Transitional Bilingual Education

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In America today, 21% of K-12 students speak a language other than English at home and require some type of assistance to learn English in school. This equates to nearly 5 million students every year. The most common type of language assistance is an ELL or English Language Learner program. There are new and more effective solutions being practiced including Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE). Due to the rising numbers of non-native English speakers in the school system today, finding and implementing the best English acquisition program is key to helping these students be successful, which I feel is the Transitional Bilingual Education program because it will help students grasp English better, students stay on grade level and bilingualism is a skill to be developed and not hindered.
Transitional Bilingual Education is a program where non-native English speakers are taught in their native language while they are learning English. Their class consists of students who speak their native language so there is a classroom for every language represented at a school. The teacher uses the native language to explain and aid the students in learning English. With time, the teacher increasingly teaches in English until the teacher is teaching only in English. This usually occurs after 3 to 4 years in the program. After this, the student is transitioned into mainstream classes with their English-speaking peers. The main three goals of TBE programs are to keep their native language and become bilingual, learn English more effectively than without using their native language and eventually transition to a traditional, mainstream classroom.
There are many differences that make TBE and ELL programs different. In ELL, non-native ...

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...ain more and more non-native English speakers. Young students in the ELL or ESL programs are not being encouraged to keep their language but rather replace it as soon as possible with English. These students are seen as having a deficit but really this is just a unique fund of knowledge that increasingly will become a useful and desired skill. Being bilingual could help these students get jobs and set them up to be looked at as having a valuable resource in the future. Transitional Bilingual Education programs allow non-native English speaking students to learn their native language and become fluent and literate at the same time becoming fluent and literate in English.

Works Cited

(http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/05/what-is-the-future-of-spanish-in-the-united-states/)
http://www.fairus.org/issue/rising-immigrant-admissions-to-the-united-states

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