NEW
Library Project
Volume 3, Number 1 - Fall 2004
Crossing
Bridges in Both Languages
by Marcy Schwartz
People
and Stories / Gente y Cuentos values
language as experience and expression rather than as a teaching goal. In
fact, our sessions don’t aim to teach
anything at all. Hoping to avoid correction, criticism and censorship
of one another, we plunge into the stories to argue with them, disagree
and propose alternative outcomes.
We also cross boundaries between languages as long as the result is inclusive. While the programs in English and Spanish have generally existed side-by-side in separate harmony, in recent years participants and host agencies have called for a more flexible approach.
Often, when adult education programs offering English as a second language (ESL) classes provide their site, educators expect that the program will improve participants’ English skills. We have been pressed to find a common ground. A focus on language competency—beyond the specificity of English or Spanish—furthers the goals of any ESL program as well as honoring People and Stories—Gente y Cuentos’s goal of empowerment through expression.
The first program to test these shared goals was at an adult education course that concentrated on English practice in preparation for the General Equivalency Diploma (GED) exam. The teacher, although willing to dedicate one class per week to Gente y Cuentos sessions, armed her spot at the table with Spanish-English dictionaries. After several interruptions during my reading of the story, while she looked up words and announced their English translations, I decided it was time to intervene. Halting the rhythm of the narration was affecting comprehension; if this continued, the sessions would be reduced to bilingual vocabulary lists.
Spontaneously, I generated a list of the ways Gente y Cuentos can boost competency in both languages without resorting to translation or overuse of the dictionary. I managed to convince the zealous teacher that allowing the session to proceed in Spanish would support and improve skills in reading comprehension, vocabulary enrichment in context, transposition of ideas and concepts from one context to another, self-esteem and respect for others through listening and comprehension. In expanding their Spanish, readers were exposed to a variety of communication strategies they could draw on in any language.
At the Yardville Youth Correctional Facility, where I have led both Gente y Cuentos and People and Stories sessions, alternating English and Spanish programs has worked to reach a wider population.
In a recent session in Spanish, a participant from Ecuador displayed a fascinating knowledge of colloquial expressions (dichos or refranes in Spanish. Some have English equivalents, such as “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” but others such as “amor de lejos es amor de pendejos” (“long-distance love is foolish love”) or “comer la torta antes del tiempo” (“eating the cake before it’s cooked”) showed a spirit of language play and a heritage of metaphor that sometimes rivaled the stories’ in their inventiveness, history and sentiment.
Confidence and competency grow out of experiencing language, any language, in its creative processes. Nurturing all forms of fluency benefits participants and furthers the goals of all of our programs.