ABSTRACT
Teaching bilingual children is rewarding and exciting. Watching a child acquiring the English necessary to express him/herself in your classroom can give teachers a wonderful sense of achievement. Knowing that you have the responsibility for enabling a bilingual child to access a monolingual curriculum can be daunting however. As Megan commented in Chapter 5, ‘I feel this challenge and I don’t have the background’. One of the aims of this book has been to give mainstream teachers some of the background necessary to begin to overcome that challenge, but there will always be further questions as every teacher wants to do the best for every child and every child is different. This chapter will address some of the recurring questions that I have been asked by teachers about teaching bilingual children. The chapter sets out to help teachers to build on their existing knowledge so that they do not view meeting the needs of every bilingual child as a completely new challenge each time. Photocopiable formats are included for analysing the potential difficulties of texts and tasks and for planning collaborative work. Alongside the photocopiable sheets for planning targeted language support across the curriculum in Chapter 5 and the assessment sheets in Chapter 6, these can be used by teachers of any stage and any subject to help meet the needs of bilingual children in their classrooms.
