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06/01/2022 08:30 AMAs the English Language (EL) district coordinator for grades K-12 in the North Haven Public School System, Nadia Gonzalez helps children new to the English language adjust to their new lives in town and strengthens bonds between families and the community in the process.
For the past six or seven years, Nadia has worked as the EL coordinator in North Haven.
“I was in Hartford before that,” Nadia says.
Prior to Hartford, Nadia started out in the field as an EL tutor in Farmington, which lasted for a year before her move to Hartford.
She was drawn to the teaching field by her own broad background.
“I graduated in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in social studies,” explains Nadia. “I wanted to teach grades 6 to 12 in social studies, and I wasn’t all that picky about where, but those jobs were few and far between.”
With no social studies teaching positions at the ready, Nadia took a few odd jobs over the next year and began substitute teaching in Wallingford.
“When I was a sub in Wallingford for the first year of middle school, it was then I realized I wasn’t so much married to social studies as I was to just teaching in general,” Nadia recalls.
She wanted to learn how to become more marketable as a teacher and find the right fit in the grade-school system. And that’s when it dawned on her to reach into her own past.
“I’m not a Spanish speaker, but I thought about learning more Spanish,” she says and notes that the Spanish she knew was from what she had learned in school. “I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll just learn Spanish.’ But Quinnipiac [University] didn’t have a program and I didn’t know how I was going to get to the level I needed to get to in order to be proficient in Spanish in speaking, writing, reading, and listening.”
When Nadia googled graduate programs, she discovered a program called TESOL, which is the acronym for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Nadia found this interesting since both her parents are immigrants from different countries, so she figured she could study linguistics.
“How hard could it be?” she asked herself at the time.
The answer was not what she wanted to hear.
“Turns out it’s pretty hard,” she admits with a laugh.
She forged ahead, however, and found her language studies both challenging and rewarding.
“One of the [school] principals said this was one of the growing fields, and she was right,” says Nadia.
The need to help the children of immigrant families from non-English speaking countries is growing in the United States, and thus the need for teachers to help students learn English is growing.
Nadia finds the work rewarding because “the families and the students are really kind and appreciative” of the help afforded them in the school system to allow them acclimated to the dominant English language.
In her work, Nadia stresses that the aim is not to negate the native language of an immigrant family but to add English to their ability to communicate while preserving their heritage at the same time.
“I grew up in a multi-lingual household,” says Nadia, “My father spoke Arabic, my mom spoke Polish, my grandmother spoke Polish and Austrian, and they had been told to only speak in English to me and my brother.”
This philosophy—with the purpose at the time to quickly Americanize all new immigrants—is something that’s no longer stressed in schools today.
“In order to be proficient in a [new] language, you really have to build off another language,” Nadia explains when talking about how to teach English to non-English speakers via modern standards, to help people learn faster.
“So now we tell families to speak both languages [their native language and English], read and write in both languages, and truly be bi-lingual [at home and for the children] because it really helps your brain development,” explains Nadia, and the result is more accurate use and understanding of the new language being learned.
Immigrants can still assimilate into American culture while being bilingual and not have to give up their ancestral roots, according to Nadia.
Even though the largest growing immigrant population in North Haven is Spanish-speaking, Nadia stresses that there are so many other languages spoken by many other immigrants in town, so an EL teacher does not need to know all those other languages to teach them English.
“People will assume I need to be a Spanish speaker in order to do this job, which just isn’t true,” Nadia explains. “In North Haven, we have a mix of languages: Arabic, Turkish, Korean, [and] Urdu, in addition to Spanish,” so no one person could learn all those languages to help these people learn English.
“You just have to understand patterns,” Nadia says, which includes understanding the word order of different languages to help learners understand the placement of subjects, verbs, and objects in the construction of a sentence spoken or written in English versus how those same parts of speech are arranged in another language.
Another aspect of teaching English to students is helping them work through the pronunciation of English words.
“You want to know, pronunciation-wise, what sounds they are going to have trouble with,” explains Nadia. “For example, L and R in Japanese can be mixed up.”
Nadia’s teaching spans from kindergarten through the 12th grade, but she would also like to connect with older residents of the North Haven population “so that even people who have been here for a while have someplace to go to learn English,” says Nadia. “So, we plan to connect with the adult education people next week.”
“We want the students to grow,” continues Nadia, “and they’re exposed to an English-only environment for many hours a day [at school], five days a week, most weeks, so they get a lot of exposure to English, but that’s not true for some of our parents.”
In stressing the importance of preserving a family’s native language while their children learn to assimilate into America and learn English, “we tell families you really need to speak both languages at home and don’t let the kids lose one of the languages, even though the kids do feel a little different in grade school and often don’t want to learn more than one language. And it’s sometimes difficult on the younger children as they are trying to figure out two languages. But once they catch up with their peers, they soar, because it’s great for your brain to know more than one language.”
With two boys at home, ages 4 and 7, Nadia has plenty to keep her busy, while also following her passion to help non-English speaking children and their families in North Haven.
“I love this job,” Nadia says and gives thanks to the administration in the North Haven School System. “They have been nothing but supportive. They really care for all students and want to help them with any barriers. It’s so rewarding because between the beginning of a school year and the end of a school year you can see some amazing growth for a lot of these kids.”