Aspects of teaching English Language Learners to be Literate in English; the problem areas where these students really struggle

This picture illustrates referring back to a students native language while teaching them English 

Learning a new language is far from easy. Especially at a early elementary school age; which is where more and more of these English Language Learners and first starting to learn English. Since proceeding further on my research I have learned about where a lot of the problem areas are for these student.

In fact before teaching students that are English Language Learners I can highly recommend looking at the performance in their native language. Through research I have learned that there is a strong relationship between these students literacy performance in their native language and the English language. If they perform lower in literacy in their native language chances are it will also reflect how they perform when working on English literacy skills. This can go both ways though if a student is stronger in one area of literacy in their native language this could show positively as they could do in that part of literacy in English. This patterns cover a variety of literacy areas including, oral proficiency, pseudo word reading, reading comprehension, reading strategies, spelling and writing.  Therefore, I have learned though my research it important to refer back to students native language.

I found the information mentioned above as a good foundation for my research and to keep in mind as a future educator. One of the main problems with learning literacy in English as a new language for these learners, is a lot of aspects in the English language and can be very different in other languages. Phonemic awareness is one area these students may struggle. "Children's minds are trained to categorize phonemes in their first language, which may conflict with English phonemes(Antunez 1). For example, Spanish-speaking children may speak, read, and write ch when sh should be used because in Spanish, these two combinations produce the same phoneme." Other aspects  similar to this could be metaphors as mentioned in my annotated bibliography. There are different words in vocabulary that we could be trying to teach these students that could have a completely different meaning in their native language. The article I read used the example of "bread" are a symbol of power here in America but, it could have a completely connotation in that students culture. 

Another aspect I learned about was the aspect of homophone, homonyms, and homographs. These are everyday words and can be very confusing when trying to teach ELL students to be literate in English. Thus being so because words can have double meanings and double sounds. One word can be spelled exactly the same and then have two different pronunciations. This can cause a lot of confusion for these students. It is important as a teacher to be prepared to explain these differences and help your ELL students understand.