Increasing English Skills One Scene at a Time

(October 21, 2008 - Riverhead, NY) Students (in Marisa Medina's ESL classes at the Pulaski Street School and in Monique Sturm's English as a Second Language classes at the Riverhead Middle School) are improving their English speaking skills one scene at a time through a special grant-supported movie-making program that employs the title “Finding their voice through multimedia learning.”

The grant, which procurred a Mac laptop computer, movie making software, and a digital video camera for the ESL classes, is part of a Nassau and Suffolk BOCES Title II D Consortium grant with several other districts. With this grant, ESL students at Pulaski and the Middle School are using their new Mac laptop and video camera to create video interviews with English Language Learners about their journeys to the United States.

"It's fun for the students and it integrates technology with ESL strategies while simultaneously addressing the English Language Arts standards," states Ms. Sturm. "Also, by using the theme of immigration as the central topic, it also correlates with the 8th grade social studies curriculum. The purpose is to help English Language Learners express themselves through the use of technology."

While two students at a time from Ms. Sturm’s Intermediate ESL class used the middle school library’s conference room to conduct their interviews, the rest of the class worked on editing their videos with movie-making software on the computers in the library.

Joselyn, a seventh grader who immigrated to the United States from Guatemala, interviewed Bevi, whose heritage is Mixteco from Mexico. Through her questioning (in English), Joselyn learned that Bevi’s family immigrated after the death of two of her siblings from a common childhood disease like chicken pox.

“My parents couldn’t get medical care for them and they died,” stated Bevi. “In the United States children do not die from chicken pox or other common children’s diseases.” 

Next, Kristina, who came to the United States from Russia at age 13, interviewed 7th grader Yosselin, who is from Honduras. Even though they both came to the United States with no English skills and, in Kristina’s case only a year ago, they asked and answered questions with very little hesitation and had only a few difficulties with choosing the past tense of the verb rather than the present tense.

There are three teams working on projects, one at the Middle School and two at the Pulaski Street School. Several of the final movie projects will be posted on a secure website through BOCES.

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Related Link: News Review Article (November 5, 2008)