They include Hebrew, Spanish, Russian, Ukranian, Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Polish, Khmer, Vietnamese and Hungarian. Joy Karol, the ESL teacher and Wanda Bender, the ESL aide, work together to provide daily support for the students. There are additional bilingual aides who provide support as needed. The ESL staff work with children of diverse language backgrounds using English as the language of instruction. Learning English includes both communicative and academic language skills.
Communicative skills are the conversational and social skills.
Academic skills include vocabulary development, basic reading and writing skills, and reading and writing in the content areas, such as social studies and science. Another goal for the ESL staff is to help facilitate communication between our bilingual families and the school. In our program we affirm Additive Bilingualism. We support each student's native language and add a second language by developing proficiency in English. The second language is not replacing the first language.