Imaginary Community of the Mainstream Classroom: Adolescent Immigrants' Perspectives (original) (raw)

In this paper, I explore the perspectives of three adolescent Mexican English language Learners regarding their high school English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom experiences within an urban city in the southwestern part of the U.S. An additional purpose is to demonstrate how the three student participants did or did not invest their identities into the imagined communities of the mainstream program. The paper focuses on two major themes: (1) The ESL classroom provided a socially comfortable learning environment with little cognitively challenging material, and (2) The ESL class/program did not meet students' expectations for their future careers. Due to the students' disillusionment with the ESL program, despite its many strengths, they projected their hopes onto an imagined community of the mainstream program. This research can be of use to both teachers and researchers interested in understanding adolescent immigrants' perspectives on their ESL schooling experiences. Keywords ESL Á Students' perspectives Á Imagined communities Á Identity engagement Imaginary Community of the Mainstream Classroom: Adolescent Immigrants' Perspectives For many years, academic literature on adolescent immigrant students was scarce, with the majority of the research focusing on elementary immigrant students (Faltis and Coulter 2007; Gunderson 2007). This is understandable considering two-thirds of the immigrant population in school is at the elementary level (Callahan 2005).

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