Valeska Cardona, 9, is still far from calling herself conversational in English — she’s trying to remember how to pronounce the word orange — but she says she’s cracked the code for making a friend.
“You have to say, ‘Hi, how are you, what’s your name? My name is Valeska,’” Cardona said. Sometimes the native Spanish speaker will ask, “where you from?”
Back home in Venezuela, Cardona said she knew the days of the week in Spanish. Now she’s learning them in English – “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday, Thursday, Thursday!” her 7-year-old friend interjected during an after school program at the Salvation Army Times Square.
Cardona is among thousands of New York City public school students who arrived in the U.S. in the last year-and-a-half and are learning English.
Child advocates, educators and social services providers say migrant students face significant barriers to schooling in general, let alone having to learn a new language. And local groups are getting creative, using music and play to encourage language skills.
Some don’t know how to read or write, missed school for months or years at a time and are still processing the trauma of their journeys to New York and the family members and friends they left behind. Teachers and providers say students need a sense of stability and safety to learn, but a shortage of bilingual teachers and the city’s newest rules forcing migrant families in shelters to leave and reapply for housing every 60 days will only undermine those efforts, leaving kids with sporadic learning.
And learning English takes time.
“People are very interested in this question of how long does it take? I think that we should really be asking a different question,” said Kate Menken, a linguistics professor at Queens College. “The question is which approach is going to ensure that students are able to succeed in school, but also experience the least amount of ongoing trauma as possible.”
Some groups, like the…
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