Graduating High School: A Triumph in Learning English
by Adam Sugerman

At the TESOL convention in Baltimore this year, I witnessed enthusiastic groups of professionals who were committed to teaching English while recognizing and supporting efforts to help students preserve their own language. It reminded me of one particular soon-to-be high school graduate.

In June, Henry receives his high school diploma. Looking back on his school years, he proudly remembers his triumphs over the difficulties shared by students who overcome linguistic barriers that mar their early U.S. school experience. Like hundreds of thousands of his contemporaries, his K–12 journey has been filled with academic—and social—uncertainty, but he is now ready to continue on his career path.

Spending the first decade of his life in Colombia, his teachers were academically strict, using a rote memorization method to teach and evaluate. Henry’s notebooks, filled with his handwriting, was at a much higher level than the writing demonstrated by his peers in the U.S. Students were instructed to organize their notebooks by subject. We see that his teachers’ linear approach to instruction allowed Henry to build his thinking from the concrete to the abstract.

When Henry turned ten, his family immigrated to the Midwest. Henry entered the U.S. school system in the fifth grade and became enrolled in a private school with little experience in teaching language-minority children. His parents hoped that his immersion in English would help him acquire the language much more quickly. After three months of study, Henry showed little improvement in academic and social English. More important, his self-esteem had reached its nadir.

Upon consulting with Henry’s teacher and school’s principal, Henry’s parents decided to enroll him in a “bilingual” program at a neighborhood public school. In the fifth grade, Henry’s class studied with second grade textbooks. All classes were conducted in Spanish, with a weekly one-hour class in ESL. The school had insurmountable problems, ranging from discipline and overcrowding to a staff suffering from low morale. For the first time in his life, Henry dreaded attending school. Each day, his grandparents had to escort him past the bullies who tormented their arbitrary victims. Once again, his parents withdrew him and contemplated homeschooling.

In January, Henry’s parents enrolled him in another private school. Although the classes were conducted exclusively in English, Henry’s teachers doted over him. The school provided tutoring after school. The curriculum was also much more rigorous, the students acted more maturely, and Henry started to thrive. He learned English by understanding content, by his parents translating his homework, by listening to the Beatles … and by relating English to his personal experiences. By the end of the school year, Henry was able to communicate with his peers in spoken English. It took two years for him to become fluent in social English and another two years in academic English. In the meantime, Henry didn’t lose his native Spanish. Today he is completely bilingual!#

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