Gameday Magazine August

How a lifelong Indians fan blends her passion of baseball into language teaching Baseball’s not the o Hillcats players ar

Lynchburg, Va. - The Hillcats play- ers rely on their coaching staff to help them make improvements on the field every day. But for some of the players, who are learning English as a second language, they have another coach, off the field, and her name is Christina Wade. Wade, now in her third year with the Hillcats, grew up an Indians fan in Youngstown, Ohio. Her mother fol- lowed the Tribe so closely that when they played, she would have seven ra- dios on throughout the house, so that she could move from room to room and never miss a pitch. While Wade grew up only speaking English, her grandfather was born in Mexico, which sparked her interest in different cultures, and helping non- English speakers communicate. “I wanted to be a linguist,” said Wade. “I thought I’d focus on English as proper, or the analysis of language, but I found the application of it to be more interesting because it involves engag- ing with people more.” After traveling throughout Central and South America as well as China, Thailand, Azerbaijan, and Italy, she concluded that this path would help feed her hunger for learning about various cultures and people. She currently works with four Hillcats players: Li-Jen Chu, Leandro Linares, Jorma Rodriuez, and Emmanuel Tapia. “She’s a good teacher,” said Chu, a native of Taichung, Taiwan. “She’s very flexible about the work and she talks to me a lot about life.”

Wade’s goal is to foster positive and successful English conversations to give the players the confidence they need to continue speaking the lan- guage outside of the classroom. She focuses more on conversational English with the players as opposed to the grammar and writing that are stressed in a traditional classroom setting. “I focus mostly on working on my pro- nunciations and being able to express myself to my coaches,” said Tapia, who grew up Santo Domingo Centro in the Dominican Republic. Formerly the Director of Liberty Uni- versity’s English Institute, Wade has worked with students from all over the world. But until she was offered the op- portunity with the Hillcats, she hadn’t thought about baseball as an avenue for her work. “I was surprised to find how many play- ers from other countries are coming here and what an important thing it is for the Major League clubs to equip those players with English,” Wade said. She works with the players 12 times throughout the season. While it’s not a ton of time for teaching, she notes that Anna Bolton, who is the Indians Educational Coordi- instruction in the offseason. This will al- low them to have more regular instruc- tion when they will have greater time to digest the material. Wade speaks English and Spanish, as well as some Portuguese, Mandarin, and French. But she teaches in an im- mersion style, so she only needs to be fluent in the language she is teaching. nator, is working to get the players increased English

She’s very flexible about the work and she talks to me a lot about life