This year, the ESL program at Anderson welcomes a new teacher, Mrs. Mayra Ibarra-Kenny. Mrs. Ibarra-Kenny graduated from UT Austin in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education. She has been teaching in Austin ISD for five years now, with a total of eleven years of experience in education across different Texas school districts including Fort Worth and Hays CISD.
ESL, otherwise known as English as a Second Language, is a program that was first introduced in the 1920s. However, ESL programs weren’t implemented in schools across America until the late 1960s. The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 was passed to include a specific curriculum for students learning English. The curriculum for this program has changed over the years, but one thing has always stayed the same: the desire to help students.
ESL classes at Anderson contain students who speak many different languages, including Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, and French. Classes follow the planning unit provided by the district; this curriculum typically parallels the same curriculum as English classes, but with the help of extra support for the students. The goal of ESL is to help students understand and learn the English language by working on sentence structuring, paraphrasing, chunking, reading, listening and speaking at their given level.
When interviewing Mrs. Ibarra-Kenny, she mentioned that coming into Anderson, she had “a lot to think about” due to her unfamiliarity with teaching at a high school level. She felt she could be a “benefit for these students,” also adding that “they’re all going through the same experience, so they won’t feel isolated.”
Since coming to Anderson, Mrs. Ibarra-Kenny has found that her own experiences help her find common ground with her students. “With my background, having also been an English language learner in elementary school, I think it’s more beneficial to have somebody in the class [specifically providing language acquisition support] with just these students that are learning English.”
With introducing Mrs. Ibarra-Kenny to Anderson, she has already left an impact on the ESL program, and will continue to grow the program as her time continues here at Anderson.
