By Kiara Maldonado
Benjamin Franklin High School

Fergie Perez has only been in Philadelphia for a year. She came from Honduras to reunite with her mother.

During her first few months in a new country, she felt overwhelmed by the language barrier. That feeling was especially strong at her new school, Benjamin Franklin High.

“I cried all the time,” Perez, a sophomore, said. “I was desperate.”

She had difficulty adapting to life here, because everything was new. She was overwhelmed and often thought about going back to Honduras.

Perez said that, with time, she started to make improvements, but only through the help of some dedicated teachers at her new school.

There are currently 91 students, including Perez, at Benjamin Franklin that take English Language Development (ELD) because they struggle to communicate in English, which is not their native language.

The high school’s staff has faced difficulties with students who struggle to overcome the language barrier. Teachers say a combination of lack of will and difficulties understanding English grammar make learning the language hard, especially after puberty, when the students’ brains are more developed.

Lori Waxman is one of the ELD teachers at Benjamin Franklin. She said that it’s important for the students to learn English, so they can better communicate and navigate their new home.

She has previously helped support her students’ learning by labeling some parts of her classroom in the students’ home language. Doing so, she said, makes students more comfortable saying those words in English.

“It’s important to support their home language, because it will facilitate faster learning at this age,” Waxman said.

With exercises like this that take a step-by-step approach to learning English, she said, students can avoid burning out quickly. 

Karen Granados, a junior at Benjamin Franklin, is from Honduras and has been living in the United States for five years. In her first and second years here, she struggled with her English, because she changed schools multiple times and didn’t have access to language-education resources.

In the beginning of her time here, she was afraid to hold a conversation with another person.

Her method of learning English without getting frustrated has been to read and write words frequently, almost memorizing them, so she can more easily use them when she communicates.

Now, after three years, she feels she is improving past that early nervousness.

“With losing the fear, I can learn more,” she said.

Even if students like Granados take learning step-by-step, there is still another barrier that they often face, according to Waxman and Qiuxia Liang, another teacher at Benjamin Franklin: a lack of motivation.

Newcomers often give up easily, confused by the many rules of English grammar, according to Liang, leaving them without motivation to progress.

By starting their education with the rules of English grammar, students can find similarities with their home language, Waxman said. This naturally helps them improve their ability to understand English. 

Still, even with the help of teachers like Waxman and Liang, students find it hard to overcome their frustration, and they give up. 

Liang often finds, through teaching the students English, that they didn’t have a proper education in their home language or the foundation to develop basic grammar in general.

When learning in groups, Liang said, students also don’t want to be embarrassed in front of their classmates, and that serves as a distraction from focusing on their lessons.

In conversations with her students, she has found that some aren’t progressing because they don’t feel a purpose in learning the new language.

“You gotta be clear what you’ve come here for,” Liang said. She said she often tells her students that since they now live in the United States, they need to learn from this new culture.

Some students at the school, like Ilgin Sunar, say they were pushed to learn English from their families.

Sunar, 16, who arrived in the United States three years ago, had difficulty communicating at first, because schools in her home country, Turkey, only taught her the basics of English grammar, and having conversations was difficult for her. 

Sunar said at the beginning of her life in the United States, it “felt weird not knowing what to say.”

Her English improved with the opportunities offered by Benjamin Franklin, where she is now a junior, including a community college program she attended in the summer to improve her English and be social, which in turn helped her with her studies.

Students at Benjamin Franklin High School, like Sunar, face multiple obstacles in the process of learning English, a new language in a country that is new to them.

They face these challenges every day, and with efforts encouraged by their teachers, they have improved their ability to communicate.

“And to learn how to communicate is powerful,” said Waxman.