The Garden City Telegram
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ESL students share stories, learn language
Published 5/7/2009 in Local News : Education
By SHAJIA AHMAD
Garden City Community College student Ngoc Nguyen hasn't seen her two siblings in nearly three years, after part of her family left their small village in South Vietnam to live with extended family in Hugoton, hoping for a better life.
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Brad Nading/Telegram — Oralia Trejo, right, describes her childhood as Lorilynn Landgraf looks through TrejoÕs scrapbook Wednesday at Garden City Community College Beth Tedrow Student Center's Portico during a GCCC ESL presentation project.
Now the 19-year-old, who has aspirations to be a pharmacist, is learning intensively along with dozens of other English-as-second-language students in adult learning classes at the college.
"The vocabulary is the hardest part because there's so much I still don't know," Nguyen said, adding that she'll sometimes use an electronic dictionary while watching movies or television when she stumbles across an unfamiliar word.
Nguyen and her peers chronicled their journeys before and after arriving in Garden City as an end-of-year class project and showcased their written and art work Wednesday during a program at the Beth Tedrow Student Center Portico.
"I remember exactly the date my family left Vietnam. It was June 12, 2006, at five in the morning. With the luggage in my hand, I was walking to the airport with tears and sadness because not my entire family would leave Vietnam. My two brothers would stay," reads part of the scrapbook Nguyen put together for the program.
In her scrapbook, the 2008 graduate of Hugoton High School displays some pictures of her family in Dong Thap, the village where they once lived together, and life after coming to the United States, including a portrait at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota where she recently went on vacation.
Jeanie Ferguson, an ESL instructor at the college, said the students were expected to use much of the grammar they learned over the semester to tell their stories, but the project went beyond that scope, as well.
"You'll see that no two books are the same," she said. "Our hope is that these scrapbooks will be passed down through their families for generations, allowing their descendants to know the people brave enough to leave what was familiar and immigrate to a new, unknown country."
Broken English
Several of the few dozen students included pictures and mementos to record their experiences in both their native countries and their lives in Garden City.
In Maria Ramos' scrapbook, the mother of two includes a map of a small town near Zacatecas, Mexico, where she grew up and where her mother still lives.
Ramos said when she was completing her elementary education, her brother was robbed and killed in their small town; her mother subsequently took her out of school after she finished the sixth grade.
"I wasn't able to have enough education in my country," Ramos said. "But now that I live here, I need to learn and want to learn English, especially because I want to be able to help my children."
Ramos, like most other students who primarily are concerned with improving their grammar, said speaking with confidence is the most difficult.
The Garden City resident since 2000 said she tries to practice when she's not in class through listening to the radio and holding conversations with strangers -- though in Garden City, that's not always easy, she said.
"I went to the bank the other day, and I was having trouble speaking in English, and the lady looked at me and said, 'Don't worry, dear, I speak Spanish,'" Ramos said and laughed.
Making it to the twice-weekly grammar and twice-weekly writing classes is not always easy for the mother of a 1- and 8-year-old who also works to support her family and hopes to one day master enough English to study and become a psychologist.
Ferguson said many of the adult ESL students have added challenges to learning because they must work and support their families in their adult lives.
"They may be conversant, but college work and the working world are different -- and academic English is even more difficult," the ESL instructor said. "We want to prepare them for classes and for their professional lives."
Culture shock
Ferguson, who has students from Mexico, Latin America, Ethiopia, Somalia, Vietnam and more, said she hoped the students' stories also would shed light on some of the difficulties shared by current immigrants and those of Americans' European and other ancestors from the past.
"Most people haven't had these experiences unless they've traveled to another country — without that, it's difficult for most to understand culture shock or how difficult it is to learn a new language," she said.
For Justin Tar, adapting to life in the U.S. has not been easy: After moving to Kansas in 2007, the 21-year-old who finished high school in Burma and speaks English fairly fluently is taking intensive grammar, writing and reading classes while working full time.
The English instruction in Burma has faltered over the last few decades, as the military government has tightened its control on the formerly British colonized country, Tar said. However, he said he stays motivated to improve his English despite the challenges.
"We couldn't do anything without learning English — if you want to live here, you have to learn it," he said. "These classes have been really helpful, a real benefit for all of us."
Students will again showcase their projects at a program scheduled for Monday at the Beth Tedrow Student Center. The program will run 6 to 8 p.m., and the public is invited to attend.
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