By Eunice Allman, Quincy College, ESOL Department,

 Summary

The students at Quincy College participating in this project represent a low-intermediate ESOL class preparing for college academic studies. The focus of this course is to provide these students with ample reading, writing, and speaking activities in order to facilitate the development of critical thinking skills in a variety of situations.

 My class which meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:30 a.m. - 1:20 p.m. is composed of students from many different countries including the following: 1F-India; 1F- Vietnam; 1F-Japan; 1F2M-China; 1M-Korea, 1F1M-Nepal; 1M-Turkey; 1F Sweden; 1F-Czechoslovakia; 1F-Lithuania; 1F-Haiti. Out of this class of 14 students, 2 female students own their own homes in Dorchester and Quincy; 1 male owns his own home and is in the process of buying a business; and one female who is pregnant asked me if I could help with the homebuying process. Because I am both a landlord/owner of a multi-family property and a licensed Real Estate broker, I felt as if I could bring to these students my own personal and professional experience.

 The process of homebuying and renting is different from country to country, and in many ways the U.S. seems to possess the most complicated homebuying process of them all. So as well as providing an opportunity to learn the homebuying/banking jargon, I hoped to help my students learn how to think critically about and feel comfortable should they want to every buy homes of their own in the U.S.

 We spent about three weeks on the homebuying unit. Though I used only a few lessons from Unit 2, Finding Your Dream Home from the FannieMae Foundation's ESOL workbook, How to Buy a Home in the United States, I did integrate other reading materials such as information about fair housing and discrimination, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous speech, "I have a Dream," to name a few. I also incorporated an investigation of folk and popular songs with themes of "home" which provided a way to compare cultural differences and specific students' childhood memories.

 Week One

All the students were given a copy of the FannieMae Foundation's student workbook which correlates to the teacher's guide How to Buy a Home in the United States. Their response to receiving the books was "Can we keep this?" Needless to say, they were really excited and happy to have the text. We started the unit with a preliminary discussion about homebuying and renting. This led to a difficult and very worthwhile in-depth discussion about housing discrimination. Most of my students rent and have had a variety of experiences with real estate offices while looking for apartments. My conclusion, after listening to their stories was that indeed, many of the students had been subject to discrimination while they searched for places to live. I knew that we would return to the topic of fair housing and discrimination. But first I wanted to do more of my own research and compile accurate and helpful information about fair housing rights.

In order to gage how much my students already knew about homebuying, we did a whole-class mapping exercise. I put the terms "to rent," and "to buy" on the blackboard, and recorded the terms that my students came up. I explained that these terms were part of the real estate "jargon". We had already explored the notion that every discipline and setting has its own jargon and vocabulary. Thus I was able to connect this new topic to my overall syllabus. The words generated from the mapping exercise included the following: loan, bank, owe, lease, contract, security, deposit, mortgage, deed, record, Probate Court, evict, multi-family, condominium, commission, taxes (Federal & State),

Foreclosure, FannieMae. The three students who own homes generated most of these words based on their own dealing with the housing market. One of these students in particular, a Vietnamese woman named Ha works in a bank and was familiar with the bank's role in the homebuying process. She discussed her experience buying her home in Dorchester and contributed a lot of useful information to the discussion. Another student, Marie, originally from Haiti, has been sharing a house with her sister and wants to buy her own home. Mahesh, from Nepal, disclosed how he had recently been placed in an awkward situation near his home in Cambridge. He was asked to translate for potential home buyers who were looking at a six-unit multi-family. The transaction didn't follow the usual negotiating process and he wondered whether fair housing practices were being adhered to.

Murat from Turkey told the class that he was in the middle of applying for a loan to buy a business. He discussed his situation in class and how frustrating the whole process had been. Also, Murat and his family had attempted to rent a three-bedroom apartment in Quincy, only to be told by the owner that he couldn't rent to his family without first installing another bathroom. A student from Nepal, named Anita spoke about a similar incident where she too was told that her husband and two children needed a two-bathroom apartment, and that the owner would not rent a unit to her with just one bathroom. She ultimately had to leave her children with her parents in Nepal because of the difficulty of finding housing. Again, the class discussion moved toward issues of housing discrimination and how to identify when one was being discriminated against.

 The experiences of my students drove this first discussion about homebuying. I was amazed at their collective knowledge and experience.

For homework they were asked to write a 4-5 paragraph essay about the process of buying, selling or renting property in their original countries of origin. They were to also read through all of Unit 2 in their workbooks and describe their dream house.

 Week Two

Students presented their summaries of the homebuying process in their countries and their peers asked questions. When the discussion turned to homebuying in the U.S., I was surprised to find that of the 13 students, only 3 planned to live here permanently.

We then read a short composition entitled "Sometimes Home Is Not really Home." It was written by Maggie Mok, a student at Hunter College of the City University of New York and can be found in the text book, Changes, Readings for Writers.

After students read the passage to themselves, I read it aloud to reinforce the proper pronunciation and to give them a chance to absorb the meaning of any new words. There was a few seconds of silence when I was done and then Ha exclaimed, "I can't believe this. This is exactly what happened to my mother when she went to Vietnam where she was born and brought up. I am going to show this to her. She thought this situation only happened to her." We then spoke about the notion of home- what is home and under what circumstances do you feel like you're at home? This led to a further discussion about using the term' home" as a metaphor. To give an example of the use of home as metaphor, I handed out a copy of the song "The House I Live In" composed by Earl Robinson and made famous by Frank Sinatra in 1945.

After reading the lyrics of the song to them, I asked them what they thought the reference to "the house" represented. They responded that the metaphor of the house was expanded to refer to the immigrants experience of living in a new county- the U.S. Then I actually sang the song to them and had them sing it with me a second and third time. We were sitting in a small circle so that we could see and hear each other. They were clearly enjoying the singing, so I asked each student if he or she wanted to share a song from the country that expressed some notion of home. Of the eight students present that day, six sang songs in their mother tongue and then using English each student explained his or her song to us. It was a wonderful learning activity and was completely spontaneous!

 For homework, I asked students to write a 4-5 paragraph essay about how they defined "home." They were also expected to write out the lyrics to their song about home in both their first language and in English. Finally, they were asked to read both the famous essay "I Have a Dream" by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and a one page homebuying information sheet compiled by FannieMae.

Week Three

The well anthologized speech "I Have a Dream," speaks directly about Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of a time when justice and equality reign throughout the country. Among other things, it portrays the extent to which discrimination and prejudice permeate life in this country. Because the issue of housing discrimination had already surfaced in our class discussions, I thought that this speech would provide a perfect segue into the topic of fair housing law. With its passionate language and positive message, I strongly recommend it as reading material for any language-appropriate adult education classroom.

As we read the speech out loud, we discussed it and its terminology. And then the students shared their experiences of discrimination in the United States. The discussion became very sensitive as students analyzed how their own assumptions and discriminations "played into" racial and ethnic prejudices that had been taught to them by both family members and U.S. media and culture. Then, I focused the topic back to homebuying by distributing a packet of information collected by Deborah Schwartz, coordinator of the homebuying readiness project, on fair housing practices. First I handed out the Federal and State of Massachusetts Laws of Fair Housing. I explained that each state has its own laws, and that if a case goes to court, the laws that are the strictest are the laws that are abided by. Overall, the class was not aware that they are protected against discrimination in many different realms, housing being one of them. Students had no idea that they had access to recourse if they were being discriminated against. This mini-unit on Fair Housing proved to be an eye-opener for the students. At the end of the class discussion we broke into small groups and assessed our knowledge of Fair Housing law.

For homework, the student wrote a response to the questions: Have you ever been discriminated against during the process of buying or renting property? I also asked them to write a response to Martin Luther King's speech, "I Have a Dream."

Reflections

My class responded favorably to this curriculum and requested help with various aspects of renting and buying homes. I think the area of fair housing and housing discrimination is an extremely important one for the new immigrant. Also, it is my opinion that the FannieMae Foundation's ESOL curriculum can be used in almost all levels of ESOL classrooms and that the accompanying Adult Basic Education curriculum seems like a language appropriate learning tool for native speakers who are baffled and confused about the homebuying process. I imagine that either curriculum could be used in its entirety throughout the course of one semester.

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