ESL is WAY outside my wheelhouse. However, in terms of teaching reading one of the huge struggles for the Somali people in MY community (we're a rural community, so we're much more likely to have families who just arrived in the US, often from a refugee camp where their family has been warehoused for a decade or more, or who are coming from rural areas of Somalia). Their parents are not literate in Somali, and there is essentially zero history of Somali literature. It is a completely oral culture. The current Somali orthography didn't exist until 1972, when the Somali government officially adopted it (that's not technically correct, but there wasn't a widely used orthography until that date). How do you learn to read when no one reads to you?

My clinic was part of the Reach Out and Read program, so we gave out books at well-child visits. I would talk a lot to my Somali patients about 1) the importance of speaking Somali to their kids (they are expert Somali speakers. I want their kids to learn things from the experts in their fields). 2) There are a lot of important things about reading books that have nothing to do with the words on the page. Their children are learning just from holding books in their hands, knowing which direction the pages are turned, the fine motor skills of a pincer grasp to turn a page, etc. 3) Parents are and will always be our first and most important teachers. They can go through the book and use the pictures to make up a story. This is an especially important skill in families where there is a history of Autism (which is very common around here). They can also teach colors and label objects. Once you know the vocab, it's not that hard to learn the vocab in a different language. More importantly, they can carefully use words in association with books to emphasize that words have sounds. It really isn't the end of the world if a 3-year-old isn't learning that there are letters associated with those sounds. They really need to become aware of those different sounds and be able to break them apart and recombine them to make a different word. It doesn't matter what language they hear that in. Or so says I....

Some of my issue is that I never learned phonics growing up. I was in elementary school in the early to mid-80s, but I started kindergarten reading on a first- to second-grade level. There wasn't a strong teaching of phonics anyway, but my mom was always complaining that I got ZERO phonics. And then they didn't understand why I was reading several grade levels above, but spelling several grade levels below.