Cultures and Languages in Education
M2U5A1
The
enrollment for school year 2015-16 at ICSA was 430 students coming from 58
countries, in which there is 12 percent of students who are identified as English
language learners (ELLs). In this writing, I focus on the two groups amongst
ELLs, Japanese students coming from Japan and Lebanese students growing up in
Ivory Coast, the host country.
For
the Japanese students, most of them were born in Japan and have been received
some certain levels of the Japanese education system. They speak their mother
tongue and write Japanese scripts. The written language uses three
scripts. These are the kanji (Chinese characters, pictures representing
words), hiragana (for Japanese words), and the katakana (for foreign
"loan" words), which are syllable scripts that use modified Chinese
characters. Romaji (Latin alphabet) also gets frequent use in modern
usage of Japanese for things like logos, entering text into computers,
advertising, and company names. Japanese characters were originally written by
brush, and later by pen and pencil, so the stroke order is important. When
writing by hand, and particularly in cursive or calligraphic styles, using
proper stroke order is crucial. Additionally, some characters look very similar
but are written differently. Students who practice both reading and writing can
easily distinguish these characters, but students who only practice reading may
find it difficult.
Japanese
community in this school is well known by their harmony in any event or project
we do. Their children come to this school following their parents’ work,
business, or mission. Japanese students are recognized by their discipline,
time punctuation, good behavior, and collectivism. They respect teachers,
seniors, and masculinity. In group work, they are motivated team players,
attentive listeners, and critical thinkers. They follow decisions of teachers
and group leaders, and rarely challenge superiors in public. Almost Japanese
students work hard and always try their best in any assignments, homework, and
assessments. Parents send and pick up their children every day, and always find
time to discuss with teachers about their child’s issues, progress, and
integration. Japanese parents care not only about their child’s education but
also school’s events. They voluntarily work as room parents, participate in
PTO’s activities, respond immediately to classroom’s projects or
assignments.
In
contrast, the Lebanese population in Ivory Coast is large. They immigrated to
this country since 1920 and began with commerce and trading, then expanded
their scale of enterprise and began to displace independent European merchants
and gradually dominate the local economy. The majority of their children, who
are born and growing up here either join French schools or American school.
Generally, Lebanese children speak Arabic at home and
fluently French as the local language. Arabic belongs to the group of Semitic
alphabetical scripts in which mainly the consonants are represented in writing,
while the markings of vowels is optional. The basic Arabic alphabet
contains 28 letters. Many letters look similar but are distinguished from one
another by dots. Both printed and written Arabic are cursive and Arabic
alphabets are developed as a form of art, calligraphic styles.
Lebanese
community in this school is popular and children registered in ELL program are
those who switch from the French schools or just start school from home.
Children often go to school every day with their caregivers. Parents are only present
in Parent Teacher Conferences. For some families, the communication with
parents has to go either through caregivers or interpreters since parents speak
French or Arabic while teachers speak English. Since children depend or spend
most of their time at home with caregivers, they can hardly exhibit independent
character at school, especially during meal times and personal care or
responsibility. While working with peers, children tend to be bossy or want to
be group leaders. When being placed as team members, they find difficult to
collaborate with others.
Relating
to the development of ethnic attitude, both groups have strong self-identity
and self-esteem in this school community. Even though they are ELLs at school
and remain their primary language at home, their self-confidence increases over
times. What make them different are the education from home or from parents,
the readiness for school, the life skills, and the progress due to frequently
skipping school. It is visible in meal times, Japanese students demonstrate
their independence, neatness, and table manners while Lebanese counterparts
need helps to complete their meal. Some Lebanese students skip many school days
for some leisure reason and as its results, they hardly catch up with the
class’s progress. Additionally, the level of involvement of parents in their
child education and progress make them different. While Japanese parents often
find teachers after school to understand about their child’s homework or
assignments in order to help them at home, teachers have to search for Lebanese
parents to discuss about their child’s progress and issues if any.
The
greatest challenge for both of them can be evidenced in gaps in language
learning and content learning. On the other hand, ELLs have some limitation in
being exposed to another optional world language comparing with their
mainstream counterparts. In order to address this issue, our ELL department
introduced a new approach called “Inclusion”, which will be tested with some
lower grade levels. In this model, ELL teachers will join teaching with some
key subject teachers, meaning that ELLs will learn content language with both
content and ELL teachers. It benefits both ELL students and teachers since they
align with academic and content language.
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