Rationale
Over the past 6 years in which I have taught at Pugh, I have received a crash course in poverty and in Tex/ Mex barrio culture. The inspiration for this unit came quite unexpectedly one day as I was introducing an Argentine exchange student to my class. Lucas Romanini, a native of Buenos Aires, was living with me during his summer vacation; he was in the U.S. to improve his English. After introductions, a short Q. and A. session followed. One of my students asked Lucas how he came to learn Spanish! While I expected that my kids would be titillated to meet someone from the Southern Hemisphere, it did not occur to me that they would be surprised to learn that Lucas was Hispanic. But in their insular barrio culture, all Spanish speakers are Mexican. My students had virtually no information about the broad spectrum of Hispanic culture with whom they shared a mother tongue. I knew then and there that I needed to develop a unit that would broaden my students' perspectives of Latino Culture.
Just as immigrants come in all shapes and sizes, so do the language levels and abilities of my English language learners. It is my task as a self- contained ESL teacher to deliver the mandated curriculum in the content areas, while supporting and growing their English language learning in the four language arts strands of reading, writing, speaking and listening. My 4th grade ESL students are transitioning to instruction that is completely in English for the very first time. Many are recent arrivals, others have been taught through our school's bilingual education program. Because the Texas Education Code strongly supports bilingual education, most of my students have come through a bilingual education program through grade 3. (Some schools have dual language programs, which promote total biliteracy, but ours is a transitional program designed to exit students at grade 4.) At grade 4, all instruction is in English and this makes the testing demands daunting; by February my students must take and pass a Writing test that requires a working knowledge of English grammar and composition
As a means of lowering the affective filter that transitioning creates, and in hoping to make the English language appear as friendly as possible, I teach ESL students from a literature based curricular perspective. It is my belief that the very best teachers are great storytellers; in my own academic experience the teachers who had the most profound influence on me were the ones who told the best stories. My recipe for success demands a high level of student interaction: the more students use and manipulate language, the easier second language acquisition is for them. For this reason, I try to choose high interest material that will immediately engage them; using well written, multi-cultural children's literature has always proven to be the most pleasurable way to achieve the language goals. Because the students love the stories, they find the skills embedded in the tasks to be fun and exciting. Using children's literature allows me to do my best "sneaky teaching" —— in which students are learning and don't even know it!
For this unit, I plan to introduce my students to 3 Caribbean, Spanish speaking islands: Cuba, The Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. I chose these islands because together they represent the largest (after Mexico) number of Spanish speaking migrants in the United States.
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