Situational Analysis of Esl Student

CONTEXT Katie, aged 15, is a highly motivated student from a family with a strong educational background, currently living and studying in a British-style International School in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam, and is a member of the increasing group of globally-mobile students. Katie can be solidly placed into the “entering phrase” of the transition from Taiwanese national to immigrant in a Western society, where she “has decided to become part of the new community, but is still figuring out what that means” (Hayden 2006:53) at the age of thirteen. She is an example of what has recently been identified as a common occurrence for international school students, children going through a “sojourner adjustment” (McKillop-Ostrom 2000), as can be seen through the following aspects of her background: • She does not plan on staying in HCMC and there is no pressure to assimilate the local culture or language, and in fact she cannot speak Vietnamese beyond “thank you” and “hello.” • Her family have the goal that all their children will attend university in a western society, in order of preference: either Canada, United States, Australia, or Singapore. • Since English represents a “foreign” rather than “second” sociolinguistic context in Vietnam, she relies on her schooling for the acculturation process. Further solidifying the transitory nature of her context, Katie has changed schools, all within HCMC, three times in the past two years, as a part of the search to find new meaning. High-stakes external assessments will be conducted starting in March 2010. I am her English teacher, and our school is her “proxy language school” (Deveney 2000:35 quoted in Hayden 2005:61). Her learning context would be best classed as “submersion” (Holderness 2001:64), in so far that she is expected to “English-ize.” For example, she is expected to speak English at home, even with her two siblings (one younger brother and one older sister). In this weak form of bilingualism, the L1 is no