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English Journal Articles

Lesson Plans

Elegreet-DeSalvo, N., & Levitsky, R. (1989). "We left our homeland, A sad, sad day": An interdisciplinary approach. English Journal, 78(6), 62-65.

This article was about integrating a unit on immigration into an 8th grade classroom, with the question of "What is an American?" at the heart of it. The students were asked to role-play a family, after reading up on immigration experiences in their social studies class, and they were representing those people that came to the U.S. in 1845-1915.

Greene, B. M. (1988). A cross-cultural approach to literacy: The immigrant experience. English Journal, 77(5), 45-48.

This article was written by a teacher with a lot of immigrant students from primarily the Carribean and the Central America, and she decides to do a cross-cultural (incorporating all the cultures in her classroom) literacy project. It showed students that they are not the only ones, and that different cultures have different experiences when immigrating.

Quinn, A. E. (2001). Moving marginalized students inside the lines: Cultural differences in classrooms. English Journal 90(4), 44-50.

This article discusses the importance of putting the primarily Mexican students into the spotlight of the classroom. It talks about acknowledging the differences between Mexican and traditionally American students, and how that changes how a Mexican student perceives the classroom and the environment.

Crossing Boundaries Through Bilingual, Spoken-Word Poetry

I like this idea because it has students explore different cultures and try to incorporate a different language into poetry (or writing in general), and it exposes them to different ways of thinking (just by nature of language).

Digitally Explaining the Immigrant Experience

This idea is similar to the next, but it has the class explore specific famous immigrants, and research their lives and compare them to each other. It can give students an insight into motives for leaving their home country. It could also be an interesting activity with creative writing and see what they would do if the student was facing the famous immigrants' situation in their life now.

Inquiry on the Internet: Evaluating Web Pages for a Class Collection

This gave me the idea to have a student-directed inquiry (or web-quest) where they research a specific culture and see how they immigrated to the United States (a lot of ideas regarding Ellis Island in particular, and having them do a specific family), very similar to the Elegreet article above.