African Women Learning English

Nobody wants these women to speak the English language more than they do.They know better than anyone that their futures depend on achieving a certain mastery of the language we speak.

Some years ago there was an ad for volunteers to tutor immigrants studying English. I responded and found it to be a good fit.

Working with newcomers from a dozen countries started me wondering what it takes to learn a language from scratch. I’ve invested six years trying to answer that question.

Taking a introductory course in Spanish at a community college got me ready to study in Spain. (No reason this shouldn’t be fun, I told myself.) I’ve followed up with classes, evenings of conversation and reading lists ever since.

Unlike my clients I’m under no pressure to nail a language to land a job — and a good thing too. If you ask me a question in Spanish there’s still a better-than-even chance I’ll ask you to repeat it. Sometimes I nod and just pretend to understand.

It’s easy to forget that we learn our childhood language over decades. Our mistakes are seen as normal and even cute. But these Africa immigrants are confronted with an immediate, real-life crossword puzzle of nouns, verbs and adjectives wrapped in contradictions and exceptions. It’s more difficult than I had expected.

But I’m here to predict success for the four of them.

With patience and effort, they will undergo a change that borders on miraculous. Breakthroughs in language often occur at the moment a student is about to despair.

At some point intuitions, hunches and wild guesses prove to be correct more often than not. Patterns become familiar. Word associations kick in. Numbers can be understood. Nuance comes into play and jokes start to make sense.