Thing 35: Supporting English Language Learners

I've been working on this Thing for a while. I had come across some of these articles and strategies in my work on my administrative license, but I still didn't feel like it was enough. Most of the articles address large populations of ENL students, and many assume the first language is Spanish. This is not my experience in my small school. When I first started in this school seven years ago, there were very few minority students - period - and even fewer ENL students. Our ENL teacher was very part-time. We now have a full time ENL teacher for just our building of 310 students. Our ENL students, though, are so varied it feels impossible to meet their needs in the library. I have families from India, Pakistan, Armenia, Turkey, China, Korea, and Venezuela. I also have a family of three from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who have the additional challenge of not being able to read or write in French, which is the language of their prior education. As a side note, a major complication in providing instruction to these students is their exposure to trauma. This adds another layer of consideration when planning for these students.
One of my major concerns has been communicating library expectations to families. I have approached this in several ways. I worked with the ENL teacher to translate my introductory library letter, as well as letters about missing books as it came up. One piece of advice I read in an article was to send home a picture of the cover of a missing book, which has been extremely helpful - and successful as several books have been returned since using this strategy.
Something I struggle with is that I wish I had the ability to provide materials in students' native languages.  One of the basic tenets of ENL instruction is that students are taught in English. This often leads people to assume they should just check out books in English, too. However, it is important that students have a strong foundation in their first language in order to build their skills in English. It seems to me that having reading materials in their first language would be beneficial. However, given the size of my school and relatively wide-range of first languages, my budget doesn't allow for that. I am hoping that with our recent migration to Follett Destiny, with a more powerful capacity for ILL that I will be better able to meet these needs. I understand that there are ebook options, but the truth is that they just aren't the same. They are often of lower quality, and research shows that reading ebooks is simply not the same as reading print. However, I will certainly share resources from the International Children's Digital Library!
I found several ideas to pursue in this post: 10 Ways to Support ELLs in the School Library. I'm proud to say I read Duck for Turkey Day this year around Thanksgiving to my first graders. They loved it, and we had a good discussion about it. I am planning on including more visuals in my storytimes for younger students, and, as mentioned above, I have made minor changes in how I communicate with families. Moving forward, I am planning to promote audiobooks more to students in general, but ELL students in particular. I will plan a meeting with the ENL teacher to show her how to access digital audiobooks through OverDrive in particular.