I just wrote an extensive post about my latest unit, more for me than you really, but I wanted to draw your attention to one particular student and his slow but steady progress. This student has been struggling because he is in eighth grade and can understand very little English and speaks even less. He has been struggling to keep up and understand the overwhelming amount of information that is coming at him all day, everyday, from every direction.

In my ESL class, we have been working slowly with bite size chunks of language and information, trying to find ways that he can express himself using images, video, and yes Chinese. Sometimes, I just want students to feel like they are participating and staying caught up. I wanted Alex to have a success. Create something and be able to express his thoughts about it without the pressure and frustration of doing it in a foreign language.

We set up his blog with a Google Translator so he could start blogging like the rest of us in Chinese! I could then translate his posts and comment back in both languages. I understand that translation is a crutch for language acquisition and that it is rarely accurate, but at this place and time he needs a crutch because he is tried of always falling and crawling on the ground.

Through a variety of tools Alex was able to create a poster, write his reflection, and leave a short video post about his frustration. He was very embarrassed by his video, but smiled after we looked at all the work he had done and parted with high fives!

I am proud of him and hope that his blog will show him that if he takes small steps the language will come. I will continue to let him write in Chinese for some posts, when others must be in English as a way to balance his acquisition and his need to express himself.

So please help encourage him. Take a look at his latest post here. And leave him a comment. Write it in English then translate it into Chinese and post both comments. Let him see that his words have an audience regardless of what language they are in. Thanks.