For my scholarly source for Project #2, I decided to read the chapter She Doesn’t Know Who I am of the book L2 Writing in Secondary classrooms by Luciana C. de Oliveira and Tony Silva. In this chapter, research is conducted on how refugees adapt to a new school and new life, but more specifically why refugees are underrepresented in the area of second language writing. The chapter focuses on a case study over a 15-month period on L2 writers in an American High School, but also draws attention on the experiences of a 14-year-old boy named Wisdom and the challenges he faces in his English classroom. The author first gives the reader a bit of background information about Wisdom. His first language is Gokana and second language is English. His father was the village leader of his hometown in Nigeria, and worked with activists who led an uprising against the government in the 1990’s. Wisdom and a few of his siblings left Nigeria when civil war broke out. When he came to America, he was first an “English Language Learner” (ELL) but in High school he didn’t want to be associated with that. He felt he had a strong base of English and didn’t want to be too attached to his Nigerian roots.
Wisdom started off his semester in Mrs. Jenner’s English class with excitement. However, as time went by, he became less enthusiastic about the class. The teacher never gave him corrections and never encouraged his strengths. There were often miscommunications between the two and that created tension. Wisdom didn’t want to inform Mrs. Jenner’s about his ELL experiences. However, as time went by he wondered how that would affect his academics. Ironically, despite Wisdom’s desire to keep his refugee past life in private, he was also frustrated that Mrs. Jenner’s didn’t extend an invite for him to write about his personal life. He thought the opportunity of writing about being a refugee would disclose his past. Eventually, Wisdom decided to invite his old ELL teacher to a meeting with all of his teachers to talk about his past association with the ELL program. This did create a truce between Wisdom and Mrs. Jenner’s.
From this research and Wisdom’s story, one can conclude that teachers ought to consider more closely how young refugees have been influenced emotionally, academically and socio-politically. One can see that by writing about their experiences, they can either feel more constrained or they are motivated to do better.
Wisdom started off his semester in Mrs. Jenner’s English class with excitement. However, as time went by, he became less enthusiastic about the class. The teacher never gave him corrections and never encouraged his strengths. There were often miscommunications between the two and that created tension. Wisdom didn’t want to inform Mrs. Jenner’s about his ELL experiences. However, as time went by he wondered how that would affect his academics. Ironically, despite Wisdom’s desire to keep his refugee past life in private, he was also frustrated that Mrs. Jenner’s didn’t extend an invite for him to write about his personal life. He thought the opportunity of writing about being a refugee would disclose his past. Eventually, Wisdom decided to invite his old ELL teacher to a meeting with all of his teachers to talk about his past association with the ELL program. This did create a truce between Wisdom and Mrs. Jenner’s.
From this research and Wisdom’s story, one can conclude that teachers ought to consider more closely how young refugees have been influenced emotionally, academically and socio-politically. One can see that by writing about their experiences, they can either feel more constrained or they are motivated to do better.
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