The purpose of my article is to try to bring to you not only a notion of what some of the distances between homes and schools, countries and cultures involve but what it means for youngsters to arrive at school without knowing English. I will describe two middle school students — Lilian and Elisa — who arrived in this country in the summer of 1991 and enrolled in a school in the greater Bay area. I will talk about who they were and what they expected when they came to school, and I will describe the school climate that they encountered. I will describe their English class and their subject matter classes and tell you about their successes, their frustrations, and their failures. I will also talk about the community in which these girls lived, about their homes, and most especially about their mothers. Finally, I will use their lives and their experiences as a lens through which I will examine both the policy and the instructional dilemmas that now surround the education of immigrant children in this country. (p. 4)
When designing a study, researchers must identify the research “problem” and consider the research questions to be addressed. Besides being clear, specific, and answerable, the research questions should be meaningfully interconnected and “substantively relevant”—that is, “interesting and worthwhile questions for the investment of research effort,” according to Punch (1998, p. 254).
Вальдес Valdes’s (1998) research question in the study presented above was: “Why is it that so many non-English-background students fail to learn English well enough to succeed in school?” (p. 4).
