OCEAN CITY – In a small classroom at Berlin Intermediate School, a group of students are playing bingo.
Each of the students place round chips on square cards with different pictures of classroom objects on them.
“Can you name any of these objects on the card in Inglés?,” says teacher Dawn Barrett.
Carla, a 11-year-old student whose family just moved to Worcester County from Nicaragua, scans the card with a puzzled look on her face before settling on a picture of a pencil.
“Pen-cil” she says.
“Muy bien Carla,” praises Barrett, “Muy bien.”
Another student rattles off a dozen or so of the pictures in English with great aplomb.
Barrett gives her a huge high-five.
“She is from Honduras, and has come so far,” says Barrett. “Her family used to live here, then went back to Honduras, and now she’s back. I used to teach her at Buckingham Elementary.”
Barrett’s is one of the growing numbers of English Language Learners (ELL) classes offered in Worcester County Public Schools.
Barrett is one of 12 teachers throughout the county who are working with students who don’t speak English as their primary language.
There are 159 students in the program this year in Worcester County (from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade), according to the county’s Coordinator of Instruction Angela Paris, and the number of students and the wide range of backgrounds the teachers must work with is rising steadily with each passing year.
“There are 14 different languages this year in the program,” said Barrett. “Everything from Spanish to Japanese to Tagalog (Phillipines) and Mung (Vietnamense). When I grew up in Worcester County, there wasn’t anywhere near the diversity that we have now.”
The Growing Need
In 2012-13, there were more than 59,000 ELL students in Maryland state public schools, which marked a 120% increase from a decade earlier.
The number of ELL students in schools nationwide has risen steadily since its implementation that coincided with the “No Child Left Behind” curriculum and the US Department of Education’s Title III program. In Worcester County, as those numbers have increased, more resources have been dedicated to ensure that these students don’t have to face the challenges both in and out of the classroom alone.
“The differences in our cultures is just so vast,” said Barrett, “but we are the conduit that helps them link together their culture and language with ours. We basically are trying to get to know them and help them feel like they can be a part of the American school system. They’ve got to learn to speak it and comprehend English and then they have to be able to read and write it, too.”
There are five different levels in the ELL program, essentially ranging from kids who can’t speak any English (Level 1) to students who have almost mastered the language and tested out of the program entirely.”
“I have kids this year at each and every level,” said Barrett, “and I try to spend a little time with each of them daily because the repetition of working with them every day goes so far. There are many interesting challenges, but it is so incredibly rewarding. The amount of English that Carla has picked up in a week is amazing.”
Easing The Culture Shock
Some of the ELL students have their work modified throughout the day to help them handle and understand what is going on. In many cases, students come from households where the parents speak even less English than they do.
Oftentimes, the students are given fewer questions to tackle, but all in English.
“They have hardly any help at home,” says Barrett, “so modifying the workload helps make it manageable so they can do it independently. But, Worcester County is lucky because in other parts of the state, where they have so many more ELL students, they only have five or six ELL teachers for all of those kids.”
Still, language isn’t the only hurdle these kids face.
Almost all of the kids at the table admit that while they can easily keep up with the pace of the regular American classroom, the differences from their native countries can be a bit overwhelming.
“We didn’t have any computers at my school,” says Diana, an 11-year-old student from Mexico, “and most of the schools have no playgrounds and no specials like art or music.”
Angela Paris notes that while the program focuses on helping the students transition from their “L1” (primary language) to their “L2” (English), students are not discouraged from continuing to speak their native language at home.
“We just want them to continue to communicate with their families in their native language as they keep working hard at learning English,” said Paris. “If they tried to go home speak what little bit they knew in English to their parents who, in most cases, know even less, we’d have a terrible communication breakdown in the home.”
Helping Them Thrive
Barrett says as the students grow in confidence in their ability as English speakers, she says they often begin helping the students who are just beginning their journey of transitioning into the culture and the school system.
This point is apparent as the room begins to fill with older kids who are helping Carla pronounce the English words for some of the classroom objects on her square bingo card.
There are giggles, and smiles, and high fives amongst the students.
“They are such amazing kids,” she said, “and they are so willing and eager to learn about our culture and are excited to have the ability to go to school in an environment like this. This is like Disney World for many of them, but we really want to help them be proud of where they are from and be able to do really well now that they are here.”