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Essay / 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 means of communication between parents and teacher/school. The first is when the school's bilingual secretary calls the parents for an appointment, which usually only happens when there is a problem such as poor grades or bad behavior. This occurs with only 50% of the ELL population, which is Hispanic. The second way to communicate with parents is through a translation company called Language Lines which, without any eye contact, translates the school's needs to refugee parents. For me it was disappointing. The best communication in the world involves eye contact, because body language can be universal and often reveals volumes of information that speech cannot convey. The third channel of parent-teacher/school communication is actually when the young student becomes a translator for the parents and teacher. This places a lot of unfair expectations on the student. It also limits the actual depth of communication between parent and school. I call this new communication gap the translation gap in communication. When there is no clear communicator to meet the child's needs, there is an almost complete loss of understandable communication due to reality