An Island of English

In addition to my new Lonely Planet China book, I've been doing quite a bit of other reading in preparation for this trip. Being a well-raised middle-class intellectual, of course the first thing I do when embarking on a new activity is purchase books about it. I think I was the only person in our Council group in Chile whose preparatory research had been into the political situation of the 1980s instead of where the coolest mountains or beaches were. Other people wandered around Santiago comparing notes on the best place to stay in Viña del Mar for the music festival, while I interrupted them to point out that the reason that building there is called the "Ex-Congressional" building is because Pinochet moved the Congress to Viña to lessen their influence over the executive branch, before he eventually disbanded Congress altogether. Likewise, I went to Japan having read Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program, all about the history of the JET program, instead of finding out about all the tourist sites around Sendai. I'm hopeless, and I know it, so why fight it?

I will turn my print addiction to good use by offering some book reviews. My first one is for Danling Fu's An Island of English: Teaching ESL in Chinatown.

I found this book extremely interesting, both for its writing and its subject matter. The author was brought in as a consultant to improve the ESL program in a middle school in Chinatown. The book describes the steps she and the teachers took over the course of several years to make the program one that truly served its students needs. What makes the situation really interesting is that this school is an environment that is really halfway between teaching ESL and teaching EFL. Though the school is located in one of the largest cities in the US, these primarily immigrant students live and go to school in the heart of Chinatown, where, in the normal course of things, they are not called on to use English substantially outside of school. Most of their parents do not speak English, so they cannot get help at home, and many of them did not attend school regularly in China, because of the promise that someday soon, their parents would have enough money to bring them to America. This book shows what teachers can do in what is basically an EFL setting, but with all the advantages of having the wealth of resources to be found in an ESL environment.

The author is herself a Chinese immigrant who remembers her own problems with English acquisition, so she offers a lot of insight into the linguistic challenges facing the students. However, she does not insist that all the teachers in the ESL program be at all fluent in Chinese to understand these issues. Instead, she combines the ESL program with the Chinese Language Arts program, which is aimed at helping the students maintain fluency in their native language, and draws on the strengths of all the teachers, Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers. One of the main strengths of this book is that Fu is describing strategies that were actually implemented in the school, and discussing what worked, what didn't, and why, instead of presenting a lot of theory. Part of her point is that she had a lot of theory going in, and it was only through flexibility and change that she and the teachers got everything to work. I think this book offers a great deal of insight and hope for ESL and EFL teachers both, because it shows how a very high goal was realistically achieved.