Immigrant Students and Teaching Diverse Learners (8)

There are many school and community resources to aid immigrant students. I'm sure I don't know of all of them, but there certainly are a few that I do know of. First, within the school, guidance and administration should be able to help - these are the people who would be able to find a translator for the students if necessary, or to order exam materials in their native language if possible (for example, many of the New York state regents exams come in Spanish, as well as a few other languages). Several websites that Dr. Smirnova linked for the class are also handy, such as the National Association for Bilingual Education, and the National Association for Multicultural Education. Lastly, I want to address the obvious elephant in the room -- Google Translate. Google Translate can be a wonderful tool for understanding another language, as long as however you use it does not include "hard translating" things. While the way certain phrases come through may not include proper grammar, or may include a wrong word here or there, I have found that you can often still glean the general meaning of something that one has put through Google Translate, and that ability to turn something incomprehensible into something understandable, makes it a valuable tool to add to one's repertoire.