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Milpitas is a city with a large pool of immigrants, and young people arriving in the United States need to learn how to communicate properly and adjust to a new school system. The English Language Development (ELD) program is designed to assist these students to integrate into their new life.
With 70 to 100 students enrolled in the ELD program, English learners make up a significant population of MHS, ELD teacher Amy Huddleston said. The ELD program, at its core, is designed to develop speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills at an accelerated rate, she explained.
“The first level, Emerging ELD, is all about speaking,” Huddleston said. “We want them to be conversational when they leave that class. ELD 1, which is taught by Mr. Payne, is much more reading-focused — being able to summarize texts and being able to understand when you’re reading something. When they leave that class, the expectation is that they can write a simple paragraph.”
In ELD 2 the students begin to read novels and analyze text, similar to a mainstream English class, but with added support, Huddleston said. The process is slow, and students are guided through it, but the expectation is that after they complete ELD 2, they will be placed in a Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English (SDAIE) class, so they must be ready to read and compose easy and small essays, she added. At the end of the day, the students’ biggest challenge is communicating and connecting with people outside the program, Huddleston said.
“I think it’s very hard to make friends outside of the ELD classes for them,” Huddleston said. “They are kind of limited by who they can communicate with, and navigation of the whole high school experience is a lot more challenging for them. We have to keep an eye on them. Are they able to advocate for themselves if they’re in the wrong class, or if a teacher is being unfair to them?”
The challenge for ELD students is that they’re not exposed to other people at school , and the interactions are usually limited because of the language barrier. They are not given opportunities to be exposed to things they have not experienced before because they are usually all together all the time for their classes, ELD teacher Yeonsoo Kim said.
“The (mainstream) teachers get upset with us because we don’t know their language and we don’t understand them,” ELD student Daniela Valderrama said in an interview translated from Spanish. “They come here to teach and do their job, and with us who don’t speak their language, they feel frustrated.”
It is important that the teacher who teaches ELD speaks the student’s language, which is currently not the case with any of the ELD teachers, who can only speak basic Spanish sentences, Valderrama said. The current ELD teachers can not directly explain and help the students and instead rely on an assistant to act as a third-party translator, she said. As a result, there is confusion about the instructions being given and students might not fully understand the material being taught, she said.
“I always ask for ELD tutors in this class who speak Spanish or Vietnamese because they can help students,” Kim said. “(Students) are not on the same level, and all of them are at a different place because they have different educational backgrounds.”
Despite the language barrier and other educational concerns, being an ELD student also has its advantages, Huddleston said. ELD students have their year schedules filled out before most students and receive priority attention from course counselors, she said. Unlike most students who can only take MHS courses over the summer to recuperate credits, ELD students can take summer classes in order to help them catch up with their English, she said. The school also makes sure ELD teachers have sufficient materials, and the school sets aside a portion of the budget for the ELD program every year, Huddleston added.