From English Learner to English Teacher
How Bilingual Education Can Help Students Succeed
Yisel Quintana’s first extended brush with the English language came in Kindergarten.
Born to Mexican parents, Quintana spent her earliest years in northern New Mexico learning her family’s native language, Spanish. When she entered school, Quintana picked up on English quickly, but her accent and word-usage errors marked her as different and made her a target for bullies.
“It was not a fun time for me,” she says. “I felt isolated. I did not see my background represented in a lot of my teachers, and we didn’t have many other bilingual students at that point.”
Quintana’s hometown, Alcalde, is a place, she says, where Mexican heritage runs deep — but where recent émigres are few and far between. It wasn’t until Quintana entered middle school in neighboring Española that she started to feel like she belonged. She made friends with other Spanish-speaking students, and for the first time, she heard one of her teachers speaking Spanish in the classroom. It felt like the world opened up, she says.
New Mexico’s public schools have the third-largest percentage of non-native English speakers of any state, with nearly 1 in 5 students identified as an English learner in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, English learners are more likely to struggle academically than their English-speaking peers and less likely to graduate from public high school in four years.
Having a bilingual teacher can help.
The Benefits of Bilingual Instruction
Research suggests that English learners who participate in dual-language programs have better reading comprehension scores and are reclassified as English-proficient earlier than their peers in all-English classrooms. Perhaps more importantly, they’re more likely to report feeling confident in school — and more likely to graduate from high school.
Quintana saw this firsthand in Española.
“Some of my bilingual friends in high school would tell me they didn’t even want to try to learn English because they were scared, and it felt so overwhelming,” she says. “It felt so new. And a lot of them dropped out.”
Despite the challenges, Quintana pushed through — in part thanks to a few exceptional teachers. And now she’s on track to become a teacher herself. During her senior year in high school, Quintana heard an announcement over the intercom inviting aspiring teachers to come to the library. After hearing a presentation about the program, Quintana felt inspired to apply to the Golden Apple Scholars Program in New Mexico, a teacher-preparation program working to ensure every student has an exceptional teacher, no matter what language they speak.
An Exceptional Teacher for Every Student
The program prioritizes training local teachers for local classrooms to meet local needs. According to a report from New Mexico State University, New Mexico classrooms had a shortage of at least 32 bilingual teachers in 2024.
“In more ways than one, our scholars reflect the communities they serve,” says Julie Lucero, who heads up the scholars program in New Mexico. “Bilingual teachers are an absolute must in New Mexico. Through targeted recruitment, mentoring, and intensive training, we’re setting up our scholars — and their students — for success.”
When people ask Quintana which age group she wants to teach, her reply often leaves them puzzled.
“Everybody thinks I’m crazy for wanting to teach middle school,” she says. “I know the students are going through changes and trying to find out who they are. But I had such a strong connection to my middle school. I think that’s where I would serve students best.”
For Quintana, who is a junior at Northern New Mexico College and hopes to teach English Language Arts, it’s the tumult of adolescence — the social and emotional disruption of new schools and fresh friends, of growing brains and changing bodies — that makes passionate, well-trained teachers an absolute must for middle school students. To help her English-learning students feel even more at ease, Quintana is working toward a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) certification.
And the fact that middle school proved so transformative for her doesn’t hurt either.
“It makes me smile thinking of how it felt to hear Spanish spoken in my middle school,” she says. “It was so meaningful, and I think it helped me learn. That's what I want to bring to my own classroom.”
To learn more about the Golden Apple Scholars Program in New Mexico, visit www.goldenapple.org/new-mexico.
