By Maria Glod
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 9, 2005; A01
Alex Wollor speaks English. It is the language he used at home, in school and on the streets in his native Liberia. So when the teenager fled the civil war there, eventually settling with his mother and sisters in Fairfax County five years ago, he expected the shared language to ease his transition. But he found that classmates often gave him blank looks, unable to understand what he said. Teachers found fault with his written work. "I thought it was going to be the same, but when I came here, it wasn't," Wollor, 16, said. "You know how people speak slangs? In Africa, people have different slangs. If I was talking fast, you wouldn't understand me." In the past several decades, the influx of children of all nationalities has led to the development of successful programs to teach immigrants as they learn English. But teachers are finding that it is a very different challenge to educate such West African students as Wollor, who come from vastly different cultures where the mother tongue is English, but not the standard American version. Educators say that learning a different form of English can be even more challenging than picking up an entirely new language, because students never know when the habits of a lifetime will be right or wrong. "It's very frustrating for them," said Dena Sewell, a dual-language assessment teacher with Fairfax County schools. "They've learned English, and all of a sudden we say, 'You don't speak English the right way.' " Fairfax schools have a pilot World English Literacy class at West Potomac High School to help West African immigrants. Montgomery County schools are creating a program for all World English speakers, who can include children from places as divergent as the Caribbean, Australia and Canada. Other districts are using a one-on-one approach. A complex blend of linguistic and cultural phenomena set English-speaking students from Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone apart from other World English speakers, educators say. Most West African children learned a form of English in school and are fluent in it, but many lag in reading and writing partly because of limited or interrupted schooling. Socially, many of them speak Creole, a mix of English and regional dialects. And many have experienced or witnessed violence in their home countries, leaving psychological scars that make learning harder. Sewell, a veteran English for Speakers of Other Languages teacher who started with Fairfax schools in the 1970s, said she started to see a need for new teaching techniques in the mid-1990s as a small wave of families began to arrive from West Africa. Between 1995 and 2000, school officials said, 481 West African children moved into the district. In the 2001-02 school year alone, 268 additional children from Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria entered Fairfax schools. Teachers soon found that their new students weren't a good fit for the ESOL system. It was clear that an English-speaking child from Sierra Leone didn't belong in a class next to a newcomer from Vietnam or El Salvador who spoke a completely different language. But that same student struggled in classes with students who were reading and writing at a much higher level. In 2002, Sewell formed the World English Speakers Team, a group of Fairfax teachers and administrators who set out to determine what was going wrong for West African students and what would work. They found that teachers sometimes chalk up apparent errors in writing to sloppiness or bad behavior, failing to understand the cultural and linguistic gaps. ("I feel that they think their English was acceptable in their 'previous life' and see no reason to change," one Fairfax teacher wrote in response to a questionnaire about World English students.) The survey also found that the students often don't perceive differences in their version of English and American English and grow frustrated at their placement in classes with those who were learning English for the first time. To complicate matters, the students adapt their spoken English quickly and, like any teenagers, pick up the latest American expressions. But their ease in conversational English masks the difficulties they face in learning, or relearning, the grammar rules they need for writing. 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.