Elida is a remarkable Third Age ELL. She has pursued English proficiency with a great deal of bravado and determination despite her physical, financial and readiness obstacles. She is someone who perceives no age barriers for herself or others. At the present age of 61, she still wants to pursue an as yet unknown new career in this country. Her prior education and career as a Brazilian psychologist surely have helped her to surmount many hurdles in America to this point. She and her American husband have lived in South Florida for 10 years, and she has been a U.S. citizen for six years.
Visiting Elida in her home today was a good experience in that I could meet her husband and see her in her own living space. It was, on the other hand, distracting too because her three dogs were barking a lot and we were tempted to have coffee and take an extended break to see her yard. It took me away from concentrating on the interview. But fortunately, I will correspond and ask for clarification via email and one more visit with her to review the transcript. Of course, I must realize that n the Hispanic culture, it is most important to establish the relationship with the person before attempting to conduct any other business.
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I still feel that I overdisclosed things about myself since I felt a little uncomfortable not knowing her native language and culture. I also did not want to have her feel that I was investigating all about her without sharing anything about myself. I don't usually do this, but I felt she was exceptionally articulate and interested in getting to know me as well. I told her about A.S. at work b/c I know that she was a psychologist in Brazil. I spoke about my college out-of-body experience to show her that I had felt out-of-place in college for a time. I was using self-disclosure but I must admit that I wasn't totally comfortable doing so. Part of me wanted to just come in and focus on Elida alone, without much if any mention of myself. But culturally, I knew this strategy would not do.
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Elida has attended the E.C. for two months. She came at the suggestion of a friend who moved away and called her from North Carolina and told her to go. Elida is one of the more advanced English speakers that I have interviewed. Perhaps aided by the fact that her second husband is an American (but the irony is that they both speak in Portuguese with one another), she has made considerable progress with her spoken English, taking on full-time employment as a telephone customer service representative. She is employed full-time and speaks from 8 till 2 everyday with English-speaking health care providers and for the rest of the day, she speaks with Spanish-speaking customers. Interestingly, she learned Spanish out of necessity during her ESOL class breaks at the community schools she attended. Brazilians in her section of Sunrise, FL are in the minority in these classes. Rather than stare outside at the landscaping in social isolation, as she says, during breaks, she challenged herself to communicate with the Spanish-speaking students and to make friends. Plus, learning Spanish for a Portuguese speaker is not as difficult, according to language authorities who say they are closely related and are mutually intelligible.
One learning strategy for success that she has devised for herself at work is that she is allowed to sit adjacent to a co-worker whose English she highly admires and wants to emulate. Whenever Diane says some new phrase that Elida likes and wants to try out with her own customers, she writes it down and tapes it inside her cubicle near her desk. When the occasion presents itself, she quickly employs the phrase. Elida has gotten so confident at her job that she now describes it as lacking much opportunity for growth and self-improvement. She knows though that she does have refinements in her speech that she can still make. Plus, she realizes that any job promotion or advancement will require more training.
She mentions her other English learning obstacles: Understanding her co-workers who speak the African American dialect as well as Haitian co-workers who speak in Creole. She has many challenges understanding these two dialects despite her efforts to try.
As a demonstrated and committed lifelong learner, Elida is plagued by the central question of which training to pursue? Already beset by student loans she accrued at Nova U.'s master's program in pscyhology for Spanish-speakers, she does not want to be disillusioned any further or go into any further debt. She had to drop out of Nova's program after six months b/c the school did away with the four ESOL teachers originally hired to assist the students. It was an experience that broke her heart, but not her spirit.
She then pursued work and got it with the school board as a teacher's assistant for an exceptional education class for physically-and mentally-impaired children. She worked there for six years until physically unable to do the work (due to a rotator cuff injury). Her shoulder injury began when she worked earlier as a stocker on her first job in the U.S. at Macy's. It was a job that required little English communications, but did take its toll on her physically as a then fifty year old woman. The experience, she says, prompted her to briefly pursue studies at Broward College in their physical therapy assistant program. She found that she could not handle it...why?
Follow-up questions:
Why did she drop out of the physical therapy program?
What is her current goal/purpose for remaining at her workplace right now?
What does she think of the medical interpretation program I shared with her by email?
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