Teaching Multilingual Children

This week, I read "Teaching Multilingual Children" by Collier.I believe her main argument in this piece was the fact that teachers should be bilingual. I do personally agree with her myself. She does have a very valid point. In today's world there is just so much cultural diversity in school systems, and more and more kids are bilingual or do not speak English as their first language. With that being said, it definitely is a great thing for teachers to know more than one language; it will make it easier to communicate with certain students. I have been doing my Service Learning project at a diverse school, and I did actually get to see a classroom with many bilingual kids; some even who have English as a second language. The teacher, however, only spoke English with no knowledge of any other language. Even ESL teachers do not have to be bilingual or know any other language besides English. I believe, however, if they do it will make their job much easier.

I found a picture of Collier, and you can learn more information about her here