ESL student persists to overcome language barrier

Editor’s note: All quotes are translated from Mandarin to English.

Sitting in an Algebra 2 classroom, sophomore Sida Ren turned over the paper with shaking hands. Flipping through the pages, he saw a disheartening word problem.

The words on the sheet stared back at him. He searched frantically for familiar words or some key phrases to help him get started, but all he saw was gibberish.

“I couldn’t understand anything,” Ren said.

This past summer, Ren moved from Shenzhen, China, to Saratoga and has been trying to learn English ever since.

In his eighth grade year, Ren moved to Saratoga and attended Redwood Middle School for one semester. But because of VISA issues, he had to return to China. When Ren came back to Saratoga this summer, he realized that he had forgotten almost all the English he learned in eighth grade.

After the first Algebra 2 test of the semester, Ren left his classroom feeling defeated. At home, with his tutor by his side translating, the concepts were not difficult.

After all, he had already learned them at his previous school, Shen Da Fu Junior High School in Shenzhen. But in the classroom, he couldn’t solve the same problems because of the language barrier.

Ren was equally dumbfounded when confronted with World History textbook readings.

“When I was in China, we studied World History for a whole year,” Ren said. “But now that I have to learn it in English, it’s much more difficult.”

For the most part, he knows the facts of World History  from his  classes in China, he said. But when asked to answer open-ended questions, and he doesn’t know how to analyze the evidence. He was stumped in a subject he once felt confident in.

Somehow both his Algebra 2 and World History grades had become a reflection of his English ability.

“Most people only have to learn math or Chemistry or World History, but in addition to those subjects, I also have to learn [basic] English,” Ren said. “It’s twice as hard.”

At the start of the school year, Ren was overwhelmed by both the amount of schoolwork he faced and the English he was expected to already know.

When he came home after school, he opened his textbooks, pulled up Google Translate and began translating each word from English to Chinese. After half an hour, he ended up with a butchered translation of a single paragraph.

Frustrated, he gave up and went to school the next morning without his homework completed. Each day, the homework piled on as Ren fell further and further behind.

“It’s hard because everyone here grew up knowing English grammar and vocabulary,” Ren said. “It’s their instinct, but my instinct is Chinese.”

Luckily, in his English Second Language (ESL) class, ESL and Chinese teacher Sara Tseng and his fellow classmates guide him through World History readings and complicated word problems.

Overseeing his progress, Tseng said Ren tries “really hard,” and she believes that if he continues to work hard, his English will improve.

“[Ren’s] always positive. He’s optimistic,” Tseng said. “He never gives up.”

During ESL class, Tseng said she encourages students to practice having conversations in English in hopes that they will be more able to communicate with their teachers.

Despite this, Ren said he still finds it difficult to participate in class.

“I hardly raise my hand,” Ren said. “I don’t know how to make my thoughts into words. Instead of embarrassing myself, I just stay quiet.”

Although Ren might be characterized as soft-spoken in his other classes, Tseng said that he’s actually quite talkative.

“If you were to ask teachers on campus, most of them would say that these students don’t talk much,” Tseng said. “But when they walk into my classroom, they act differently.”

According to Tseng, even though other teachers and students might not see it this way, in reality, the ESL students are sociable and act like any other high schooler on campus. Tseng said that they feel comfortable in her classroom, because they share the room with people in the same situation as they’re in.

Out of his seven classes, ESL is where Ren said he feels the most comfortable. According to Ren, not only has the class helped him improve his English, but it has also allowed him to find a core group of friends.

“Because they are in the same situation as me, they are the only ones who understand me,” Ren said. “[They] understand the difficulty in learning another language and the frustration that comes along with it.”

Even though Ren finds himself in a difficult situation every day, he is confident that with the help of Tseng and his peers, he will improve.

“I know that there will come a day when I can speak English fluently,” Ren said.