Day 50 - WWNESP

Image by Joey Yen, via Flickr

My journey to San Francisco State University wouldn't have happened if it had not been for Dorothy and Work With Non-English Speaking People (WWNESP), the Methodist Church's program to provide English language classes for Chinese immigrants in the San Francisco area. I was put in touch with WWNESP when I completed a course to  volunteer to teach adults to read through Laubach Literacy's Each One Teach One program. When it became clear that I was not going to be able to find a job in the Berkeley area teaching English at the high school level, I looked into options that might help me move into teaching through volunteering first. The Laubach method volunteer program appealed to me and when I completed it, I learned that some of the adults who wanted to learn to read were not native speakers of English. I volunteered to tutor Angel, a Spanish-speaking man, because it offered me the opportunity to teach English as a Second Language. But instead of being assigned to Angel, the Laubach program coordinator gave my name to Dorothy who was looking for someone to teach a Chinese woman to read English.

The majority of the Chinese speakers in the WWNESP classes were women and immigrants. Guan-yin was an exception. She was the wife of a Chinese American citizen and the two of them owned a Mom-and-Pop grocery store in Oakland. She had lived in the United States since the end of World War II. Because of her experience in the grocery store, she understood and spoke quite good English. But she wanted to become an American citizen like her husband and for that she needed to learn to read English. Guan-yin was used to recognizing patterns within words so she could locate items in their store when customers asked for them. She knew, for example, that "oo" could be found in both the word "book" and the word "noodle." But she was not certain how to figure out how the letters around the "oo" changed the word. Every short word with "oo" in it was "book" to her and every longer word was "noodle." She was interpreting English words as Chinese pictographs.

For a year, I met with Guan-yin every Tuesday, using the Laubach method to try to teach her to read. I hate to admit that we didn't make much progress, although we had many interesting conversations. I also used a textbook that was prepared by the San Francisco PBS station specifically for Chinese speakers. I couldn't help but wonder why one of the first vocabulary items taught in this series was the phrase "elevator operator." L's and r's were challenging for Chinese speakers to hear, let alone pronounce. In addition, most Chinese words were one or two syllables, not four syllables, long. Guan-yin laughed whenever I tried to get her to say elevator operator. Then she told me how frustrating it was that her daughter named her daughter Valerie. Guan-yin couldn't pronounce her granddaughter's name.

After I had worked for a year with Guan-yin, Dorothy asked me to teach one of the classes that met Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Chinese Methodist Church in Oakland.  I enjoyed teaching groups of students more than one-on-one tutoring largely because the one-on-one tutoring put Guan-yin under pressure the entire hour. With a group of students, no one student was under too much pressure and I felt that all of the students made some progress at each meeting. At the end of six months, I knew that teaching English was what I wanted to pursue, so I looked into taking some classes through San Francisco State University's evening extension program. I found three sessions, each one meeting once a week for a month, in February, March, and April. The first session focused on teaching conversation, the second on teaching reading, and the third on teaching grammar. I mentioned the classes to Dorothy because I wasn't sure that I could continue teaching classes both Tuesday and Thursday as well as attending the classes at SFSU. Dorothy was enthusiastic and encouraged me to sign up for the classes. She also agreed to pay for the classes if I couldn't afford to pay for them. I didn't need the help, but I needed the support the offer provided more than I realized.

I completed the three courses which were taught by three staff members of the American Language Institute, Pat, Al, and Vern. I had no idea at the time that I would later also work as a secretary and then later teach at ALI.  But I did know at the completion of the third course that I wanted to enroll in the masters program.  I applied without knowing how I was going to be able to afford it, with my windfall still many months in the future.

WWNESP and Dorothy's willingness to pay for the extension courses were the beginning of my journey.