Hetty Roessingh aims to ease learning for ESL students

Hetty RoessinghShe speaks without the trace of an accent, but English was not her first language. Hetty Roessingh, BEd’74, MA’74, PhD’96, moved to Canada from Holland with her parents when she was just four years old, and she still remembers learning the language that she is now most comfortable in. It was tough, despite the fact that most people think that the younger a child’s age, the easier it is for her or him to pick up a language. Roessingh says that’s not the case at all.

“Fifteen is actually the perfect age to immigrate and start learning a new language. At that point, someone has far better command of their first language and is able to translate more words. Small children are actually in a deficit position,” Roessingh explains. The key to learning language, any language, is repetition and exposure. It takes most children about five years to gain a solid control of their first language, adding another language at that point is complicated, says Roessingh. “Children mimic. Sure, they’ll learn about 3,000 words of a new language quite quickly, but their ability to read or actually learn in another language at that point is rarely there.”

Roessingh speaks from experience—not only as an immigrant herself, but as a schoolteacher for 30 years during which she focused on teaching English as a second language (ESL). She noticed that immigrant students who spoke proficiently still read well below their grade level, and they were performing poorly on standardized English exams. Roessingh started to track students and determined that they needed specialized ELS classes, classes that went beyond teaching grammar. Learning a second language needed to be more integrated; she developed lesson plans and models that tied students’ language learning to the curriculum they were studying in other classes. “These students need to be critical thinkers in English, not simply technicians of the language,” she adds.

“With a desire to have a different kind of impact” Roessingh returned to U of C to earn her PhD, research full time, and teach other teachers how to instill integrated language learning into the classroom. Becoming more of an advocate for ESL and its increasing requirements is also what took Roessingh to a different level of teaching. “In some of our Calgary schools, 60 to 80 percent of the kids don’t speak English at home. At Connaught School, for example, there are only 15 students who speak English in it. Canada’s experience with immigrants is really still in its infancy. If we want to tap all that potential, we need these students to be fluent in English. We have already lost one generation of educated immigrants to unskilled labour positions because of language barriers, I want to ensure we don’t lose this generation as well.”

By Leslie Strudwick