English as Second Language

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The story below is from our July/August 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you! 

By whatever name, learning English as an immigrant in Roanoke Valley Schools can have massive cultural and community effects.

When Erica Gonzalez arrived as a 16-year-old Honduran immigrant at William Fleming High School 15 years ago, she couldn’t speak English. “It was hard,” she says in a massive understatement. But she persevered. Today, she teaches English as an assistant to new Americans at Preston Park Elementary School and is president of the school’s PTA. 

Roanoke Valley schools teach an impressive number of kids who speak a wide range of foreign languages in three different school districts: Roanoke City, Roanoke County and Salem. The curricula, which are essentially the same, even have different names: EL (English Learner), ELL (English Language Learning), ESL (English as a Second Language). For simplicity, we will use EL.  

Gonzalez says young students pick up enough English to communicate “in about four months.” Her first year at Fleming, communication was difficult and frustrating, but she finally caught on, discovering that “you find the most amazing ways to communicate.”

The children help each other, she discovered, but it “is traumatic having to learn” a new language. “It was learning, not just teaching, and I learned to love [Americans], to understand them. … You see these nine- and 10-year-olds who have already gone through so much, and you want them to feel safe.” 

Gonzalez’s own children (who are 13 and 10) speak both English and Spanish at home.

“EL programs benefit the Hispanic community greatly,” says Noelle Lane, a veteran EL teacher at Preston Park Elementary. “However, I see that if you live and work in certain areas you definitely can go without learning English for a very long time. This is a big reason we have students who start school who may have been born in Roanoke, but Spanish is their first language.”

Eric Fisher, principal of Preston Park School for the past 14 years (24 years with the school system) has the largest percentage of EL students of any school in the city, which has a total of 1,756 EL students in all grades. Preston Park is at 40% (the overall city is 13%), 220 of 520, most of whom began in the school knowing no English at all. But, says Fisher, “Most progress quickly … They tend to be high-performance students and they want to please. Students tell me, ‘I want to make my family proud.’”

“Preston is unique in the sense that the Hispanic community has a very strong presence all along Williamson Road, in the churches, the stores, the restaurants and the neighborhoods,” says Lane. “This sense of community is reflected in the day-to-day activities of our families and our staff’s appreciation for our students’ culture and stories.”

Pam Anderson has taught for 36 years and worked with EL students since 2000. These days she has 44 students at Cave Spring Elementary school and Clearbrook Elementary. She’s been around long enough to know: “It is hard for [parents] to imagine not having the opportunity to successfully communicate with their children’s school, their teachers, and the enjoyment of fully participating in school events without language barriers. Parents of English Language learners face all of these challenges and more. It is crucial that schools are aware of these challenges and create a welcoming environment.”

Fisher says, “We work closely with the families of students and they can see that the schools and the [local] government are here to help.” The kids, he says, “are accepting. Learning a new language is more challenging for adults, but the kids are breaking the barriers. The schools and teachers in the Valley, Fisher says, “work to get services” for families “and to help them understand those services. But we are not here to be the government. We’re here to help.” Many families, Fisher says, “have endured great obstacles and tragedies.”

“The teachers and administration really love their EL students,” Lane says. “‘Love’ is one of those words that can sound so light and fun, but I don’t mean it like that. Sometimes there are new students who transition without any problems whatsoever, but other times there are students and families who need more time to process and adjust to school and the greater community. Even school can be a scary thing and it may take us a while before we as teachers know exactly why.”

There appears to be an especially rich dedication on the part of the EL teachers, say a number of school officials familiar with their work.

Corey Alder, Roanoke City Schools Supervisor of EL and World Languages believes that the reputation of EL teachers as hyper-dedicated is “absolutely true. [The city helps] neighborhoods and the [immigrant] communities get acclimated. He mentions the English Learner Parent University, which “tries to connect families with school departments [career and tech; pre-school; honors and advance programs]. We provide interpreters and staff to go through the ins and outs and we tie partners to them to help. There are so many programs that [sometimes] I forget some. It’s grown each time we’ve had it and often more than 100 individuals come out. As the programs continue to grow, what makes me optimistic is not just people in teacher roles, it’s principals, administrators, front-office staff, doing good job to support the professionals.”

Paula Newbill, Supervisor of World Languages and ESL for Roanoke County, taught French for 18 years in both the public school and university levels and sees the ripple effect on families that EL has. “There is such a community of support,” she says. “We collaborate and know each other. It crosses district lines with diverse cultures under an umbrella. Teachers wear so many hats, including being counselors. They see that families are taken care of, as liaisons. They are the contact in a child’s life, sometimes for several years.”

Kris Tilley-Lubbs, who is retired and living in Roanoke, has taught (at Virginia Tech) a remarkable number of local EL teachers. “So many people regard EL as being like learning a foreign language, but the purposes and goals for an EL program are vastly different from those of a foreign language program,” she says. “They have separate sets of state and national standards that provide evidence of these differences. The main focus of an EL program is to prepare students with an academic understanding of spoken and written English so they can be successful in their academic courses. These skills include learning to understand spoken language, and also learning to speak the language, as well as learning to read and write in English.”

Tilley-Lubbs sees an overarching effect of the EL programs. “In Spanish, for example, you can be a D or even an F student, and you can still have a straight A average in all your other courses. Not so in EL. You don’t do well in your EL class, and that will have an impact on your performance in all your other academic courses. There is also an emphasis on learning to communicate in social and work situations, and that is where assimilation will be the most noticeable. The EL program does provide cultural knowledge, and the school setting provides many opportunities to experience the culture.”

Megan Crew, Salem Schools Division Coordinator of EL Programs (she’s working on a EdD), says there is a concentration on “getting comfortable with what things mean here. We have a lot of conversations with the families” of EL kids. Multi-cultural acceptance, she says, “is getting used to peers with brown skin and a different language. As we notice the numbers [increase], we see more growth among students, both immigrants and natives.”

Salem has created a few partnerships that can help students adjust, says Crew. One is with the Salem Red Sox minor league baseball team which annually has a number of Hispanic players, some of whom speak English, others who are learning it.

EL programs, says Tilley-Lubbs “can help families and kids realize that not all people in the U.S. hate them and want them to go home. Often the EL teacher assumes the role of advocate, liaison with the administration and the community. More often than not, families tend to love and respect their children’s teachers, and trust accompanies that relationship.” And that puts a whole new urgency on the programs in a country where immigration is a major issue.

The story above is from our July/August 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!