have a laptop I sometimes let them use; unfortunately, that can be cumbersome and sometimes not an option. Most often, they ask if they can use their cell phones. However, our school has a strict no cell phone policy. Students are not allowed to use their personal devices in class. Some classrooms have Spanish English dictionaries, which can be helpful but are clumsy and time consuming to use for a quick reference.
One of my students said out of frustration, "If I could use Google translate all day, this would be easy." I steered them towards this site, and they were excited to get a project proposal together. My students are highly anticipating these devices to help them with not only reading material and writing their ideas, but also for basic communication like receiving instructions.
Research has shown that English Language Learners are best served to learn English in a full immersion environment with access to quick translations of academic language. They are certainly immersed in listening, speaking, reading, and writing in English at our school. However, the quick translation is a challenge. As soon as they hear a word, whether it is academic language like 'Summarize the third stage of the process" or if it is specific content language like, 'Mutually assured destruction' learning stops until they know what those words mean.
Having quick individual access to a huge library of definitions and how to say them in Spanish and English, their language proficiency will grow and their feelings of frustrated reduced.
In Their Own Words
Our goal is to learn more English. Having this technology is important to us because they will help us to know English words quickly without getting in trouble for taking out our phones. We will use them for class but also for completing our homework. Sometimes in school we don't understand a word in the instructions a teacher gives us or a word in a reading, and we don't understand, and sometimes at home our family can't help us with words from school.
If our project is funded we will share these translators with other Spanish speaking classmates. We asked all the Spanish speaking students at our school if they were interested in using one. Once we get them, we will label them and hand them out to be collected at the end of the year so that students can use them next year as well. Also, when we visit with the ELL tutor, we will encourage our friends to us them.
These translators will help us be on the same level as others students in class. For some of us it will help us better understand the directions from the teacher, which will stop the frustrated feeling we get when we misunderstand something. For others it will be a tool to make sure we are spelling and speaking words correctly in English.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mr. Rhone and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
