Honoring two worlds:
Teaching young writers as they learn English
Below is an interview with 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.
WKCD: You aren't specially trained in teaching English as a second language. What helps you to hook teenagers on reading and writing in their new language?
I try to find simple texts that engage their intellects and ignite their imaginations. You have to go slowly and define words, but you don't have to define everything. You're teaching them to trust themselves, too. One of my tenth graders, Sandra, couldn't speak at all when she came here. Yesterday, she was doing a presentation about whether adolescents should get the death penalty—and she was so confident, because it was something that she understood. You realize how much their skills and their ability are driven by interest.
WKCD: Some of your students are not literate in their first language. How does that affect your work with them?
We have a lot of students who never went to school in their native countries, or who missed a couple of years of school. They can be very savvy verbally, and then you get their writing and you realize, wow, the student doesn't have any sense of punctuation or sentence structure. It's much easier to get literate in English if you're already literate in your first language. Yet students come to us with so many different languages and dialects; we can't possibly try to fill that gap when we find it, so we concentrate on the English. It's a very big obstacle, but there's a lot of research that's being done about these students right now, and our school has a grant for serving Students with Interrupted Formal Education (SIFE).
WKCD: For the Forty-Cent Tip project, your students interviewed neighbors and relatives about their experiences as immigrant workers. They did the interviews in their native languages, and then they translated them and shaped them into short essays. How did that process influence students' writing?
Students could be experts in these interviews, and they took it seriously. I was really moved by how much time and care they all gave, to their subjects and to the project. For example, my student Miguel sometimes seems elsewhere in class, he's not really grounded in his commitment to himself academically. But in this project, he was interviewing his stepfather, who is a mechanic. And in the presentation, he took great care in his word choices. He wanted to put his own spin on it and he wanted to be true to his father. That's when translation really works—when it's not just a direct transcription, but when the translator captures something of the feeling, in that air that lies between the words and the page.
WKCD: It sounds as though students gained a certain pride in their own strengths, as writers who are learning to cross language barriers.
Many of my students live in families that don't speak English. They are always interpreting, always code-switching; it becomes a part of their way of being. This project allowed them to use the skills they practice all the time. It was a way of honoring their two worlds—honoring the part of them that exists, but goes unrecognized.
WKCD: I'm interested in the step-by-step process they used for this project, and how it might have built their literacy skills.
The students used inexpensive digital voice recorders, then they loaded the files into the computer. They played back the interview—the computer can slow it down—and transcribed it first in its original language, then translated it into English. Those included in the book then saw their work edited and made public. In Miguel's case, his title got changed in the process, and he was very upset, he didn't like the change at all. I talked to the students about my reporter friends who have to let go and give up editorial control. This book was produced over the summer, so the editing couldn't have been done in class, but if we did it again, I would want to include them more in the process.
WKCD: Moving from the spoken word to the written word appears to be an important technique with kids who are still learning English. Do you use this strategy in other assignments as well?
Yes, we spend a lot of time on the college application essay at the beginning of senior year, because so many of our students have moved to this country, often against their own wishes, to go to college. A social worker, Susan Calhoun, comes in every week as my co-teacher on this. It takes two months in the fall; once a week at the start, and then every day for the last three weeks. I think the whole assignment succeeds because it involves speaking, writing, revision, and then eventually presenting to the community.
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WKCD: Can you explain how it works? First we have the students make extemporaneous speeches, to get them thinking about their lives and who they are. We work a lot at getting their verbal skills to help inform their written skills—for example, we have them give a speech with a beginning, middle, and end. Eventually, we build up to using one of the four questions on the Common Application as a speech prompt. They give their speech from note cards—or some will write it all out—and then they give each other feedback about its strengths and weaknesses. That often tells them about the strengths and weaknesses of their writing—where they could go deeper, finding their angle. If some part of the piece is just to sell the admissions committee, for example, their fellow students will pick up on that in their speech, and it will be the part that falls flat in the writing, too. So starting with the speech allows them to go further with writing on the page. It's a really important process—almost like having an experience of their writing, with other people. WKCD: It sounds like revision is a huge part of teaching writing in this way.
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It is. They all give the speeches in class twice, and at the same time they are revising their papers. One student, who got into Hamilton College, probably rewrote his college essay twelve times. Susan and I sat with him for so long, looking at the writing: "This is what tells me more about you"; "show, don't tell," all those things. If we can help them to sort out the patterns in their thoughts, if they can somehow get a bigger picture, which a lot of them have never gotten from an adult, they can have the ability to move those muscles that allow you to be more specific. You kind of have to model that for people, or they don't get it.
WKCD: A college application essay has high stakes right from the start, of course, because a committee will be using it to help make admissions decisions.
Yes, but we also build in a more public audience—a Speech Day, when nine of the fifty seniors give their speech for the school. We don't choose for the strongest speeches; often, we choose students who need the experience of success, who need to hear their voice and surprise themselves.
WKCD: Perhaps more than most English teachers, do you see the effects that improved writing skills can have on your students' futures?
Definitely. I use the term "living document" when we talk about the college essay project—it not only reflects who they are, but it can teach them who they are becoming. One student, Fianny, wrote her original essay about her sister dying when she was a kid, and now the college has asked her to write more about herself. And in the last few months she has come alive, has developed an interest in photography and started taking a photography course at the Museum of Modern Art. "It was like I was asleep," she told me, when we were talking about what she would write [about her sister's death] now. "If I could just freeze the moment, like in a photograph, then I can go beyond it and see something I couldn't see before."