by
Susan Behrens, Communication Sciences and Disorders, Marymount Manhattan College
Cindy Mercer, Academic Achievement, Marymount Manhattan College
Maria moved from the Dominican Republic to New York City with her family when she was nine years old. She was a native Spanish speaker who also spoke a good deal of English, which she had picked up in school. She was an average student in the Dominican Republic, read at grade level, and made B’s and C’s in math. Neither of her parents spoke English before arriving in the United States, and her mother never learned; therefore, the family spoke Spanish at home. However, Maria appeared to be coping well in most subjects both in the Dominican Republic and once she moved to the U.S. That is, until high school.
She was put in a regular high school program with an added hour each day of English as a Second Language (ESL). ESL classes mainly targeted her written English skills, which were poor. Maria did not like the idea of being an “ESL student” since she had spoken English since she was little, but she accepted the fact that there was room for improvement.
Maria made good progress, becoming more fluent and confident in English. She made a point of conversing with her new friends and classmates in order to practice her English and to try to fit in. They were happy to coach Maria in her language skills. Her neighborhood, Jackson Heights, was heavily Colombian, so she could still meet and make friends who spoke Spanish. This helped her relax a bit, since it was always easier for Maria to express herself in Spanish. Sometimes her friends from Colombia used an expression or word she wasn’t familiar with, but she enjoyed learning new Spanish from them.
Maria felt equally proficient in Spanish and English, although by this point she had received more education in English. Overall, she felt more comfortable speaking in Spanish. She could clearly see the problems confronting her mother, a non-English-speaking immigrant, and hoped to have a freer, more independent life as a native speaker of English. Maria considered herself truly bilingual.
But something was not right in her high school classrooms. She continued to have a difficult time with writing assignments in all of her classes. Her papers would usually be returned to her with such comments in the margins as “awk” and “S-V agree” and “sing-plural confusion.” Maria never actually understood these comments, but since she never was asked to fix them, the same comments appeared again and again on her papers. She never received an A on a paper.
Maria tried to sit in the back of the classroom so her teachers wouldn’t call on her. Her accent was heavier than some of the other students who had arrived from their home countries around the same time. She worried that something she said might come out “awk” or her “S-V” might not agree, so she felt it was better to keep quiet. By the end of her freshman year, she wasn’t feeling too bilingual. In fact, the whole question of language ability and bilingualism occupied her thoughts more and more. Other students seemed much more comfortable with their identity than she did, either because they considered themselves “Latino” or because they possessed more academic English skills.
Question 1—If Maria is bilingual, why might she be experiencing such difficulties with written English?
In spite of her problems in writing and speaking in class, Maria had a decent grade point average. Most of her assignments were multiple choice and fill in or matching exercises, so by studying hard she could off-set the low grades she got on her papers with A’s on her exams.
Her teachers were a bit confused by Maria, however. Here was a student who could make decent grades, yet was seemingly sullen and silent in class and lazy on her written assignments. They heard her speak fluent English with her friends in the hallways, but her papers contained misspelled words, typos, grammatical errors, and unusual sentence structures. They concluded that she was smart but not highly motivated.
In fact, Maria’s writing teacher noted that Maria made many writing errors typical for high school students: subject-verb agreement, pronoun use, and possessive formation. But her teacher wondered about Maria’s other, more unusual, lapses, such as poorly formed tense markers (e.g., “would have reacting differently”; “would have interrupt”) and confusion of adjectives and adverbs. In addition, Maria’s writing demonstrated a limited English vocabulary. These problems led the teacher to suspect language impairment.
Question 2—Why would Maria’s writing teacher wonder about language impairments? What other factors—educational, cultural, or personal—might account for Maria’s problem?
Date Posted: November 4, 2008.
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