Connecting With the American Dialect

In a student who has such difficulties, teachers might see someone who appears to be slacking off or has a learning disability, not a child who was educated in Africa and who might also suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. "The classroom teacher says, 'Well, he speaks perfectly fine, but he's lazy and won't write for me,' " said Supreet Anand, former head of Prince George's County Schools' ESOL program and a second-language acquisition specialist for the Maryland State Department of Education.

Christa de Kleine, an associate professor of linguistics at the College of Notre Dame in Baltimore has been studying writing samples from 100 West African students in middle and high schools in Fairfax County. She said early research indicates that many are progressing more slowly than other classmates who speak a foreign language and are also learning English.

"You keep trying as a student, and you keep being corrected in ways that don't make sense," de Kleine said. "It's a path that leads to less performance, not more."

De Kleine observed that their most common "mistakes" have their roots in Creole or standard West African English. The students often use a past-tense verb only at the beginning and end of a written story, using present-tense verbs for everything in between. They leave out articles and neglect to tack an "s" on verbs in the third-person singular.

One ninth-grader wrote: "I will want to be like Nelly because I like the way he look, talk, walk, sing, dance, dress, smile. . . . " (De Kleine noted that once a teacher corrects an error, confused students often react by "hypercorrecting," in this case adding an "s" to words where it is not needed.)

To break those patterns, de Kleine said, teachers and students need to understand that they are speaking different languages. She joined the World English Speakers Team and has been telling Fairfax teachers about the way English is spoken in Africa.

Fairfax also put books about African culture into classrooms -- subjects that are familiar to the students and capture their attention. And the district has held workshops for teachers on the impact of trauma.

In the pilot World English Literacy class at West Potomac High School in the Alexandria section of Fairfax County, ESOL teacher Rose Akpati, a native of Nigeria, draws on her experience and de Kleine's work to teach a dozen West African students. She focuses on vocabulary, sentence construction, verb tense and comprehension. Every so often, she slips into Creole.

Cecelia Kimber, 17, who came from Liberia in 2003 and settled with a cousin in Fairfax, said she enjoys the class but wonders why she needs it.

"The program is not for me, because I already learned English in my country," she said. "For us, the way we talk, that's how we write. Writing the way I talk, the teacher thinks I am wrong."

Alexei Finoguenov, an ESOL teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools, has found some success in small groups. He often brings the five West African students in his classes together and stresses that they must learn a new form of their language because they are in a new country.

"It's very hard to change a language reality that has lasted the life of the student and is still being spoken within the family home," Finoguenov said, noting that it is particularly difficult when much of the language his students hear on the streets of Baltimore isn't standard American English, either.

But change is possible, he said. A student recently told him that his father and uncle have taken to slipping into the Creole they had used in their native country when the conversation isn't meant for young ears.