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Last year, ESL teacher Diana Ciro watched with pride as her shy students presented a Day of the Dead altar to their entire school, says Vitoria Johnson, Lead Reporter for La Voz de Chatham.
Wendi Pillars, a Jordan-Matthews ESL teacher, writes notes to her students on J-M hotspot bus earlier this year.
Photo: Submitted
But now, after several months of remote and hybrid learning, she worries about just how far behind they’ve fallen.
Ciro is the only English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher at Silk Hope School, a K-8 school located in Siler City. This year, she’s teaching ESL to 23 Hispanic students between the 1st and 8th grades. Some, she added, are also EC students.
“It’s definitely very hard, very challenging,” she told the News + Record. “It has proven awful for the kids because they’re falling behind, most of them. The lack of contact and socialization — it’s been awful. We cannot hide that. That’s the reality.”
For some ESL teachers across Chatham County, remote learning has been a disaster. Teaching ESL involves a lot of body language, specialized attention and immersion — and beyond depriving teachers of those tools, remote learning has also forced them to grapple with students’ limited technological literacy and motivation...
Since making the transition to remote learning, she said many students are no longer motivated to complete their work; others procrastinate on short assignments, and for the most part, she’s seen their drive to improve sputter and die.
“Curiosity is gone, I think,” she said. “Some students will ask right away, ‘What does this word mean?’ But I haven’t seen that as much where you’re like, ‘Do you understand what that word is?’”
Source: The Chatham News + Record
