Immigrants, immigrants everywhere!

Yesterday our JUA group traversed the city in search of an answer to our essential question: Must immigrants learn English?

In order to do so we took on the task of a linguistic scavenger hunt in the North End and Chinatown.  Student were asked to find the following:

What language are the street signs?
What flags do you see?
How do you say “language” in the target language?
Find someone that is from Italy or China.
Observe two people conversing in the target language.
In what language are the menus of the restaurants?
What does “mei guo ren” (Mandarin) mean in English?
What does “cittadinanza” (Italian) mean in English
Find a newspaper in the target language.

The results were quite interesting and our final project post will analyze what we found.

Following the scavenger hunt in Chinatown we had a short walk over to the office where Tony Quintero Sr. works.  Mr. Quintero is an accountant who performs audits all over the world.  But more importantly, Mr. Quintero is an immigrant who came to this country when he was 18 years old and did not know how to speak English.

The interview was quite informative and the students asked very insightful questions.  Mr. Quintero, along with a few of his coworkers, explained to us what it was like to have to manage two cultures.  As our group is entirely composed of international students here to learn English, we certainly understood this perspective and surely look forward to reporting back with our analysis.