Teaching Writing to Bilingual Students

 

                In Fu’s chapter he brings up a great point when he talks about his experience of learning the English language, he says: “but was never taught how to write or barely wrote anything meaningful in English while learning English.”(Fu 14) I made the connection to the importance of writing and its importance whether learning a new language or just becoming better at your native language. I remember when I was younger and I began pre k, I was an English language learner. My first language was Spanish but fortunately for me I picked English quickly.  When I got a little older I went to an Elementary school in Providence that thought it was important for all students to know and learn Spanish. I remember making friends with kids in the ESL class and how little English they knew but I had the advantage of understanding them both ways. I look back thinking there was very little to no writing for the English language students learning Spanish and vice versa. I wonder how much more progress could those kids had if they practiced writing in the language often. I still keep in touch with some of the kids I met in the ESL class and ‘till this day they struggle with speaking and writing in English. The accents they had have gone away but you can tell they need more practice.

            I was fortunate enough to have lived with a Spanish speaking mother who reads, writes, and speaks English. But my mother never spoke to my siblings or myself in English; we were literally a bilingual home. My mother was very good at writing English back when I was a kid; granted she moved to New York from Dominican Republic at ten years old. My mother moved to Rhode Island at the age of twenty one and she said when she arrived to Providence almost nobody was Latino. So she was forced to write and speak in English and it was best for her to do so. As time passed more and more Dominicans from the Dominican Republic and other parts of the United States moved to Providence. As the result of the Dominican population there were more options for her and less opportunities to practice English because all her friends were now Spanish speakers. As my mother got older she got lost in speaking Spanish and not practicing writing in English and she had just finished beauty school which did not require much writing anyway. All of the application and parent forms from school she received were in English and of course everywhere we went and all but one channel on TV was in English. Somehow along the way my mom began to forget English. Today she still speaks, reads, and writes in English but it is not at its best. If my mother had to write in English more often leading up to today she would so much better at it. The key to learning another language is to write in it as much as possible. Just like the key to become a better writer is to write.