Case Study

1. Dhruv Harendra Relwani
Case Study
Education W140A
The Art of Making Meaning
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Scaffolding Language Acquisition by ESL Refugee Students &
Enabling their Ideological Becoming through Problem Posing Education
Introduction
We are currently living in a world where many countries are increasingly getting connected
to each other through globalization and hence we witness large-scale migration of people. Since
US is an essential part of this globalization process, many people come to this country as
immigrants and refugees with the hopes of uplifting their economic status in the society and
pursuing the “American Dream”. This case study is based on my fieldwork at xxx in Seattle,
Washington where I had the opportunity to tutor and mentor elementary and middle school
students from refugee backgrounds.
One of the biggest challenges faced by immigrants and refugees in United States, is
English language acquisition. In many cases, the ability to communicate fluently in English has a
direct impact on their employment capability in our society. Moreover, in the USA of 2017, we
often hear about English language acquisition in political rallies and also read about proposed
reforms to the current immigration system which would make learning English even more
essential for immigrants. Hence, I became interested in learning how language acquisition could
be made easier for English as Second Language learners (ESL). Additionally, I was interested in
learning how we could enable these students to think critically about their role in the society and
thereby free themselves from some of the dominant/ authoritative discourses about immigrants/
refugees in this country. This requires a variety of instructional techniques

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to move ESL students progressively towards stronger understanding and ultimately, greater
independence in the learning process, by leveraging their prior knowledge to help them gain
confidence and understanding of academic material. Such methods of scaffolding used for
English language acquisition explored in this case study include: pushing students to a level
where they can master course concepts with learning tools till they are able to do it themselves
and designated classroom roles during adult-supervised reading sessions which can help
students engage in active reading and comprehension of the text and also critical reasoning using
the assimilated knowledge. Similar to the language acquisition techniques, the method utilized to
help students think critically about their role in the society and also challenge the status-quo
within their communities, included questioning their understanding of a concept/ societal norm by
asking challenging questions or helping them critique their own beliefs and practices within their
societies. Since these methods were applied in a dialogical setting in which the students
contributed and questioned each other and their tutors freely within a respectful environment, the
students were able to learn from each other’s experiences and also recognized that a group of
students, learns better with an exchange of information and ideas with the instructor instead of a
uni-directional deposition of knowledge from the instructor to the group.
Research Questions
1. How can we use literacy tools to support and scaffold the learning of ESL students, who are
refugees, to access their ZOPD (Zone of Proximal Development) in English
language acquisition?
2. How have attempts to implement problem-posing education enabled these students'
ideological becoming and language development?

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Theoretical Framework
Lev Vygotsky’s “Mind and Society” discusses the relationship between a student’s
developmental level and learning process in great detail. In his opinion, the current evaluation
systems in academic institutions are flawed in testing only the existing/ current developmental
levels of students; i.e. these evaluation techniques only test their abilities to solve problems and
comprehend course concepts that they have previously internalized independently, without any
external help from tutors or other classmates. He believed that “The developmental processes do
not coincide with learning processes. Rather, the developmental process lags behind the learning
process; this sequence then results in zones of proximal development.” (Vygotsky 16) Hence, his
work argued to convince readers that “ what children can do with the assistance of others might
be in some sense even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone”
(Vygotsky 10). His work provided the fundamental framework for systematically scaffolding
English language acquisition by ESL refugee students in this case study. Vygotsky’s concept of
the Zone Of Proximal Development, provides a formalized structure that illustrates when students
require a tutor’s guidance and when they are ready to move on to a different course concept.
With this approach, I was able to utilize existing learning / mediation tools like “reading roles” at
my field site and also modify them to suit each student individually.
Another course concept that helped me organize my teaching and mentoring techniques
to make them more engaging and relatable to the ESL learners at my field site was that of
“culturally relevant pedagogy” by incorporating their funds of knowledge. Luis C. Moll’s “Funds of
Knowledge for Teaching” discusses the benefits of utilizing a combination of ethnographic
observations, open-ended interview strategies, life histories, and case studies about the cultural
experiences of the students to make the experience more relevant for students. He used the term
“funds of knowledge” to refer to “historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of

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knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being” (Moll 133)
and believed that “capitalizing on household and other community resources [to] organize
classroom instruction that far exceeds in quality the rote-like instruction children commonly
encounter in schools” (Moll 63). Teachers can incorporate this concept in their teaching
techniques by asking questions that help the students relate the course readings to anecdotes or
experiences from their lives or practices within their communities.
However, just like we read in Gloria Ladson-Billings’ work, culturally relevant pedagogy
doesn’t simply imply that it’s enough for students to chose academic excellence and remain
culturally grounded, but it instead involves students to go beyond individual characteristics of
academic accomplishments and cultural competence to “develop a broader sociopolitical
consciousness that allows them to critique the cultural norms, values, mores, and institutions that
produce and maintain social inequities.” (Ladson-Billings 162). Thus my tutoring sessions
involved several questions and discussions that forced the students to think critically about their
role in the society. This was to incorporate the three criteria of culturally relevant pedagogy in
Gloria’s work which required students to experience academic excellence, develop and/or
maintain cultural competence and develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge
the status quo of the current social order.
This concept of pedagogy aimed at developing critical consciousness among students is
deeply tied to and aided by the problem-posing style of education that’s described in Paulo
Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. Since this liberating educational approach involves a
dialogue between the teacher and the students as equal in the classroom and a multi-directional
flow of knowledge, ideas and opinions, it starkly contrasts the banking style of education which
replicates the “act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the
depositor” (Freire 72). This approach places the responsibility of critically questioning the existing

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societal norms on the students and requires the instructors to encourage such thought and
provide a platform for the students to share their opinions freely. Nearly all of the tutoring
sessions at my field site involved group discussions in which the tutors shared their thoughts as
participants (and not leaders/ banks of knowledge) and urged the students to think critically about
the knowledge shared among the group members, thereby implementing problem posing
education. Bakhtin’s work implies that since this approach focuses on helping these students to
develop their own voices in the society, it would aid in their ideological becoming, “Ones own
discourse and one’s own voice, although born of another or dynamically stimulated by another,
will sooner or later begin to liberate themselves from the authority of the other’s
discourse” (Bakhtin 79).
On the other hand, Nelson Flores would have probably termed my weekly reading
sessions and discussions that helped ESL learners attain a certain level of proficiency in English
comprehension and communication, as Dr. Jim Cummins’ CALP translingualism (Cognitive
Academic Language Proficiency) which is part of a “liberal multicultural vision of bilingual
education which assumes that the language practices of language-majoritized White populations
are conceptually richer than the language practices of language-minoritized
communities.” (Flores, p 26). Flores would probably argue that by focusing on developing new
vocabulary and learning pronunciations from the dictionary during the reading sessions, we were
idealizing the language practices of hegemonic Whiteness and positioning them as the language
practices that minorities must master. This brought up the question of how we, as tutors at my
field site, could balance between enabling our students to contribute in dominant discourses
effectively and not setting the language practices, of the dominant communities in our society, as
benchmarks to achieve. We sought to address this challenge to a limited extent by encouraging
those students to not be afraid of maintaining their accents/ dialects, informing them that they

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pronounced certain words differently (and not incorrectly) from the majority of the people in the
United States and telling them that there was nothing wrong in being different.
Hence the above readings served as basis for my research, with the first two serving as
frameworks that guided me in developing individualized strategies to scaffold language
acquisition by ESL learners and the other readings providing me with teaching concepts that
helped me focus on utilizing problem-posing education to enable the ideological becoming of my
students.
Study Background & Methods
My field site was in southern Seattle, at a community center in a low-income and refugee
neighborhood. The community center is a part of the xxx Apartments, which have been part of the
Low Income Housing (LIH) project since 1998. The Catholic Community Services in Seattle
already have an ongoing program at my field site (called the Youth Tutoring Program), which aims
to encourage school students in this region to pursue educational challenges in their lives by
helping them improve their math, science, reading and writing skills through in-class exercises
that range from reading in groups, solving math problem sets to outdoor activities that help build
social bonds.
Most students that attend the Youth Tutoring Program are Vietnamese and African refugees from
Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia. I visited my field site on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for 2
hours in the evening, for the last 6 weeks of summer. A typical tutoring session at my field site
involved interaction with 15 - 20 elementary and middle school students in the age group 7-14
and most of them studied English as their second language. Since Tuesdays were “Weekly
Science Days” at the tutoring center, a large part of the day was dedicated to ornithology whereas
group reading and writing sessions occupied most of the Wednesday sessions.

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My role was that of a participant observer for this case study, as I observed the
interactions between students to collect data related to my research questions while guiding the
discussions and reading sessions for a group of 3-4 students on each day, as their tutor. I also
varied my teaching techniques and asked / encouraged students to ask questions, that were
guided by the theoretical framework for this case study. I then documented interactions relevant
to my research questions in 5 detailed ethnographic field notes for 5 weeks. I subsequently read
my general and focused observations in the field notes and inductively coded those segments by
listing the course concepts that stood out and highlighting the relevant sections of evidence that
related to those concepts. Some of the codes that I used for my field notes were generally related
to my theoretical framework for this case study: ZOPD (Zone of Proximal Development), PPE
(Problem Posing Education), Classroom Roles and Multimodality. These codes were relevant to
the case study because they helped me recognize instances when these course concepts were
applied during my fieldwork and notice patterns in my field notes that helped my answer my
research questions about supporting ESL learners access their ZOPD in English language
accusation and utilizing problem-posing education to enable their ideological becoming.
Analysis and Results
Vygotsky’s ZOPD applied to language acquisition in the classroom:
In every tutoring session during my fieldwork we used learning tools within the classroom
like: reading roles, enacting dialogue sequences, written and audio dictionaries and online videos,
to help the ESL learners access their ZOPD while comprehending the course readings. These
reading roles were essentially learning tools which assigned a distinctive responsibility to each
student in the reading group, which helped them and their friends comprehend the text better by
performing activities that required them to internalize the readings and apply critical reasoning.

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For example, the role of the “Character Captain” was to write a letter from one character in the
story to another, after finishing the week’s reading session in a group. This meant that the student
had to comprehend the story and then internalize it to the extent that allowed him/ her to think
from the viewpoint of one particular character while bearing in mind the historical relationship with
another character and also to a limited extent, predict future relationship between the two
characters. Hence, this role forced the student to remain actively engaged during the reading
session, read between the lines of the story and pay close attention to the subtlest interactions
between different characters in the story. Other examples of reading roles, that served as learning
tools for language acquisition in the classroom were: “Super Summarizer” (responsible for
providing a summary of the chapters read, at the end of the session), “Amazing
Artist” (responsible for drawing a scene in the text), “Word Wizard” (responsible for finding and
sharing the meaning of difficult words in the text), “Particular Predictor” (responsible for making
predictions about the story at the end of the session) and many more.
However, there were several instances during my fieldwork (Weeks 4 and 5) when none of
the students in the group picked “Word Wizard” as a reading role and hence the students had
difficulty in comprehending the texts. Sometimes, even when they had access to the “Word
Wizard”, pronouncing long and complex words, seemed like a daunting task for many students. ‘I
then asked xxx if she spoke English at home and she said, “Not with my parents. But I speak
English in school.” I asked her if she found it difficult to switch between the languages and she
said it was difficult for her initially but not now. When I picked up the novel to resume reading, she
added, “Maybe a little bit, when there are big words”.’ (Fieldnote 3). I observed that their
experience improved a lot when I brought a written dictionary to the table (even if no one picked
the “Word Wizard”) and also used an audio dictionary on my phone to help with the pronunciation
of complex vocabulary. I also modified the reading session by requiring an enactment of the

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dialogue sequences, to help the students follow the story better. Additionally, a two-sentence
summary after every person’s turn to read, greatly bolstered student engagement and
comprehension, “When I asked every student to summarize at the end of reading each page of
the book, xxx shared that she was starting to understand the story better.” (Field note 2).
Moreover, this practice helped me identify xxx’s current developmental level in reading, which
troubled her in pronouncing long words in the text and also comprehending passages which
included sentences with unconventional/ rarely used structures. Hence I was able to respond to
her needs as an ESL learner and work within her ZOPD using dictionaries and dialogue
enactment.
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Luis C. Moll’s “Funds of Knowledge” being incorporated in the
classroom:
The reading role of the “Story Connector” greatly focused on using the funds of knowledge
of the students as it required them to make connections between the text they were reading and
anecdotes from their lives or practices within their communities. On several instances, the
students were able to share their experiences and enrich the group discussions with cultural
insights about the challenges in their communities. For example, when we read about the
protagonist in the story making a wish on a shooting star, we had a discussion about a student’s
wish to have her grandparents from Mexico visit her family someday and the challenges in
today’s society related to her wish. Hence through such discussions and classroom roles, we did
not only make the tutoring session more relevant and engaging for our students by utilizing their
funds of knowledge, but also provided the opportunity to learn about their experiences which can
help in maintaining the cultural competencies of everyone in the group.

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Paulo Freire’s Problem Posing Education being applied in the classroom to develop critical
consciousness and enable ideological becoming:
By taking advantage of the dialogical structure of our tutoring sessions, I was able to learn
a lot about the cultural backgrounds of my students. Since it was always an open discussion,
questions from the tutor or other group members, pushed the students to critically analyze the
cultural practices within their communities. One such example (Week 5) was of a student who
talked about the gender roles in her family that required the females to cook, do the household
chores and clean dishes for everyone in the family and the males to earn while working outside
the house. Through a series of questions about how she felt about the gender roles, whether she
found them fair and how she could suggest any changes, we were able to urge her to recognize
the reasons behind her feelings, critically analyze the role of females in her family and her
community and also question the status-quo. Hence this approach exemplified problem-posing
education to develop critical consciousness among students and enable their ideological
becoming, “It is also important to observe that we tried to ask xxx several questions, to force her
to think about the issue herself, before providing her our opinions. A banking education approach
would have perhaps involved an immediate lecture about gender roles, after xxx shared her
story.“ (Field note 5).
Findings, Limitations, Future Research
Through these examples my primary conclusions are:
1. Classroom roles can be vital learning tools to access an ESL learner’s ZOPD, that can
complement adult-supervised learning to help students internalize readings and thereby
efficiently learn new languages. As Vygotsky’s theoretical framework suggests, each ESL
learner is different and as tutors, we must modify our approach based on the specific needs

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of our learners. i.e. for some written and audio dictionaries can be sufficient whereas some
other learners may find enacting dialogues in texts, more effective.
2. Moreover, these roles can be modified to leverage the funds of knowledge of our ESL
learners and also focus on maintaining cultural competencies while making course material
more engaging and relevant.
3. Lastly, we can utilize problem-posing education to enable the ideological becoming of our
students and to develop their critical consciousness, by providing a platform for free and open
discussion, rich with questions that make us critically analyze our roles in the society. When
the teacher becomes a participant and not a bank of knowledge, the students can learn a lot
by a multi-directional exchange of ideas in the classroom.
This research has its limitations since I was the only person collecting data over a short duration
of time (5-6 weeks) with a limited sample size of only 1 field site. This means that I did not have
people to check my biases and also the data size was really limited. However, these research
questions are of great importance to the education community, especially since we live in a world
with several ongoing refugee crises and heightened political debate that makes it essential for
ESL refugees and immigrants to learn English and also critically analyze their roles in the society.
By helping these populations learn the dominant discourses of our society, we provide them the
opportunity to share the issues within their communities to the rest of the world. Some of the
future research about these topics, could involve finding the extent to which the above mentioned
learning tools can boost the reading, writing and speaking competencies of ESL learners, thereby
quantifying the impact. Also, how could we balance language acquisition (that’s empowering in
contributing to the economy) with setting the cultural practices of the hegemonic societies as
benchmarks for minorities to attain?

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Appendix: Coded Field Note #4

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References
1. Vygotsky, Lev S. Mind in Society. N.p.: Harvard University Press, 1978.
2. Moll, Luis C., Cathy Amanti, Deborah Neff, and Norma Gonzales. "Funds of Knowledge
for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms." Theory
into Practice XXXI.2 (1992).
3. Ladson-Billings, Gloria. "But Thats Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant
Pedagogy." JSTOR. Taylor & Francis, Ltd., 1995. Web. 14 Aug. 2017.
4. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the oppressed. Herder and Herder, New York. 1970.
5. Morris, Pam. The Bakhtin reader: selected writings of Bakhtin, Medvedvev, Voloshinov.
N.p.: Blackwell Publishers, 2007. Print.
6. Flores, Nelson. "A Tale of Two Visions: Hegemonic Whiteness and Bilingual
Education." Educational Policy. SAGE Publications. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks,
CA 91320.
7. Example CaseStudy I, Asset Library, Education W140A, UC Berkeley.