Identifying Language Needs in Community-Based Adult ELLs: Findings from an Ethnography of Four Salvadoran Immigrants in the Western United States

This chapter employs findings from 6 months of ethnographic observations with four Salvadoran first-generation immigrant women living in a suburban neighborhood in the western United States. We document these women's authentic experiences with navigating everyday linguistic interactions in Spanish and English, showing how the women's participation in Salvadoran and other Latinx communities curtails much of their need for daily English but that their desires to fulfil economic and other long-term goals motivate them to improve their English, even with few opportunities to do so. We document the assets, strategies, and skills the women use when the need for English does arise (usually in a small set of routine contexts), often with success despite their limited English proficiency, then close by proposing general recommendations to ESL programs based on these observations. [For the complete volume, "Refugee Education across the Lifespan: Mapping Experiences of Language Learning and Use. Educational Linguistics. Volume 50," see ED660722.]