Chapter 1 English Language Learner gives a description on who is considered as English Learner, how to welcome them to English Classroom and how to teach them using English language. And here I found that cultural understanding plays important role.
On other part, the book also suggest that teacher can allow student of non-native english to use their own language at the first few meeting. But the question is ‘can teacher understand the student’s language?’. It could be very difficult if there were many children with many different languages.
On the last part, the author gives description on the policy on using billingual language to accommodate student need as well as to make their learning abilities on content knowledge a little bit easier. I think this billingual program is good to those who have little ability of English, or new comer to the United States. However, this program is not for those who can understand and speak english well, even though their native language is not English.
In reflection to my own experience, native-english teacher who can speak my language--Indonesia—is a lot easier to understand and to follow instruction than those who can not speak my language. I have two teachers. Both come from the U.S. One teacher can speak my language while the other can not. I found out that I can easily follow and understand the first teacher. When I do not understand I can ask him to say in my language. This help me very much.
The other teacher can not speak or understand my language. I found that it is difficult to follow him. I think this is not only affected by his lack of understanding of my language but also by his lack of understanding the way we speak, the way we express my mind into word. So cultural and sosiolinguistic understanding does play important role.
Note: this chapter is not too usefull for me, because I am not the native English speaker but I will teach English in Indonesia, whose English is foreign Language.
