A:
The answer to your concerns is not as simple
as it may appear. First of all, the internationally adopted children
are certainly the English language learners and they will be for
a long time (depending on the age and circumstances), but they
are not bilingual indeed in most cases. Let's look at an example.
A typical international adoptee of a school or pre-school age
will normally arrive with a native language, which:
- Will not be supported in the adoptive
family
- Typically limited in vocabulary and developmentally
below expected level
- Delayed in cognitive/academic aspect
Naturally, there is no prier knowledge of
the English language in existence too. All that makes adopted
child an ELL. And as such, any adoptee is eligible for ESL automatically
based on the federal law.
On the other hand, any adoptee is normally
not bilingual, because their functional native language is lost
within weeks in the younger children or in several months in
the older ones. Due to this abruptness of the language loss
and inadequate native language base, there is nothing there
practically to build upon: they have to start almost from scratch
in learning the new language. And they normally (excluding the
cases of language disabilities) do this very fast, because the
new language is necessary for their survival and because they
experience total immersion, including support from the family,
which can offer proper and intense modeling of conversational
patters in the English language.
"Do these children need any help at school
with learning English under these circumstances?" you may
ask. Oh, yes! They do need a lot of help with the cognitive/academic
English, which does not necessarily come to them easily because
of their background. Do ESL programs specifically address the
cognitive English learning of internationally adopted children?
Not really! But they need to do that to be useful for such a specific
category of ELL as internationally adopted children, otherwise
these children are better off in a regular class studying school
subjects and concentrating on cognitive/academic English there.
You may need to reinforce specific cognitive/academic language
training part of your curriculum and show the school that your
approach is not only necessary for international adoptees in this
case, but will be helpful and proactive in terms of preventing
much greater trouble these children may experience in the next
grades--the Cumulative Cognitive Deficit (CCD), if left without
any help.
Here are a couple of links to my articles
that may be useful. You can always print them out for your colleagues,
if necessary.
