By Sam Bernstein, Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center's Adult ESL Program

Summary

Our program, Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center's Adult ESL Program, offers three years of English classes and each year of study consists of three trimesters. The students that I taught the homebuying readiness curriculum to are in the first trimester of the second year of study- level 2a.

My fifteen students are Chinese immigrants, some form the North, but most from Canton and two from Vietnam. About half the students speak Cantonese, but almost all the students understand at least some Mandarin, and a few don't understand Cantonese at all.

Consequently there is some disagreement about which dialect should be emphasized for classroom explanations about grammar. For example, most students think the teacher should explain the grammar in Mandarin. On the other hand, some students don't really understand enough that way.

This particular class has a lot of enthusiasm. They're also a little hard to control because they like to joke around in Chinese. On the bright side, some of the jokes are pretty funny. "Poke guy" was a big one this semester. It's Cantonese for something like, "stumbling around dangerously on the street." It sounds a lot like a number of the new English words they learned, so the students used the phrase as a mnemonic aide, reciting it over and over. Furthermore their attendance is regular; they are a work-together class and they love to use computers.

Introducing the Topic of Housing

Early in the semester we started the material in our program-designed text which includes an introduction to very basic banking concepts. I introduced the thought that we might be studying apartment finding (a topic from their text) and maybe, a new twist, house buying. Students liked that idea. We also incorporated grammar into these lessons: "How long does it take to______?" "It takes (time) to (do something)." That Friday I gave them a writing assignment that combined the above elements. The assignment included questions about the difference between banking in China and in America. It also included the questions: "How long will it take you to be comfortable in America?", and "What will it take you to be comfortable in America?" My thinking was that housing and banking and the idea that time was an important factor in the equation would lead the students to begin the process of establishing some goals; and I knew, from my years of teaching in this community that buying a house was a predictable goal for many Chinese immigrant families.

Introducing the FannieMae Foundation's ESOL Curriculum

Throughout the homebuying unit, we moved back and forth through old and new ways of teaching and learning. For example, as I mentioned earlier, our regular curriculum includes some fundamental concepts about banking and the search for an apartment. But I also wanted to incorporate the FannieMae Foundation materials and to try some new approaches as well.

For instance, I didn't begin by handing out the FannieMae Foundation ESOL curriculum How to Buy a House in The United States, for two reasons: I didn't want the students to get lost in the text and I didn't want them to be frustrated that I was handing them too much information and not teaching it to them. So, I copied the first unit, and we used that, lesson by lesson without much alteration. Of course it took some time to deal with new words and new ideas. The concept of credit, for instance, was a very foreign one to the students. The discussion about credit lead students to inquire about obtaining credit cards. Also, many of the students assumed that in order to buy a home you needed to have saved for a down payment of at least 25-50% of the total purchase cost of the house. These lesson were a good opportunity for students to learn about U.S. homebuying practices.

How the Students Generated Homebuying Questions

At a certain point, I decided that the pictures in the curriculum could work to catalyze a good discussion and might lead students into some initial research about homebuying. So I copied and cut out all 40 pictures from the workbook.

During that class, I spread out the pictures on the table in front of pairs of students and asked them to choose two pictures per pair, talk about them together and write a question about each picture. The students hemmed and hawed. They had a lot to say in Chinese, but not much in English. They were hard pressed to wrap themselves around the specific details of the pictures; they were equally hard pressed to put themselves in a questioning mode. I walked around trying to encourage them and corrected grammar here and there. Then I asked a student from each pair to write their question on the white board. The questions were pretty bad. For example, one pair of students wrote an out-of-focus question about the different types of houses, colonial, duplex, etc. How much does a Victorian House cost? Finally, I helped the whole group revise everything and we came up with a list of about 6 questions that I could email to a Realtor that we had invited to class in order to address the students more technical homebuying questions.

How can you buy a house if you don't have money?

Is it cheaper to buy a condo?

How much does a condo cost?

What's the lowest down payment one should pay? (Some students thought it was 50%)

How much do you have to pay a year?

How do you get a credit card?

Using the World Wide Web to Research Homebuying

Anther route to finding answers to these student generated questions was via the Internet. Because we have a 12-piece Pentium Lab at the school, and because we now have our own homebuying web site as part of a FannieMae Foundation/ALRI mini-grant, I imagined that we would be able to answer much of the students' questions using technology. Eight students and I had worked pretty hard on this special project for two months in the Fall of '98. We had made three visits to a Realtor, a mortgage broker and a student's condo. The web site includes work-ups of all three visits, interviews with the Realtor and mortgage broker, students compositions about what they learned and how, a set of key questions and answers in Chinese and English and links to some large industry sites with a great deal of information about housing (e.g. http://www.realtor.com).

I demonstrated how to type in the site address and hit "Enter" using our one 17- inch monitor. Students picked up the idea quickly, but typed very slowly. They all made mistakes in typing in the address too. So I had to move around to every machine myself and type it in for them. This was very time consuming. Many of the students found that the English level on any given visit- description page was too high. And of course, the specialized real estate jargon intimidated them. A good deal of patience was required for our 2a students to stick with the program.

On top of that, some of our students wanted to print out student interviews with a banker and broker, but our printer was only grudgingly cooperative. Finally, a group of students started looking at some of the current ads on one of the large industry site with lots of information including the listing of particular houses in particular neighborhoods complete with maps and photographs of houses. Four or five students thought this was fascinating. Other students were beginning to get interested too, but time was running out and not one person had answered any of the six questions. In fact, the students had stopped looking for the answers, and instead were looking around at whatever seemed of interest to them. They were learning to use the web site, but specific answers to specific questions would have to wait.

A Realtor Addresses the Students' Homebuying Questions

In early March, Dekahn Wong, a Realtor who is based in Chinatown, came to the class to meet students, make a presentation and answer the questions they had generated earlier in the semester. Dekahn knows our student population well because he's been a substitute and part-time teacher at our school for many years. He speaks fluent Cantonese and some Mandarin. Dekahn spoke mostly in Cantonese. He had excellent bilingual materials. He compared the advantages and disadvantages of renting and owning, highlighting the tax advantages to owning a home. He showed pictures of different kinds of homes so students could compare them. He explained in detail how a broker functions. And he presented a monthly payment chart based on a 30 year fixed rate mortgage. All of this was very much what students were ready for and with this new information they asked even more questions. Also, during the presentation, I angled around taking pictures for our newest web page.

Wrapping Up

In our final week with the homebuying project. I asked students to try to remember something they had learned form Dekhahn, the Realtor. I wrote down their comments and translated some of them into English. I also asked them to review their initial set of six questions and try to see if they now had some answers. Students told me they had learned a lot, but that the most useful aspect of the unit was meeting Dekhahn in person and knowing that he was a resource for them. Now they know they have someone who will help them when they decide to buy a home.

For their final assignment, students wrote up a report of the visit from Dekhahn based on the in-class notes that I had taken for them. This exercise lent itself to learning about what/if constructions: "If I have enough money, I'll buy a house; If I make a lot of money, I'll buy my dream house." For the final touch, I set up some photographs of Dekhahn's visit in a table on web page editor and asked a group of student to try and write their final reports into the HTML document. They partially completed it, and later I filled-in with excerpts from the reflective writing of individual students.

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