A group of five English as a Second Language (ESL) middle school students from Robinson Middle School took a first place award at last month’s WorldFest, an event sponsored by the City of Little Rock and the Racial and Cultural Diversity Commission, where students compete in their knowledge and presentation of information about different continents and countries.

The goal of the annual event, according to WorldFest material, is to celebrate the global fabric of the City’s social diversity and encourage friendship and reduce prejudice by coming together to learn about different cultures and ethnicities. More than 400 schools from across Arkansas attended the event, which was September 25 at the William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park.

Dena Yancey, an ESL Specialist and teacher for the Pulaski County Special School District, said her students presented information about South America and the country of Peru. “We were the only ESL students to participate and were competing against so many other schools, including private schools,” Yancey said. “I’m so proud of them because not only did they have to present information about the country, they don’t speak English as their native language.”

“Public speaking is difficult enough to begin with if you speak English, but these kids speak Hindi or Malayan and then English. That makes this win even more phenomenal,” she said proudly.

The winning students were sixth-grade student Nancy Trejo, seventh-graders Truc Le and Esteban Gonzalez and eighth-grade students Alejandro Ramirez and Angel Pineda.

Yancey’s ESL students range from sixth to eighth grade and include students from Turkey, Romania, Vietnam, and China. “I’m so proud of them for overcoming such a big challenge,” she said. “They overcame all these barriers and boundaries and succeeded.”

Yancey said each student researched a particular area of the country and then would interact as a group to decide what to include on the presentation board that displayed their research for the judges. “They had to have visuals and be able to verbally present facts including culture, agriculture and geography,” she added. “They couldn’t have general information; they had to be very in-depth and specific.”

Yancey said she believes the students won because they were so excited about learning. They also competed with each other, which helped them improve, she said. “Each of them wanted to be the best. The student researching culture wanted to find the most and best materials related to that topic and the same for the student looking at geography. They would get together and compare notes,” she said.

“From working as a team to developing note-taking skills, they learned so many skills through this project,” Yancey said, adding, “And that they got the bragging rights associated with a first-place win made all their hard work worthwhile,” she said.