What do the Learner Portraits tell us about the purpose and relevance of adult Education and English language learning courses for adult immigrants in particular?

While there are a number of starting points and trajectories for immigrant-learners to take English language classes, the most common reasons given by the learners in the Portraits were:

• Becoming a citizen.
• Getting along in the new culture.
• Work opportunities.
• Helping children in school and speaking with children's teachers.

For most of the learners in the Portraits, formal classroom language learning was effective. However, being a 'successful' learner, that is, achieving notable change in proficiency in the language, takes a long time - around 2 years for some learners (Abby, Guangli, Inez, Jing, Larissa, Quyen, Valerio). Jorge and Fuquin made the fastest progress of all the learners but for different reasons. Jorge was highly motivated to learn about U.S. culture and get a more prestigious job. For Fuquin, her motivation was her children - to be able to communicate with her older daughter who was speaking more English than Chinese and to communicate with her daughter's teachers.

Some of the learners in the Portraits (Abby, Imanuel, Inez, Jorge, Nina, Quyen, Valerio) used English and improved their proficiencies in English through that use outside the classroom in 'natural language learning' (Spolsky, 1989) situations. But due to economics, and resettlement as an immigrant, learners "cannot choose the social conditions surrounding their language acquisition and production, nor the responses of the target language community" (Miller, 2004, p. 301). The fact that English is used at work or other social situations does not mean that these are ideal settings for the use of developmental English. Valerio and Nina both reported experiencing discrimination at the workplace based on their immigrant-learner status. Our observations and the voices of the learners themselves tell us that this language use outside the classroom is successful to the degree it is because of their formal classroom learning experiences.

Classrooms that provide opportunities for language use are effective, in part, because the classroom provides a safe and comfortable place where adult learners can use and develop the language that they need to express their complex and new identities in many contexts outside the classroom. The repeated use of their idiosyncratic developmental language with peers in the language learning classroom allows learners to develop pan-contextual, 'anonymous' (Berger & Luckmann, 1967) language for use outside the classroom. The classroom communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998; Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002) which these adult immigrant-learners were a part of offered them the opportunity to practice, reflect upon, and develop a perspective on themselves as English language users and members of a new culture and new language culture. In that sense, the personal voices of learners are "wrought" from the institution of the classroom (Kramsch, 2003), not in the sense that their voices are restricted by the school and classroom, but rather, that their voices (re)constitute the classroom community of practice. For many of these learners, such a community was not found at home or in the workplace. In fact, the home and workplace are often sites where a language other than English is the primary language of use.

Classrooms also offer many immigrant language learners the opportunity to socialize with their peers. Due to their newcomer status to the U.S. and the great time commitments from work and family, many of the learners in the Portraits report not being part of communities outside of the family. For this reason, the classroom becomes more than an institution of learning but, for many of the learners, something like an affinity group and part of their affinity identity (Gee, 2000/01). The nature of this setting as an affinity group or community of practice is a primary reason for language learning happening in the classroom (Hellermann, 2007).

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