Erica Garcia, an emergent bilingual English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher, faces unique challenges everyday to make sure her students who struggle with understanding English thrive in school. 

For an English-based school, there are a lot of Spanish or foreign language speakers, so challenges and barriers between students and teachers are common. 

“They’re gonna struggle,” Garcia said. “You have to keep in mind as well that some of these kids are ESL students because their home language is English. They might have been born here in the states, and they’ve always come to an American school, but their home language is Spanish and they listen to their Spanish music and their Spanish movies. Their brain thinks in Spanish.”

Emergent Bilingual teaching is the process of teaching foreign speaking students English. 

“Emergent bilingualism is a new term we are using instead of limited language proficiency. We changed it because we wanted a more positive connotation to it.” Garcia said.

The teachers and counselors provide tools to help educate the students that need them when they’re in the classroom, not just students who speak Spanish. 

“If they are Spanish speakers they will be put into a Spanish speaker class, they might be put into a reading class, and they have different pull outs that help them with their language,”  Counselor Anna- Marie Trotter said. “So we have students who don’t speak Spanish at all and speak languages like Russian and we have some who speak Chinese or Korean, so we have a lot of different students from different places because this is a big military town. So in addition to some of those courses they get their pull outs with Ms. Garcia or Ms. Campbell; that’s where they get their support there.”

The applications for most colleges are only in English and it’s up to the foreign speaking students to figure out what they must do in order to be successful and get into the college they want to. 

“Applying for college like we were saying the application itself. Even beyond that just finding the information because if English isn’t your first language and you want to take a tour of the campus and you show up the tour guide is probably going to give it in English,” College and Readiness counselor Lauren Kiesling said. 

Therefore, even outside of high school there are even more challenging barriers to get over, regarding the college admissions process. Unless the college is targeted towards foreign speaking students, they are faced with the challenge of navigating college alone.

“It’s up to the student to translate it into a language they understand once you get to the university,” Kiesling said. “There’s no one there to tell students that they have to figure it out on their own.”