By May Overmyer
Like many people, I was required to learn a foreign language growing up. I was taught Spanish. It often felt tedious, leaning against a locker between classes, memorizing categorized vocabulary lists (things you find at the airport, rooms in a house, types of vegetables, etc.) and charts of irregular verbs and their conjugations (watch out for “hacer”).
But during my sophomore year of high school, a 4’11” nun named Hermana Catalina assigned our Honors Spanish 4 class to read Cajas de cartón by Francisco Jiménez. It was about a teenager roughly my age whose family had immigrated from Mexico to California and eked out a living by picking cotton, strawberries, and carrots. He and his brother had after school jobs, comical misadventures, and glowing ambitions.
Unlike textbooks, flashcards, and workbooks, this story fully immersed me in the Spanish language. As I read it, concepts that had previously remained out of reach were solidified for me. The book presented hundreds of new vocabulary words and provided thousands of reminders about proper subject-verb agreement. Beyond that, I got to spend hours in the mind of someone who thought in Spanish, and that was (ironically) helpful beyond words. Jiménez’s tale wrapped me up and quietly taught me.
In my current role as an ESL teacher, I use a similar technique to build connections with my own students. I’ve found that nothing draws them in, holds their attention, and helps them remember quite like a story.
May Overmyer is an active and passionate ESL teacher and the founder of www.FriendsWorld.org, an ESL resource for preteen students.
