By Shelley Rieman, the H.A.B.L.E. Program, El Centro del Cardenal, Boston
 

Summary

The twelve students with whom I work are all Level 1 ESOL students, advanced beginners, and they are all native Spanish-speakers. The majority is from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, with the addition of a Colombian, a Salvadoran, a Honduran and a Nicaraguan.

 I chose to use Lesson One from Unit One, and Lesson One from Unit Two of the FannieMae Foundation's ESOL curriculum, How to Buy a Home in the United States. I felt that these lesson would generate interest in homebuying information, without being too difficult or technical. I taught both lessons as presented in the accompanying teacher's guide, with some modifications because of the students' limited English. For each lesson, I added activities with an emphasis on literature and written and oral expression. The students were very responsive to the lesson and participated with enthusiasm.

 Unit 1: Do you want to buy a house?/Where is home?

After the students wrote their letters of advice to Rosa and Manuel, we discussed their personal opinions and aspirations regarding home ownership. Everyone agreed that it is better to own than to rent, although they acknowledged that the responsibilities of home ownership can be difficult. Most students thought Rosa and Manuel should try to buy a duplex or three-family home in order to have rental income. We then discussed the obligations that owners/landlords have to their tenants for apartment maintenance and repairs. People agreed it was a great advantage to know something about plumbing, electricity and building construction in general, if you are a home owner.

About half of the group wanted to continue living in the United States, and hopefully, one day, buy a home here. The other wanted to make enough money in the U.S. to be able to afford a home in their native countries. Because home prices have risen incredibly in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in the past ten years, students who own, or have families who own homes there, felt they a had made very good investments. Many thought it would be very difficult to get a mortgage in their native countries because of the scarcity of good jobs.

 I turned the discussion to the experience of leaving one's country to come to the United States, and the conflicting feelings that sometimes occur. We discussed which country people consider "home" and if that changes over time. Are people here purely by choice, or by economic and other necessity?

We then explored two children's books about people who fled to the U.S. because of war and repression in their native land. In the Lotus Seed (written by Sherry Garland and illustrated by Tatsuro Kiuchi. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. New York. 1993), a woman flees Vietnam and brings a lotus seed to remember her home. In How Many Days to America? (written by Eve Bunting and illustrated by Beth Peck. Houghton Mifflin. New York. 1988), a family flees an unnamed country, bringing with them only a song of hope. After reading these stories out loud, I asked students to imagine that they had to flee from their homes with just a few minutes warning. "What would you take with you," I asked. I wrote the items on the blackboard as they called them out. Their items included photo albums, food, money, credit cards, identification documents, clothes, medicine, water, blankets, pillow and pets. Then we went down the list by two's, choosing only one item. For instance, when asked to choose between photo albums and food, the students choose food. Then they were asked if they would choose food or money, and once again, food was chosen. In the end, with just one choice left, the class chose water. Earlier, I had done this activity with a group of high-school students who had a somewhat different list, but the process of elimination resulted with the same final choice- water. Following this lesson, we had a discussion about living here and missing "home."

Unit 2: Dreams of Home

The second unit was enjoyable as well. Students learned the vocabulary related to single homes styles, other types of housing, exteriors and special housing features. Currently, all students live in apartments in Boston, and were familiar with the vocabulary associated with duplexes, three-family units and single families. They were unfamiliar with the differences between condominiums, townhouses and cooperatives. When the time came for describing their dream house, most students chose a one-floor single family of modern construction. Nobody was interested in having a fireplace. Everybody wanted a pool, air-conditioning, and a nice yard. For the students who wanted to own a home in the U.S., their dream house was exclusively a single-family, though given the reality of their work and living conditions, all the students could imagine buying a duplex or three-family.

 Reflections

We finished the unit by inviting bankers from the U.S. Trust Bank and housing activists from the tenant rights group, City Life/Vida Urbana, to come speak to the class about homebuying. These speakers, along with the FannieMae Foundation and ALRI materials that I distributed to the students (i.e. Choosing The Mortgage That's Right For You/Abriendo la Puerta de su Propio Hogar from the FannieMae Foundation and a list of homebuying resources and agencies from the Adult Literacy Resource Institute's 1997 homebuying readiness resource book Where the Sun Breezes Don't Stop Shining) provided students with a good jumping off point to begin the homebuying process.

Return to Teachers' Writings Menu