Talk:Immigrant Youth Challenges

Hi!

I like your choice of topic because I feel like I can relate to it. I moved to Canada from Brazil when I was a young child and agree that it is not easy adapting to the education system when you are new. My experience in elementary school was that although I was at an equal level of reading and writing english in comparison to other grade one children I was still placed in ESL. The reason for this was that I made spelling mistakes and the teachers knew I was an immigrant. Therefore, I was forced to be excluded from the rest of my class to be in a special ESL class with 5 other children who could barely speak english. I remember being upset because when Iw as excluded I felt that I was not as intelligent as other children in my class. However, in the ESL class I was the top student and was the teacher's assistant helping the other kids who couldn't speak any english. As I excelled in ESL class I got moved back to my original class after a couple weeks. In this situation, I feel as though the education system and teachers were not trained to understand my needs and the individual needs of each different immigrant child. In my case, the education system categorized me as an immigrant so I was automatically assumed to have poor english skills. This entire situation caused me more stress than needed and the situation would have been avoided if my teacher had taken the time to assess my skills privately and spoken to my parents. Anyways to conclude, I think you have picked an important topic to talk about!

Just a couple suggestions :) When you are speaking about children and youth in your introductory paragraph I find it a little confusing. I think it is important to determine whether you want to strictly talk about children or youth because they are not the same thing. Assuming from your topic title, I think you plan to speak about youth which is defined as the period between childhood and adult age (teen years). As well, when you determine your age group I think it would be supportive if you included what the age range is (for example ages 13-19). On more suggestion, in your first introductory paragraph when you write "while still dealing with issues that all adolescents face" I think you could expand more on examples of issues adolescents face.

Overall, I think you are doing a good job!!

Sincerely, Alessandra Antunes

Thank you so much for the feedback. I have edited and I will continue to review and make changes.

Cheers Salice