Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society

Abstract

Suarez-Orozco, Carola, Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, and Irina Todorova. Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Print.Carola Suarez-Orozco, Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, and Irina Todorova's 2008 publication, Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society, offers a comprehensive account of the immigrant student experience in the U.S. They explain that the purpose of their study is to increase our understanding of the experiences of immigrant children and youth, which they argue remains limited (1) . They have accomplished this by providing a thorough representation of immigrant students through a longitudinal, five-year study that involved quantitative and qualitative research. Suarez-Orozco, Suarez-Orozco, and Todorova's book includes students, parents, and teachers' voices as as comparative charts that trace the academic achievement of immigrant students in U.S. schools.Aside from the introduction and conclusion, Suarez-Orozco, Suarez-Orozco, and Todorova divide their book into eight chapters, fitting the results of a five-year long study into over 400 pages. While this may seem overwhelming, their organizational approach - chapter divisions, sub-sections, and charts - allow for a manageable read. They use their introduction to build context through which they explain the benefits, importance, and necessity of education. Next, they outline the differences between first and second-generation immigrants in terms of English fluency, education, health, and population growth. Suarez-Orozco, Suarez-Orozco, and Todorova also explain their methods and methodology, including ethnographic participant-observation, triangulated data, the assistance of a research team, interviews, and testing. The gathering of such data not only involved interviews with immigrant students and their parents, but it also included administrators and teachers' perspectives. They also describe their participants, including their age, educational level and experience, household income, class status and employment, family dynamic, geographical location, and language proficiency. These important details orient the reader into fully understanding the context and purpose of their five-year long study. More importantly, the study allowed Suarez-Orozco, Suarez-Orozco, and Todorova to paint of the immigrant student experience in education (26). These detailed portraits are what distinguishes their book from other scholars who have published similar works. They close their introduction with a very clear description of their book that signals its uniqueness: [We] specifically compare and contrastthe experiences of immigrant youth who sustain over five years impressively high grades with the lives of immigrant students whose academic engagement and performance decline precipitously over time. This approach provides a unique insight into why many recently arrived students struggle academically, whereas some others do remarkably well (29].While the introduction provides the reader with a thorough description of the study's methods and methodology, including its participants and the book's overall purpose, the first chapter, Academic Engagement and Performance, helps set the tone for the rest of the book. Throughout this chapter, Suarez-Orozco, SuarezOrozco, and Todorova discuss different factors that negatively impact student performance causing a decline in achievement. These contributing factors include: a complex family structure, such as extended families..., blended families, or... non-parental caregivers (36], parental education and employment, gender differences and relationships, school contexts, involving economic factors, diverse student populations, attendance, and results of the state-administrated English language arts exam, and English proficiency. They expand on the various concepts discussed in this chapter in subsequent chapters.Suarez-Orozco, Suarez-Orozco, and Todorova open Chapter 2, Networks of Relationships, discussing the first contributing factor that they introduced in the previous chapter, that is, how complex family structures impact immigrant student academic performance and achievement. …

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