Post 128: Language Minority Student Different Backgrounds can surprise you

Post 128: Language Minority Student Different Backgrounds can surprise you.

Use your Language Minority Student different backgrounds as a rich resource for cultural enrichment for your students and as a way for adult students and teenagers to get to know each other. Each human has a story. Let everyone in the class have a chance to tell their story. Students from conflicting cultures can get to tolerate each other better and if you are in a dual immersion program or in a mainstream classroom, learning the ELL background lets Language Majority Students learn about other cultures. Teachers who did not grow up around ELL can also learn and grow and become less biased towards ELL and learning that we are more all the same and different helps the class become a Community of Learners, one of the basic concepts behind The Communicative Approach.

Let's take my grandfather and grandmother. Both came to America in their 60's. When the ESL teacher looks at my grandparents, they see a Chinese elderly couple. From the teacher's perspective, the Chinese elderly woman (my grandmother) appears to have no English at all. The Chinese elderly man has some English, but he seems very proud, yet very sad at the same time. Of the two, the Chinese elderly man seems to be a bit more outgoing than the reserved wife. Yet, it is the reserved wife who really wants to learn English to become an American citizen. The teacher assumes that these ELL are refugees with no education from their previous country just like all the other ELL she has encountered in her short ESL career.

Luckily, my grandparents are in an ESL class that uses The Communicative Approach and students are allowed to tell their stories. There are two ESL teachers in this class--the young inexperienced ESL teacher who assumes all ELL are refugees and not very intelligent and the more experienced teacher who is a Mexican American 2nd generation teacher who knows differently.  As the inexperienced ESL teachers lets my grandfather speak, she is thinking that she will just hear another poor refugee story, but she is dead wrong.

She gasps in surprise as she listens to my grandfather's story and it goes like this: My name is James Huang. I was a top diplomat in the Nationalist Chinese government in China. I worked with the President of the Nationalist government, Chiang Kai Shek. After the Communists took over China in 1949, my wife and I first fled to Taiwan and then we came to the United States.  For more about the Chinese Revolution of 1949 go to this link. My grandfather told bits and parts of the Chinese Communist take over in his pidgin English. My grandfather had even met the President of the United States at one point and helped in making the US realize that the Nationalist government had the same aims of democracy and freedom as the US.  The Mexican American ESL teacher was not surprised at all by this story. She knew by my grandfather's proud demeanor that he was somebody of importance in his home country and she also knew he was having a hard time adjusting to the US because he went from being somebody of importance in China to a nobody in the US.  It was the more experienced ESL teacher who created the bonds of trust between her students and her while the younger ESL teacher learned to respect her ELL students.

In the end, my grandmother became a US citizen at the age of 80. Becoming a US citizen was one of the happiest days of my grandmother's life.  Grandpa sadly had passed away by then because he was not able to fully adjust to US life the way Grandma did.  Thanks to the Communicative Approach, my grandmother learned just enough English to pass her citizenship test and she and her teachers remained friends to my grandmother's death. I still have my grandmother's Christmas cards where she wrote to me in her broken English. I treasure them all.