"At a time when fewer schools are meeting national education standards and graduation rates are always a source of contention, anything to help our students achieve success is important and necessary.

A local English professor at San Juan College hopes to look at the challenges Navajo students have when writing in the English language.

Eric Bateman recently was named the BHP Billiton Distinguished Teaching Chair of Native American Studies at the college and he was awarded with a $7,500 grant. He hopes to use the grant to come up with solutions to help assist Navajo students with English.

Bateman has studied students' writing assignments for the past two years, searching for common culturally caused mistakes. What he has come across is that most current Navajo students are not native speakers; therefore, their writing mistakes are being transferred from generation to generation.

"One of the interesting things for us ... is most of the students in the group we looked at are not native Navajo speakers. A lot of them don't speak Navajo at all," Bateman said.

However, the problem occurs when they sit down to write because although they may not be native speakers, their thinking is Navajo. This then takes the students time to translate Navajo thoughts into English words and sentences."

Get the Story:
Editorial: Study to help benefit Navajo students (The Farmington Daily Times 9/17)

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Language study may improve Navajo students' writing (The Farmington Daily Times 9/15)