How to Learn About Your ELLs' Literacy Background

We start first with the families. Families know a lot about their children. So can we actually figure out what has been the background of these students? What has been their language experiences? What has been their literacy experiences? Can I conduct some family interviews, but do I know their language or not? Or do they speak the English language or not? Well, can I get a community helper? Can I get a school helper that knows the community, knows the language? Because right off the bat, that builds trust. And really this is about relationship building, building the trust and the relationship with our students and with our families. They are an important piece, important piece of the puzzle. They are part of our team to have great outcomes, academic outcomes, language and literacy outcomes for our students.

And some of the things we might want to ask is, “What language do you speak mostly at home? Can you tell me about your home language? Can you tell me if your child can read words or sentences or paragraphs or books? Did your child, before they come here, get to go to school and attend school on a regular basis?” Just really starting the conversation.

But also there might be some school records. Can we look at the school records? Maybe they came from another school, maybe they came from another district, or maybe they sent some of that paperwork from their home country.

But you know who else knows a lot about themselves? The students. We can also interview our own students and tell them, just like I'm getting interviewed today, you feel so special when you're being interviewed. We could do that with our students: “We're going to have an interview today. We're going to have a conversation so I can get to know you better.” Do you know what that does? That validates me in your classroom. You care about me. You care about who I am, where I come from, and you care that I succeed in this classroom. That says so much. What a wonderful way to start the school year knowing about that.