Daisy C. S. Catalan
Literature has been used effectively to help English language learners in the classroom, particularly adolescent learners. First, they are motivated to learn if the subject matter they are reading about concerns themes or topics that they identify or care about such as love, changes in their lives, conflicts in their age group, dreams, fears and other varieties of human experience. Second, even though most adolescent English language learners are not very proficient in using the language, they may be proficient users of another language and thus are also capable of high level thinking skills.
Literature that is carefully selected can serve as models to these students and can challenge them intellectually and provide a high quality language that serves as a source for learning mechanisms of the English language in authentic context.
Literature is a powerful tool that gives the students the means to imagine and think creatively. It can stimulate students to conduct a lively discussion among themselves making them use and practice the language they are learning.
This curriculum unit is designed for students whose English language proficiency is at the intermediate level. I have used some detective stories by Arthur Conan Doyle in my English to Speakers of Other Language (ESOL) classes before and I found them successful in terms of students interests and class participation. My students are predominantly from the inner city. Most of them live in a world of violence, crime and deprivation. Reading detective fiction is going over familiar ground to them. They encounter cops and criminals, detectives and perpetrators. They are not naïve when it comes to such topics and they usually have strong opinions of what is good and right for them. Most of my students know how to live in the streets and for them anyone who can get away with something is okay as long as one's immediate family is not hurt or victimized.
The students in my ESOL intermediate level can understand more complex speech but they still require a lot of repetition. Some is spontaneous in the use of the language but still they may have difficulty in expressing all their thoughts because of their restricted vocabulary and their limited command of the structure of language. I would also like to emphasize that my ESOL students at this level could speak in simple comprehensible sentences but they make frequent grammatical errors. This is equally reflected in their writing. They may read proficiently if there is prior experience or familiarity with themes, genre or characters. The students in my class are diverse. Most of them have recently arrived from different countries and they need more English language instructions before they can be moved to grade level classrooms.
The students will read Carolina Garcia-Aguilera's book "Bloody Shame". I choose this book because the language is sufficiently clear and simple for the students to understand yet also expressive in a way that could match their maturity and intellectual sophistication. Carolina Garcia-Aguilera is a Cuban-American born author who has been a private investigator for ten years. She has published three books so far and "Bloody Shame" is her second novel. Her characters and themes are drawn from her first hand experience as a private investigator while at the same time she treats her readers to the taste of modern Cuban-American family life and her tales of crime in Miami, Florida. She introduces the readers to her created private eye Lupe Solano, a twenty-six year old Cuban -born investigator. Lupe is described by several daily newspapers as "feisty, engaging, funny, Miami smart, charming and sexy." Garcia-Aguilera writes directly and clearly and as such is accessible to the ESOL readers. Her sentences and paragraphs are usually short and straightforward and her vocabulary is simple and easy to understand. She uses some Spanish words in the dialogue that will naturally appeal to my native Spanish-speaking students.
This unit will be introduced during the fourth and last marking period. At this time the students have read different types of literature in their required text that included fiction, non-fiction, poetry, myths, songs, drama and speeches. Reading a novel or a book is a culminating project for the year. This detective novel is appropriately chosen because most of my students could identify with the characters who come from their own or very similar cultures. The characters in the novel are also experiencing cultural change as exemplified by a Cuban rafter or "balsero" who was pulled up on the Florida Straits by a sports fisherman's boat on New Year's day 1990 and taken to the transit processing center at Key West then later moved to Miami and started his first work as a new immigrant.
