An Immigrant Student's Story: I Was a Dictionary Girl

By Helen Janc Malone

How would you support a student who did not speak English and had no one else at the school who spoke his or her native language? I was that student some 20 years ago. Coming from the war-torn former Yugoslavia, I was placed with my peers in an English-for-speakers-of-other-languages, or ESOL, class. At home, only my father spoke some English, and at school, no one spoke Serbo-Croatian, my native language.

To help me navigate through the school day, my father bought me an English-Serbo-Croatian dictionary; however, this new communication device was both slow and imperfect. As students attempted to speak with me, I would ask them to point to words in my dictionary so I could read the translation. The process was painstakingly long, so many students just resorted to nodding and smiling.

Using my dictionary inside the classroom was equally challenging. By the time I looked up a single word from an overhead slide, another slide would appear. Some teachers allowed me to use my dictionary during exam time; however, I would use entire class periods to translate problems and questions and then to try to make sense of the information using different word-order combinations. At times, when I recognized content, usually through an image or a formula, communicating my knowledge proved to be a long process. I would write down what I knew about the subject matter in my native language, translating it at home with my father to English, and then present it to my...