Honoring two worlds:
Teaching young writers as they learn English
"Sometimes I don't know how to express who I am to people."—Barbara, ESL student
Eric, whose family immigrated from China six months ago, casts his eyes down in painful shyness, filling pages of a notebook with pencil sketches of the world in his head. Sandra, fresh from Guatemala, sticks closely to a girlfriend, the two murmuring constantly in Spanish. Pedro, recently arrived from Mexico, relies on Javier and Rafael to elaborate on his two- or three-word replies. Judyta spills out her answers urgently, passionately speaking her mind despite the grammatical errors she knows she is making.
Scenes like this occur every day, in schools with large numbers of students new to this country. And, even when the students share the same language—perhaps Spanish or Chinese—the differences among their situations can be breathtaking.
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Sixteen-year-old Sandra has just come from a remote Guatemalan village, with no access to schooling. Sixteen-year-old Pedro also speaks Spanish, but arrived in the U.S. from a rough-and-tumble Mexican town along the Texas border. Giving voice to immigrant students through writing offers them a powerful entry point to advance their learning across the curriculum. But when adolescents are still acquiring English, how can high school teachers work most effectively to draw out their thoughts in written form? For some insight, WKCD turned to Annie Gwynne-Vaughan, who has a decade of experience teaching immigrant students in the New York City public schools. At Manhattan International High School, she teaches tenth- and twelfth-grade language arts to students who arrived at the school in grade nine with very little English. She was also a mentor teacher for WKCD's Forty-Cent Tip book project, in which students at three of New York City's small schools for newcomers interviewed and photographed relatives, friends, and neighbors to tell their stories of struggle and pride as working immigrants in America.
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