202. The Translation Trap: When Google Translate Stops Helping Your ELL Students

[upbeat music] Teaching ELL students is a privilege and a joy. Is it easy? No way. But with the right support, you can feel empowered to tackle each day with ease and confidence. I'm your host, Beth Voshe, founder of Inspiring Young Learners. With over 10 years of teaching both nationally and internationally, I know what it takes to ensure that your ELL students have what they need to thrive today, tomorrow, and for life. I'm on a mission to empower you to equip your English language learners. Welcome to Equipping ELLs. Let's get to today's episode. [upbeat music] Hey, hey, and welcome back to another episode of the Equipping ELLs podcast. I'm your host, Beth Voshe, and today's episode was actually inspired by something that happened to me recently during a PD session I was leading for a school. I was working with a group of teachers, all different content areas, some ELL specialists and some homeroom teachers, and at some point, a middle school math teacher raised her hand and said something that stopped me in my tracks. She said, "I know I'm not supposed to let my students translate everything. I know I'm not supposed to do that for them. But honestly, it's what I need to do right now so they can actually comprehend the grade-level math I'm teaching them. Is that bad? Is that wrong?" I just wanna say, I love that question because it's a question that many of us are struggling with, especially when you get into those middle school, high school years where you're that grade-level content teacher, and you need those students to understand those very complex grade-level content, but they're still learning English, right? She wants to do the right thing, but she's also caught between two things that both felt true and at the same time, right? Her students need to learn English, and her students need to access eighth grade math. And so right now, that translation piece is the bridge that she's using to do that. Today, I wanted to do a quick episode about this and take this question seriously because this is a conversation I see happening a lot on Facebook, on Instagram, in the conversations that we're having with members inside Equipping ELLs. I want to honor what that teacher was really asking and then actually answer it. So not with a blanket, "Stop using Google Translate," but with a real framework for being intentional about when translation helps and when it quietly starts to hold your students back. We're gonna talk about what research says, and then we're gonna get into really practical things about what this looks like in both the elementary and secondary settings because I know that there's a big difference between an elementary setting and using translation and secondary. So let's get into it. So first, I wanna validate something. That math teacher that I was talking with, she wasn't wrong. Now, I know that many of you have heard of Jim Cummins, and you know that his short version of his concept that he's done many, many years of research on, in the concepts that students learn in their home language transfers to English, right? So if a student understands linear equations in Spanish, that conceptual understanding doesn't disappear