National Experts

Dr. Ofelia Garcia comments on the changing and challenging ways that family factors influence the lives of some English language learners. Dr. Garcia is the Dean of the School of Education at the Brooklyn Campus of Long Island University, where she founded the Center for Urban Educators. She has published extensively in the sociology of language, education of language minorities, and bilingual education.The following interview is excerpted from Education Notes (September, 2001), Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 1-3. This publication and the complete interview are available online at http://www.alliance.brown.edu/pubs/ed_notes/ednts_sep01.pdf.

What are the most significant challenges that English language learners face in school?

I think lack of understanding of how language relates to education. What I mean by that is, people who look at ELLs see only the language difference. They see them as people who need to be filled up with English, and there is so much more that a student needs than just language development. Every child is a learner with interest, passions, imagination, creativity, regardless of the language. Educators need to look beyond language, at the child, the person.

Another challenge is the isolation immigrant children face. I think that the anxiety of being in a place where you are not the speaker of the majority language, or even a majority person, is great. Exhaustion is also a factor. It is so cognitively challenging to pay attention all the time in a language that you don't understand.

There are other challenges that people do not even recognize. Sometimes we think that immigrant students only have to get used to the language, the country, or the school. Many times, and I see this more and more, immigrant students are getting used to families. They are getting used to mothers for the first time because the family reunification system has been such that a lot of mothers leave the children behind until they are able to get papers so that they can bring back their kids to the United States. I see a lot of high school ESL students who are living with their mothers for the first time and have left behind grandmothers who have really been the people who have raised them.

What additional factors should teachers and schools address in meeting the needs of English language learners?

The same factors you need to pay attention to in any child - their creativity, their ability to imagine, their ability to be positively challenged. Then I think you also need to consider, and this is the tricky one, how do you bring the home into the school? What are some of the home scripts and how do those home scripts come together or differ from those in the classrooms? For example, let's consider parental involvement. I see teachers all the time who complain about immigrant parents not getting involved. Often, when you talk to many immigrant parents, it turns out that they are trusting the school system, they are trusting the teachers. They respect the teachers a great deal and feel that it would be very disrespectful to be involved in school or ask questions of the teachers. In New York City, in order to get into school you have to go through a guard of some kind, through metal detectors, and then sign in and show I.D. A lot of immigrant parents, some of whom do not have any papers, are very unwilling to do that. So that is a difference that teachers have to really understand.

I hear teachers complaining about the fact that their second grader was out with the mother at a family party the night before until 2:00 in the morning. That may not be what the teacher was used to when she was a child growing up in a middle class neighborhood, yet it is indeed a way in which many communities function. In the immigrant community, that is a family that is really functioning because they are together and the children are involved in all the adult activities.

It is a different concept of childhood, a different notion of child development. Child development which we have categorized as developmental categories that are solid and not fluid (when they) are really non-developmental and quite culturally and historically defined. There are differences in the way we conduct ourselves at home and the way in which schools in the U.S. except us to behave. We tend to think that everything has only one way of being, but schooling is really about creating spaces where differences can be explored.