Responses to Language Diversity; Prompt 6

The world of education in my eyes is taking on a whole new level due to one major aspect: the growing number of English Language Learners in our schools. Having a language barrier between students and parents and teachers can become very troubling at times because the point of a message may never come across and can literally get lost in translation! In my SL classroom, I do not see alot of tolerance (not the exact word I want to use but close enough!) for any language other than English. Now this could be due to the fact that I came into this classroom more than halfway through the school year and the teacher may be expecting her students to be only speaking English at this point. I am sure that if I was in the classroom early in the school year I would see a more tolerant level for other languages in the classroom.
During one visit to my SL classroom, I had a difficult time keeping all three of my students on task. We started off playing Sight-Word Bingo and of course all three wanted to be the 'Caller' of the game, so to settle things I appointed myself as the Caller. After about twenty minutes of Bingo, we moved on to read a book the teacher had requested we read together. Again all three students wanted to read first so I just appointed the child to my right as the reader. This student decided that they were jsut going to go ahead and read the whole book, even though I kept stopping the student and telling the student that the others needed a chance to read. The student who was second to read took matters into her own hands and decided to read over the first student! So I had two students reading the same story at the same time and they were not listening to my instruction. Finally I interrupted them and said we are moving onto the next activity. I usually find it difficult to have my students read books, they much prefer to play the games and do the activities the teacher leaves for our group so introducing a board game got them to listen to me. But of course there were issues with the board game: one student wanted the star-shaped game piece, another wanted to continue reading the story and another one wanted to go first in the game. Some how they figured out who got what game piece and who would go first themselves and we began to play. This visit I found very trying but I did not give up and I kept doing my best to keep my students occupied with the materials the teacher left for us. As a future teacher, I know I will run into days like this in my classroom and I will need to be able to keep my composure and keep my students on task, so this visit was good practice for this!!