Culturally and linguistically diverse students are non-English or limited-English proficient learners who are enrolled in education programs. CLD students may also come from homes or communities where English is not the native or primary communication language. In essence, the students speak an array of languages thus exhibiting their diverse cultural, social, and economic origins or backgrounds. In teaching such students, pre-instructional considerations have to be taken into account in order to successfully aid them in not only learning but also developing language skills as well as mastering grade-level and standards-based content.
CLD students have various learning needs that require competent comprehension as well as specialized pre-instructional approaches. Ordinarily exposing students to the American culture as well as the English language is not sufficient for academic success. To this end, pre-instructional strategies that boost instruction and assessment ought to be based on comprehension via meaningful activities and assignments. The instructor or teacher needs to interrelate the student’s primary culture with the content to be learned. This is particularly important because culture learning affects the learning process and the content of instruction. The instructional content related to culture that the instructor needs to teach involves tenets to be taught explicitly. These tenets need to be highlighted for each topic so as to present the whole picture to the students thus fostering comprehension of the subject.
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The intermarriage between culture and content can be achieved through celebrating cultural and linguistic differences in the classroom. This could further be done through sharing their cultural identities, lives, and experiences, which builds trust and bolsters stronger and cohesive relationships fundamental to learning. One of the community dynamics is socialization as well as health, which involves mental and emotional health. The instructor could incorporate the cultural diversity of the students through providing instances in world cultures, geography, arts, as well as community-based games. In essence, students take pride in seeing that their cultures are being taught in class. This encourages socialization and interaction that is based on appreciating each other’s backgrounds. Ultimately, it results in boosted confidence and self-esteem towards learning a new language and culture.
Students from diverse backgrounds most often than not feel anxious and threatened in their new environments due to the grammatical errors or heavy accent. Alleviating this requires the instructor to set up a home environment where these CLD students can feel secure and comfortable. One way of doing this as described above is including the student’s culture in the curriculum. Another approach involves creating educational links between what the students already know from their prior schooling experiences and the new information. This could be achieved through setting programs that involve one on one interviews of the students accompanied by the parents. In this situation, questions regarding what was taught as well as previous performances, successes, and challenges will be asked and answers noted down. This helps the instructor determine the student’s weaknesses as well as strengths. Subsequently, the instructor will be able to create a functional connection that calms the students in the sense that they will feel they are on the right track in terms of learning the new language. Moreover, providing constant support and feedback on how the student has performed based on the challenging standards before teaching a new topic is crucial.
Assessing students based on the CLASSIC Program could involve the use of learning logs, which aid instructors in monitoring the students’ writing and vocabulary development. As such, instructors are able to comprehend what the students do and do not understand. Since learning involves receiving feedback from the instructors, the logs should have a section in which the teachers can directly respond to the students’ progress through simple comments and encouragements. Verbal scaffolding is yet another way of assessing the students through questioning techniques that prompt higher levels of thinking as they advance their language skills. Additionally, K-W-L chart, as well as text surveys can serve as great assessment tools important in deducing new knowledge and concepts needed in teaching the students.
In developing assessments that are geared towards the best interest of the students, the instructor can use portfolio in communicating with other teachers on the measures to be implemented to assess and improve the students’ learning. Since the assessments are student-based, the portfolios should be able to allow comments and feedback from the student regarding their plans on how to improve their learning experience. In addition, the use of visible criteria will fundamentally enable the students to familiarize with the scoring criteria and even get involved in creating the assessments criteria in areas such as word problem.
