I found this article to be interesting and resourceful.  While growing up I learned to speak English and Spanish simultaneously.  The majority of the time in my household my family and I would use Spanish as our primary language.  However, while at school I would speak mostly English.  To my recollection I do not remember being taught strategies such as Morphology.  I do recall making comparisons of English words to Spanish words and noticing there were many similarities among words.  This article helps make a great point of this and I think it would work excellent with ESL students especially with the beginning English speakers.   I think students are most likely trying to make these connections and relate the new information to something they know on their own anyway.   Making these connections and relating words can in fact help to remember the language much better.  There are several Spanish words that are spelled very similar to English words and mean the same.  There is a relationship between comprehension and vocabulary and if students know and understand the vocabulary they will be able to comprehend their readings at a higher level.  Vocabulary is very important and should be enforced throughout every grade level not only k-2.  When students are at an understanding level of the vocabulary word, they then can begin decoding words and this becomes easier for them with the more practice and making the relationships among words.

Making a list of these even if you don’t know Spanish could be beneficial to use with your ESL students.  These students are the ones that struggle the most in school because when they go home and they don’t have sufficient help from their parents.   It may even be that their parents speak very little English or not at all.  The only exposure these children receive could be in the classroom.  I agree with the article when they said this strategy could be confusing for students who don’t speak Spanish therefore there is no need to emphasize this strategy with them.  On the other hand, many schools are implementing learning different languages at a young age and making the same connections from English to Spanish could be helpful for Spanish teachers.  I think Morphology can be a useful strategy to implement in the elementary classroom and students could help close the achievement gap.  Using strategies such as these can help students achieve grade level expectations.

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