One of the greatest gifts of a long career in education is perspective. Veteran teachers have witnessed changing methodologies, shifting priorities, evolving student populations, and countless educational trends. Their wisdom is grounded not only in theory but also in decades of daily interactions with learners and colleagues.

Felicia Rosen brings exactly that kind of perspective. Over the course of 38 years, she taught both deaf students and English learners, giving her a unique understanding of language development, communication, and the importance of meeting students where they are. What stands out most is her unwavering commitment to relationships, encouragement, and respect for every learner.

In our exchange, Felicia reflects on the similarities and differences between ASL and ESL instruction, shares practical advice for newer teachers, discusses her concerns about the growing emphasis on quantitative data, and offers a powerful reminder that multilingualism is an asset to be celebrated.

I think you’ll find her insights both thoughtful and inspiring. Enjoy this interview!

ABOUT FELICIA
Felicia Rosen is a retired educator who loved teaching as much on the last day of her career as she did on her first. She received her BS in elementary and special education from Boston University in 1983 as well as her M.Ed. in education of the deaf in 1985. Felicia taught deaf students for many years in a program south of Boston. After it closed, she taught English learners for 23 years in a local elementary school. Throughout her career, Felicia often spoke of writing a book and is excited to share her teaching experiences via her new memoir.

Jennifer: Felicia, the first thing that stood out to me when our paths crossed was your experience using both ASL and English. How did that come about?

Felicia: My path to becoming an ESL teacher was a circuitous one. I was a teacher of the deaf and hard of hearing from 1985-2000. All but one of those years was in an educational collaborative program south of Boston. I had been fascinated with deafness and learning American Sign Language from the time I was in elementary school and dreamed of becoming a teacher of deaf students. When the program closed, I had to find another position.

After an exhaustive search for something in the field of deafness without success, the Thursday before Labor Day weekend I went for an interview for a part-time position as a teacher for English learners at a local elementary school. I had three certifications: elementary education, special education, and teaching the deaf, but did not have a license to teach English learners. I told my babysitter that I was going for an interview, would go grocery shopping afterwards, and would be home shortly thereafter.

The interviewers asked me about my experience teaching English learners. I explained that I had taught deaf and hard of hearing students over the years from preschool to eighth grade and that we used a bilingual, bicultural model, using ASL as our students’ native language as we guided them to learn English as a new language. As I gave many examples of how I did this, one of the interviewers turned to the other and said, “That’s exactly what we do, except we don’t use sign language to do it!” I was hired on the spot. I had to call my babysitter to let her know I would be gone longer than I anticipated.

I intended to spend one year teaching English learners and then planned to go back to teaching deaf kids. Twenty-three years later, I retired from my position as an ELE teacher!

Jennifer: Sounds like a calling! What contexts did you end up teaching in? And how far did you go beyond teaching communication skills?

Felicia: I taught in self-contained classrooms of deaf students and also spent a few years as the learning disabilities specialist in that program. I taught every academic subject you can imagine, from colors, counting, and letters of the alphabet with preschoolers, to Civil Rights, algebra, plate tectonics, and sex education with my older students. ASL was used as a common language (their first, my second) and using it, I was able to teach concepts, clear up misunderstandings, and explain how it differed from the printed/written word. Since my students couldn’t hear or couldn’t hear well, learning to read and write was challenging. They couldn’t learn via phonics, so they were taught via sight words and phrases. I had to point out how meanings differed, depending on context. When students signed as they read, I could tell, based on the signs they used, whether or not they understood what they were reading.

Jennifer: So basically, you had to develop another set of skills to evaluate and give feedback. What about your work with traditional English language learners? How did that compare?

Felicia: With my English learners, I worked in an elementary school. I pulled out students in small groups to provide service. My lessons with them also included all academic areas, to develop their receptive and expressive language and literacy skills (via speaking, listening, reading, and writing.) Developing basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS) as well as cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP) was interwoven into every lesson. Academic and language objectives were addressed as my students learned about photosynthesis, the water cycle, geometry, solving word problems, grammar, animal adaptations, and ecosystems, and other grade level topics.

For both populations of students, we focused on reading comprehension, answering fact-based questions and those that required inference based on text evidence. Students learned to think critically and to express their opinions clearly and specifically. For my English learners, teaching them to read phonetically was possible, since they were able to hear. If students were already literate in their first language (L1), with cueing, they quickly learned to transfer what they knew about decoding to doing so in English. Younger students who had not yet learned to read had the added challenge of learning to decode text in an unfamiliar language, without a native language explanation of how it’s done. It’s important to remember that decoding alone does not equal comprehension. Reading instruction for my ELs focused largely on comprehension of what was decoded.

Jennifer: Any other commonalities?

English with Jennifer

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