Submitted by Barbara Hudspeth
Recently, I had occasion to teach a lesson about a schedule of daily activities to two very different students. This situation allowed me to reflect on the differences in the preparation required for each student. On the one hand, I had an older Afghan woman from a rural area with no exposure to literacy or any expectation that she could become literate in her own language, let alone in English. She also had little exposure to life outside of her home. On the other hand, I had an older Ukrainian woman with a high school education, literate in her own language with its Cyrillic alphabet and some exposure to English. She had worked outside her home in a bank.
For my Afghan student, I had to spend weeks in preparation. Research has shown that language acquisition requires a certain number of hours of exposure to people using the language and situations in which the language is used. She is in an isolated situation where such exposure is extremely limited. She had to learn basic things like numbers through much oral repetition accompanied by rich contextual support through gestures and pictures. This required a lot of effort on her part. Also, trying to find ways to connect with her was challenging. Her life experiences and mine were so different. I found connections through her cooking and sewing and children. She had to learn about time and clocks. We had to connect the numbers to the clock and count time in hours. In addition, on a parallel track, she had to learn action verbs. Then we had to think of activities and verbs to go with them. We had a break through of sorts when she finally was able to express a preference for lesson time. The original time for lessons conflicted with her need to put her young child down for a nap and to pray at a certain time. When she was at last able to express her wishes, she requested a change in lesson time that better fit her needs. This was a huge step. Luckily, I was able to accommodate her request, and we changed the lesson time to one that fit her schedule better. She was happier for a time. The next concept was that activities occur in a certain order at a certain time. With pictures and gestures we practiced saying the activities in order and then connecting them with a time on the clock. The breakthrough with the idea of a schedule came when we talked about the children getting on the bus for school at 7 a.m. daily and arriving home at 3 p.m. daily. We were able to put activities she did in between those times in some kind of order and connect that order with times on the clock. She finally understood the concept of a daily schedule and connected it to English. Again, this took a lot of effort and energy on her part. Although I was able to see her progress, she felt she was not making progress at all. I tried to be encouraging and showed her how much she knew. We practiced saying her schedule using the clock, pictures, and gestures. She finally talked through her daily schedule. It was great!
For my Ukrainian student, not as much preparation was needed. She already could tell time in her native language and already understood the concept of a schedule. She understood the concept of literacy because she could read and write in her own language. She understood the concept of a schedule because she had already worked outside of her home. We read the story about Mary working at a bank. We discussed when she worked, ate, and slept. We brainstormed ideas for activities my student did during the day using pictures and wrote them down. I wrote down the pattern for question and answer, and we used that as a prompt for creating a schedule. We then created a schedule orally which we practiced. Her homework was to write her schedule down for the next lesson. This took only a couple of hours. It took effort on my student’s part, but she had a lot of prior knowledge to draw upon.
I found reflecting on these experiences to be helpful, so I am sharing my thoughts with you.
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