Trying to learn a new language on an iPhone screen, with no casual conversation with English-speaking friends, is a disaster for immigrant students, writes Juliana Kim in the New York Times.
When Taniya Ria moved to the Bronx from Bangladesh in 2019, she didn’t know a word of English. Within months, Taniya, now 12, was translating for her mother, making American friends in class and getting good grades. Then the pandemic arrived.
Struggling with remote learning, the sixth-grader felt words, grammar and confidence slipping away, she told Kim. “I feel like the year is going to waste.”
Across the country, English Language Learners taught remotely are falling behind even more than their classmates, schools report. Often, their parents don’t have the education or the English to help with homework or technology problems. They’re immersed in a non-English-speaking world.
During a music class, Taniya was confident she knew the answer to a question posed by her teacher, but her excitement was quickly dampened by a concern that she would mispronounce a word.
Over and over again, she silently rehearsed saying the answer. But by the time she had mustered enough courage to speak, the iPhone she was using for class froze. When it rebooted, her classmates had moved on. She was silent for the rest of the period.
Taniya “rarely speaks or shows her face in class,” writes Kim. “When Taniya first noticed her English slipping in September, she would read to herself out loud to practice speaking . . . But over time, it became harder to pronounce the words and took longer to finish each chapter. Eventually, she stopped trying.”
Attendance has slipped badly for English Language Learners across the country.
In a story on immigrant students in Philadelphia, Chalkbeat’s Samaria Bailey talks to a mother from Ghana who’s pleased her children are learning more Hausa and a Mexican teenager who’s happy her assimilated, younger siblings are speaking more Spanish and less English.