Navigating the Transition: A Bilingual Students Journey from Mexico to the U.S. Education System

Ethnographic Interview Assignment Name Institutional Affiliation Course name Instructor’s name Assignment due date Ethnographic Interview Assignment Completing the interview experience was an opportunity to learn and experience the differences in learning and teaching between the United States and other countries. My interviewee is a colleague I have worked with for the past two years and I will call him Sam for the purpose of this paper. Sam emigrated from Mexico with his family when he was 15 years old and this has given him the opportunity to experience education in the country and in Mexico. His transition into the education system in the United States is interesting and it shows the different experiences between monolingual and bilingual students. Additionally, the interview with Sam sheds light on the challenges facing English Language Learners (ELLs) and their teachers when they immigrate into the United States. Being an ELL educator, Sam uses his own experience to improve the learning outcomes of his students and become a better teacher (Hughes et al. 2022). He described his teaching career as a passion to use his background as a bilingual educator to impact his students positively and make them confident English speakers. The interview demonstrated that Sam’s education experience has an impact on his teaching strategies as it gives him the opportunity to facilitate the transition of other bilingual students into the United States. Sam grew up in Monterrey, Mexico in an upper middle-income family of four before immigrating into the United States. His family had visited the United States several times during school holidays where Sam interacted with family members living in the country during his childhood. He has two older sisters and a younger brother who came with him and their parents into the United States. Sam’s father was a factory worker in Monterrey while his mother was a teacher. The family moved to the United States when his father’s company offered him a promotion and a position in the country (Chaparro et al., 2021). His family’s income enabled him and his siblings to attend private schools in Mexico that offer more formal and well-organized English education than the public schools in the country. He described his early education as mostly provided in Spanish with several hours each week dedicated to learning the English language. Since his mother was a teacher and his father an employee of a multinational company in Mexico during his early education, they encouraged their children to learn and speak English at school and sometimes at home. The experience separated Sam from most students in Mexican public schools who speak primarily Spanish with some knowledge of English. The family has a significant impact on the education and learning experiences of students as Sam described in the interview. All the members of his family were bilingual and his mother was an English teacher when they lived in Mexico. Therefore, his parents encouraged the children to learn and speak English e