Topic > Communication: The most important aspects of…

Jayne Huseby, instructional support assistant for the Amphi School District, also confirmed that due to language barriers with most teachers, there are three basic ways of communication between parents and teacher/school. One is when the school's bilingual secretary calls parents for an appointment, which usually only happens when there is a problem such as bad grades or bad behavior. This only happens with 50% of the ELL population, which is Hispanic. The second way parents are communicated with is through a translation company called Language Lines who, without eye contact in the process, translate the school's needs to the refugee parents. For me this was disappointing. The best communication in the world involves eye contact as body language can be universal and often speaks to information that the spoken word cannot provide. The third way of communication between parent and teacher/school is actually when the young student becomes a translator for the parents and teacher. This places many unfair expectations on the student. It also limits the actual depth of communication that occurs between parents and the school. I call this new communication gap the translation gap in communication. When there is no clear communicator on behalf of the child's needs, there is an almost complete loss of intelligible communication due to the effective