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.
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