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ESL - English as a second language

ESL Department

The Brazos School for Inquiry and Creativity has strived to meet the demands of the increase in our Emergent Bilingual population on many levels. Our platform includes hiring outstanding educators to work directly with the EB students on a daily basis. We have certified teachers going into the general education classrooms to facilitate English Language Acquisition every day. Our goal is to have an ESL Teacher and an ESL Teacher assistant at each campus in the next ten years. Due to our growing ESL population the need for more personnel to meet that demand is necessary, and we are confident in our approach to meet that demand. Currently and going forward, our ESL model of content based ESL studies is approved by TEA and has shown to be effective in the academic year of 2021-2022. ESL teachers go into the general education classrooms and provide language supports and multisensory vocabulary retention strategies directly with each Emergent Bilingual student. Our district has enlisted the help of Cristina Woods; the ESL Specialist at Region 6, to train our entire teaching staff with effective research based ESL strategies in order to meet the state requirement to provide ESL support in all core subjects. We have begun our series of trainings this fall and will continue to collaborate and train our staff further throughout the year and in years to come. Also, we are in the early stages of organizing a former student mentoring program that will help encourage our new comers that do not speak any English when they arrive here at BSIC. This will give them reassurance from an ESL graduate that all things are possible and can be achieved with hard work and dedication. We have many fine candidates for this task that were former students here at BSIC, and I cannot wait to see which students decide to take this opportunity to serve others and to give back to their community. Our school wants to foster a sense of belonging and family as it has done since we opened our doors in the fall of 1999.

Please encourage your students to practice their English language acquisition by working on Imagine Learning with fidelity and consistency. This will be the greatest tool next to the visual bilingual dictionary that we have loaned students in our district. Please contact Laura Bolton if you need to sign out and borrow a visual dictionary for the year. We also have VOX Spanish/English dictionaries for students to borrow as well. All ESL students that use a visual bilingual dictionary may use it on the Reading STAAR test in the spring. They must be using it now in class and during exams in order to have this privilege.

Please visit Txel.org for any inquiries that you may have about the English Language Learning program in Texas. There are a myriad of resources to help families and students with second language acquisition.

Also, please feel free to contact Laura Bolton, the ESL Director, here at the Brazos School for Inquiry and Creativity. You may reach me by calling the district office at 979-775-2152. (Hint: press 3 when prompted for extension and then type in 135 to get my direct line.) Call for permission forms to sign out a bilingual dictionary for your student. Please kindly return them at the end of the year. Oxford Picture Dictionary 3rd Edition by Jayme Adelson-Goldstein and Norma Shapiro, Children’s Visual Dictionary Spanish-English by B.E.S. Publishing (used with PreK-3 through First grade), and Vox bilingual dictionary are the varieties that we loan students.

ESL Policies 22-23.pdf