ABSTRACT
When Martha first met Reza he seemed to her the typical newly arrived migrant, drably dressed and unsure of himself. She was new to teaching people like him but found a lot of support from conferences, colleagues and textbooks, and it made a lot of sense to her to follow the approach within which her job was not just to teach the English necessary for citizenship, but to empower her students by encouraging them to express their identity. Reza was a good example of this need. He was from a country that had been ravaged by civil war. She was lucky that there was so much information around in the media about the plight of people in his country. Martha felt that coming to the West would enable him to express himself and articulate his identity in ways he had never been able to before. She knew that even in the capital city of his country, people had absolutely nothing.
