“Newcomer students like Perla and Luis are especially likely to fall into this downward educational spiral if their schools don’t provide a socially welcoming and academically structured and scaffolded environment that can meet their particular emotional and developmental needs. To bridge the disconnect that such students may feel between their lives at home and in school, teachers and other school support staff need to bring a sensitivity to the cultural and psychological transitions they may be struggling with in both environments.” (Goodman, 2018, p. 64)

This passage really hit home. As a student teacher at an ESL placement, we encounter students with similar situations from this chapter. I’m mostly exposed to Asian newcomers, or emergent bilinguals that face emotional, social, and academic challenges parallel to those mentioned by Goodman. I’ve also read articles assigned by my TESOL courses about how staff and schools don’t provide enough of a welcoming environment, don’t take the time to get to know students, and don’t use scaffolded pedagogy to support “emotional and developmental needs.” Our newcomers, emergent students may be facing complicated situations that lead to emotional stress, like, trying to keep up with/learn the new language, rebuilding family ties after reunification, missing their old home/routines, and cultural transitions. These challenges that students are faced with can be dealt with, but as educators it can seem hard to give support since we know we’re not with our students outside of class, and we can’t hold their hand throughout the day. But, the chapter includes some ways in which educators can help these students develop new language and at the same time learn from them on a personal level through group work and journals. I also got a little excited when they mentioned pair work and allowing translanguaging because we just spoke about it in our last class. This is an approach that I haven’t been able to use yet since my placement is a school where they strongly encourage students to only speak English, but I definitely look forward to applying it in my future classroom. Even though I find useful the suggestions from the chapter in helping support newcomers, I wonder what activities can other content teachers use or create to support or get to know their emergent bilinguals?