What Happened to Rosalie? Thoughts at the End of a Cycle

Janet Isserlis
The author is indebted to Rosalie François, Sara Smith, and Fran Collignon.

This article describes a process of reflection and analysis at the end of a cycle during which I facilitated two classes at the Literacy/ESL Program at the International Institute of Rhode Island (IIRI). It also reflects my concerns about learners' progress. These concerns are felt throughout the course of any cycle and pertain to issues regarding learners and the connections they make betWeen literacy and language learning in the classroom and beyond that context. Initially, I want to know what learners already know and to help strengthen and increase their abilities with literacy. As the cycle continues this impetus fuels continued interaction around literacy and language, and finally, when the cycle is finished, I need to learn what has happened and what hasn't happened in order to continue refining the unending process of learning from and with learners.

The Setting

The ESL/Literacy Program at the International Institute, in the words of its educational director, "creates a place" for those learners who can't really thrive in regular ESL classes. Not only is print and the ability to interact with print a barrier to their successful participation, but the constraints of many mainstream ESL programs present barriers as well. Regular, punctual attendance is not always possible for our learners. In most ESL programs where waiting lists are long, attendance policies would quickly eliminate most of our students. Tuitions would not be payable—even the nominal fees charged by the Institute in order to keep its other programs afloat. While learners in other programs face similar barriers, for our learners, the extra latitude in attendance policies and the extra support around and beyond literacy provide important first steps in helping them assume greater responsibility for their own learning—initially, in accessing the class, later in developing ability with language and literacy.

The Learners

Rosalie François finished the school year on June 19. She had been studying in the Literacy/ESL program at IIRI since the previous November. Two days prior to our last class I had read aloud to her a paragraph describing her initial entry into literacy learning (Adventures in Assessment, Volume II, p. 41). Reading the passage, I felt apprehensive. Rosalie had given me permission to write about her earlier in the year, but how would she feel about actually hearing her strengths and weaknesses being analyzed?

Rosalie was delighted. I gave her a copy of the article, asking if she would like to take it home to her husband. This she did. She reported during our last session that her husband was also very happy about the article, as well as about the progress she made during the months she attended classes. We have spoken at length about her feelings when she started the program and about how those feelings have changed during the course of the several months she was in school. She said she had felt ashamed when she first came to school because all she had been able to write was her name. She says that she is a "miracle." She has developed a core sight word vocabulary as well as a few initial strategies for dealing with words she cannot decode. During the last week of class we had worked on address- ing letters. Everyone learned where and how to write her return address, where the stamp goes and where the address is written as well. I in- vited learners to write me a letter sometime during the summer if they wanted to. Not even a week later, Rosalie had written me a lovely letter.

Rosalie's classmates were native speakers of Spanish, French, Creole, and Hmong. For the most part, the class was comprised of women. (Three men studied during the course of the year , but those who attended consistently were all women). Rosalie and Bacilia were the most consistent in their attendance arid the ones with the most basic level literacy skills. This class met five days weekly, for two and a half hours in the morning. The bulk of our work together was generated through language experience stories which were typed up to be read the following day. From these stories we built strategies for using phonetic cues and reading new sentences, as well as continuing ongoing work with dates, days, and high frequency words. We also worked from photos and objects that the women brought in to share with each other. An ongoing project centered around reading about and discussing homelessness, culminating in a visit to a shelter for which we had collected money throughout the winter and spring.

A few of the women who were more advanced than the others chose to remain in the class as peer helpers. Eventually, everyone was able to help everyone else at various times—from helping to transcribe a story on the board, to knowing and calling out a word that someone else was unable to decode. As a group, the beginners made very slow but steady progress throughout the year. Those women who were already able to read and write strengthened those skills they did have by participating in the class and by working with other learners whose skills were less developed.

In addition to Rosalie's class, I worked with another group of learners for two hours daily, four days a week in the early evening. This
group was on the whole more advanced than Rosalie and her beginning level classmates, all of whom were new to the program this past year. In contrast, most of the evening students had been in class with me or with Fran Collignon for at least six months. Those few who were not returning from the previous year were either friends or family of current students or had been on a waiting list generated at the start of the school year.

Although we used a great deal of language experience writing in this group, we also did a fair amount of reading for new meaning, using texts from Voices, various textbooks (readers for the most part) as well as homework based on learner-generated writing from class. The turnover of students from this class was greater for a number of reasons: we added a third teacher to the staff in the spring, hoping to help my advanced learners make the transition from the ESL/Literacy program to the English Language Center (the agency's mainstream ESL program) in the fall. Additionally, learners came in from Fran's more basic level class and others left because of health or family constraints. One other difference between this class and the morning session was that the learners had more oral/aural English at their command. Although I spoke Spanish and French when necessary, it was far more difficult to get the morning students to speak English than it was with the evening students, probably because there was a sizeable group of Hmong learners, and only a minority of Haitians and Spanish speakers in the evening class. The use of learners' languages in the classroom (Does it help? Is it a disservice? Is there a balance to be struck?) is one of the factors I consider when stepping back from the past cycle in order to try to gain a sense of how and why things worked and did not.

The Process

When examining learners and assessment, Rosalie is easy. For her, talking about her progress comes as easily as breathing. Her aurall oral abilities are such that this kind of metawork is dynamic and endlessly illuminating. She is, however, atypical of most adult lliteracy learners. Not only is her ability to express herself in English unusual, she also accepts that talk about literacy is important. She is justifiably proud of her accomplishments and positively beams when discussing them. Her explicit acknowledgement of her progress is not typical, particularly of those learners from southeast Asia, with whom I have worked. The notion of stepping back to look at progress over a period of time is a very school-like idea. Those of us who went to school in this country knew that report cards would come quarterly. Teachers would chastise those of us "not working to our fullest potential" and/or would praise improved handwriting and comportment. Our own self-assessment abilities often developed after high school—when we began to choose what (or if) to study. We may have known early on that we were bad at math or good in English, but for many of us, our own entry into assessment was through those assessments levied by our teachers. As educators now, we may reflect back and find that we have a range of reactions to our previous schooling. Our own sense of how we know about learning and progress has evolved from a position of relative strength: we've been literate learners for years.

For learners with little prior schooling or from cultures where teachers dictate what occurs in a classroom, the concept of self-assessment may be difficult to grasp. Surely, many learners have an innate sense of their own movement with language and literacy, but the expression/ verbalization of that progress may not be within the frameworks they have developed or use in describing learning. Not only is abstract (general) self-assessment sometimes difficult, even acknowledging one's ability to accomplish a specific task is often hidden by layers of cultural patterning. Many Hmong women, for example, truly readers, will say "I don't know" when asked to read aloud in class. My colleague Fran Collignon, who has worked extensively with Hmong learners in community and educational settings, tells me that this is largely bound to women's roles within the Hmong culture.

Many of the other learners with whom I've worked, when asked "What do you think you learned this year?" tell me that I'm a good teacher, I believe, to show me respect and express appreciation. They do not tell me what they have learned, however. Others, being modest, tell me "nothing has changed for them during the course of the year. The pencil/paper work we do, (see Fig. 1) as well as ongoing brief and later extended discussions, tell me that some learners do not necessarily give the same valence to this talk about learning and/ or have yet to be able to actually feel enough of their own progress to be able to step away from it and say, "Yes, before this year, I couldn't read the schedule at work. Now I can or -I still don't read anything at home, but I feel better in school." I believe that this metaprocess is viewed in different ways by different learners, and that factors such as prior exposure to schools or progression from one level to another in their current schools might have something to do with this.

FIGURE 1

Discussions about progress may inevitably be connected in learners' minds to discussions about a teacher's merits. Not only do cultural patterns of modesty come into play, other assumptions about what teachers need, want to, or should hear are also involved. 2

Throughout the course of the cycle (from September to June) with both groups, I tried to make learners more consciously aware of their learning processes. When someone was able to write an entry in a dialogue journal without assistance, I would point it out. I would encourage someone else having difficulty reading a line of print to go ahead to the next word and then try to figure out from the meaning what that word might be. I would ask people who were clearly making progress if they thought they were progressing. Sometimes my questions were met with polite nods; at other times cultural patterning took over; occasionally someone would agree that they were able to do something they had previously been unable to accomplish.

With the pencil/paper surveys, I try to elicit specific information from learners. I am learning that such surveys, at least at present, in and of themselves are occasionally useful, as part of the necessarily ongoing assessment process. The surveys themselves, however, seem to be artifi- cial. These surveys ask learners to think and write about progress after six or nine months- in terms somewhat removed from the everyday language we used to talk about learners' literacy . However, it was the learners themselves who helped me to see in a very concrete manner the ways in which independence with literacy can in fact improve one's outlook on day to day life. These insights did not emerge through surveys.

Bacilia's progress is evident to Rosalie, who encourages her often. It's apparent to me, and I point out to her the difference in the way her print looks since she began in January and the way it looks now, months later. Bacilia herself says she feels happy because she knows some English and feels a bit more capable of dealing with office appointments on her own. Her attendance was virtually perfect; only clinic appointments and the odd day or two found her missing from class.

For Surprise, the gradual progress I'd observed was translated (literally, by Rosalie, from Creole into English): "She didn't know what to do [before]; not her name. She can spell her name." Surprise can also follow along on a page when someone is reading, and can work her way across a line of print. For now, she relies on memory and only slightly on actual print for cues to decoding. BetWeen her state- ment through Rosalie, her affect (she attends more frequently; she is affectionate and warm where she was once silent and withdrawn), and the actual strides with following print, I see that some foundation has been laid. Since I started writing this essay, I've received a letter, written by Surprise's daughter ("Because of my daughter she can It print and I can copy maybe next time I will try my best to write you something-). In her letter, Surprise has her daughter write "I know how to write my name, take a bus [Rosalie showed her how to take the bus] A,B,C so on and so forth.... I know I can read even though it's not much it's still something for me. (See Fig. 2)

Everyone in the morning class can now write the date at the top of the blackboard before class begins. They can all go to the board to transcribe something, with varying degrees of assistance from others. They are all willing to try. These are small steps, surely, but imponant ones in the context of the ongoing events in the classroom and the small tenuous bridge we try to build between it and the world beyond.

Triangulation*: Putting It All Together

* "Triangulation" refers to the process of looking at various forms of data (surveys, transcripts, writing samples, observations) in order to make sense of and derive meaning from such data. Leo van tier's The Classroom and the Language Learners (Longman, 1988) is an excellent resource for research methodologies.

In rereading my notes and the surveys, weeks and months later, I realize the differences in perspectives between observations (my own) and reportings (the learners'). Right now, these surveys tell me more about how learners respond to surveys than about how they actually feel about those questions posed in the surveys. This reminds me of something Lenore Balliro reported during her early research into alterative assessment. One state administrator acknowledged openly that the (standardized) tests being discussed did little more than test the abilities of the test-takers to take tests. There is value in the process of asking questions about how learners learn and about how they feel they are progressing. This talk about learning, however, is somewhat a language of its own and must be learned as (yet another) language.

Learners' responses to the surveys teach me about needing to find better ways to ask the questions, while reminding me of the importance of ongoing dialogue with learners as well as ongoing documentation of classroom observation.

What Next?

In thinking about the classes to come (as this reaches most of its readers, new fall classes are well underway), I wonder what might actually be the value of all this reflection. What new goals and objectives might it help us set? Geoff Brindley talks about purposes, goals and objectives:

...[S]etting objectives (of whatever kind) will not in itself automatically lead to more effective learning. The objectives might be irrelevant or incomprehensible to the learners or unattainable in terms of the resources they have at their disposal. For this reason it is very important that learners are involved in formulating the objectives and deciding on the most appropriate ways to achieve them. objectives are not just a technical tool to help teachers; they are meant to make learners' life easier as well. 3

When I consider what my learners can do, I obviously worry about what it is that they cannot do. Rosalie's enthusiasm is tempered by my own nagging doubts about what she and her classmates. may or may not retain over the summer and more importantly about the connections they make between the print related work we do every day at the blackboard and the maze of print they confront outside of school each and every day. Surprise's letter validates all of us, I think, in that she has either learned well what she thinks I need to hear or (I hope) that she herself does see the possibilities inherent in those small but solid steps she's taken in the six months since she started school.

Brindley's work provides a useful frame. work for thinking about concrete ways of working with learners towards involving them not only in the assessment of their own learning but more importantly, in the evolution and shaping of that learning process. Our own reflection, coupled with ongoing investigation, action, interaction, and dialogue should help us further learners' abilities and options for and around writing, reading, and using language and literacy in ways that are meaningful to them.

A Final Note

One shortcoming attributed to adult education, particularly ESL, is that we never seem to have a sense of closure. As long as the program is funded, learners can come back and work within it for as long as they need to. Although in recent years, funding constraints have forced us to shut down for the summer, there isn't the same kind of closure for our learners that many of us may have felt at the completion of high school or college. Learners come back to classes and their learning continues. It seems that the summer hiatus passes almost unnoticed; we pick up where we left off. When learners actually leave the literacy program, I may feel some sense of closure, but they still state. "I need English." Many of them will continue for as long as they can in one or another mainstream ESL program. Others will need another cycle or cycles in literacy before feeling ready to try out the next step. Because of the ongoing nature of this process—learners learning at varying rates, and with varying degrees of speed and abilities—our attempts to reflect upon progress at the end of the cycle are really part of a larger, circular progress of learning about learning we never really finish. We lay foundations, we hope that learners gain the needed confidence, community, and validation they will need to continue learning. We need these things, too.

And finally, Rosalie: "I can write something, I'm happy because somebody can read and see what I'm saying." That's a goal right there.

1. By "metawork," I refer to processes of metacognition: knowing about knowing. It is largely in those processes that we strive to engage learners when working towards learner-centered assessment and learning.
2. For a very different take on learners evaluating teachers, see A. Wennerstrom and P. Heiser's "ESL Student Bias in Instructional Evaluation," TESOL Quarterly Vol. 26, No. 2 (1992). In it, the authors touch on cross cultural differences in students' perceptions of teachers, but their focus is geared toward performance evaluations and subsequent career implications for those being evaluated. Although the focus differs radically from the kind of reflective assessment generally discussed within this series (Adventures in Assessment), it is important to remain mindful and aware of those "other" forms of evaluation and assessment; they're the norm.
3. G. Brindley (1989). Assessing Achievement in the Learner-centered Curriculum, Macquarie University National Center for English Teaching and Research, p. 9

Originally published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 3 (April 1992),
SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 2003.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.