Thread: Bilingual teachers tough to find

Bilingual teachers tough to find

10:35 AM CDT on Sunday, March 29, 2009

Associated Press

DALLAS -- Texas school districts are struggling to find teachers to lead bilingual programs in a widening array of languages.

As districts' language diversity expands beyond Spanish, qualified teachers fluent in English and languages such as Vietnamese and Arabic are difficult to find.

"The teacher shortage that was there for Spanish now translates to other languages," Shannon Terry, Garland Independent School District's director of English as a Second Language (ESL) and bilingual education, told The Dallas Morning News.

The state requires any school district with at least 20 students who speak a language other than English in a grade level to provide bilingual education in that language.

Garland has had enough Vietnamese-speaking students to trigger the bilingual requirement for more than a decade, but the district has been unable to find the teachers, the district got exemptions from the state.

Next year, the district will start a bilingual Vietnamese pre-kindergarten program. To meet the district's Vietnamese language needs at all elementary grade levels, Terry estimated they would need about 45 bilingual teachers.

Without bilingual programs many districts put the students in ESL classes where students speaking a variety of languages learn together from a teacher who often does not speak their language.

The Texas Education Agency has found 140 different languages are spoken among the state's students. A decade earlier, it had data on only 10 languages.

Statewide, Spanish is followed by Vietnamese, Arabic and Urdu as the most prevalent languages of students learning English.

In 2007, the State Board for Educator Certification added Vietnamese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Russian to the bilingual program.
http://www.kvue.com/news/top/stories/03 ... d3271.html

We don't need bilingual teachers. We need illegal foreign-speakers to leave our country and legal foreign speakers need to pay for their own education at a private facility. It was their choice to come here, not ours.

Being required to educate anyone who can show up at the school house steps is proving to be a disaster! Not only do we educate them, we placate them by offering instruction in their native tongues.

Where does this insanity end?

When I was growing up, non-English speaking students were a rare exception that could be helped on a case by case basis without affecting school district budgets very much. Now, if you want to find out what happened to art, field trips, gifted and talented, and so on, just take a look at ESL.

Bilingual teachers tough to find

Who cares!

Bilingual teachers tough to find

You wait and see. The next step will be to use H1-B visas to import teachers from every third world country on this planet in an effort to fill this so called bilingual need.

Originally Posted by NoBueno

Bilingual teachers tough to find

You wait and see. The next step will be to use H1-B visas to import teachers from every third world country on this planet in an effort to fill this so called bilingual need.

I bet you are right. Our Government told colleges to steer people away from nursing. They stopped 50,00 from becoming one.HEN they went and brought in 50,000 India(n) recently graduated nurses. They get paid less than we do. One more job that our country gives to people other than Americans.
When Amnesty comes they will have to pay them the same. That's the only part I like about it. I want the business owners that hire illegals to be screwed too!

Several districts are already bringing in H-1B teachers. Rob Sanchez sent out a newsletter on it recently.