Malyka Knapp-Smith wanted to know: "What is the capital of New York?"
A chorus of different voices piped up in various accents and pronunciations: "Al-ban-y!"
She moved on.
"Connecticut?"
"HAT-ford," said one man, testing his memory of the state's capital city.
"HART-ford," a dozen voices chimed in with the correct pronunciation.
Knapp-Smith moved from state to state. She prepped her students for a quiz on state capitals as part of her English as a Second Language class at Garnet Career Center in downtown Charleston.
On the surface, West Virginia's capital city can hardly be seen as a melting pot of languages and cultures.
But try stepping into Knapp-Smith's second-floor classroom at Garnet, or chat with an ESL instructor with the Literacy Volunteers of Kanawha County.
You'll then discover a veritable United Nations of tongues are spoken here daily by immigrants from a wealth of countries on their way to learning or refining their English.
Both organizations have seen a noticeable bump in the number of ESL students in recent years.
Knapp-Smith, now in her second year of teaching ESL classes at Garnet, took a break one recent day from instructing almost 20 students. Her class included a mix of millennials and older adults from a wide sprinkling of countries around the globe.
Her students, who receive the language training free as part of a federal grant through the center, speak mother tongues from many motherlands.
"Almost half of them are Arabic or Spanish," she said. "But I also have Farsi, Portuguese, Mandarin, Russian. It kind of runs the gamut," she said.
Anna Tsvigovska, one of Knapp-Smith's students, is a native of Ukraine who recently moved to Charleston after her engineer husband took a job. After leaving Ukraine she first moved to Spain and learned Spanish - but in the process forgot the English she had picked up in school back home.
Facing the need to improve her English after coming to America, the ESL class "has helped me a lot to remember," she said.
Pregnant with her first child, Tsvigovska said she would wait awhile after the birth of her baby and eventually seek work in town.
"I know working helps a lot to speak a language," she said.
A classmate, Edelmira Anderson, is a native of Lima, Peru. She earned her American citizenship in July 2014, while living in Alaska, before moving to Charleston.
She recalled the excitement at gaining her citizenship, tossing off a colloquial American expression to show how well she is learning the language: "Thank you, God. I am a citizen! You know what I mean?"
She now works at an area convenience store as a cashier, after passing a crucial test of her English language skills.
"Last year, I was lucky - I got a job," she said. "My boss understands me in my interview. Yay! He understands me!"
Knapp-Smith said her classes feature students who speak about 10 different languages. Enrollment is increasing, she said.
"I have almost 50 students, and it's going to grow," she said.
Literacy Volunteers of Kanawha Valley, which provides literacy training for adults, has also seen a rise in the desire for ESL training. Started in 1981, the group's founding focus was literacy tutoring for adults. The group used to have four ESL students but now has 12, triple the number from just a few years ago.
The ESL population now represents 50 percent of all the students receiving training from the Literacy Volunteers, said director Susan Leffler.
"That just happened within the last two years," she said.
Bill Hutchinson was the group's first ESL instructor. One of his students, a Syrian immigrant, epitomized the drive of many ESL students to learn English by immersing themselves in the community.
"He reached out to everybody," he said. "He went to the grocery stores and talked to everybody."
To meet the growing need for instructors, in mid-August, Anita Cohen trained 25 Literacy Volunteers in ESL.
"Teaching ESL is the most rewarding job you can do," Cohen said. "They are students who want and need this information. So they hang on a teacher's every word, and they want more, more, more. It's the most rewarding student I've ever worked with."
Pamilla Ferrell, a Literacy Volunteer, has been doing ESL training with Luma Naser, an attorney from Iraq, and her father, Hakeem Al Zaidi, a psychologist who immigrated to West Virginia a year-and-a-half ago.
Their interchanges were made that much more challenging, as Arabic and English don't even share the same alphabet, Ferrell noted.
But Naser already had some proficiency in English, learned while in school in Baghdad, she said.
"She was able to converse on a higher level. The father knew a few words, and his goal was to be able to converse more just as he needed, like in going to a store and interacting with the doctor," Ferrell said.
Ferrell and Naser recently met for an interview at the Putnam County Library. Nasser and her father met Ferrell for more than a year for weekly hour-and-a-half English lessons at the library.
"I had lessons planned. And then they had homework," Ferrell said. "They worked very hard on the homework. They did more than I needed them to do, more than I asked them to do."
Naser said when she would return home, she and her father would watch TV sitcoms to improve their English comprehension.
Which shows? Naser was quick to reply.
"'Family Feud,'" she said, laughing. "I love this. They use short words. So I can understand what they say."
Some of the ESL teachers said their students have been affected by political controversies over limiting immigration and posing new restrictions on who can come and who can stay.
Knapp-Smith said some of her students expressed anxiety after the presidential election when Donald Trump announced plans to pass a travel ban affecting some Muslim countries and pushing to build a wall between Mexico and America.
"Many of my students feared he would make them go home," she said. "I had to constantly reassure them that was not the case.
"They know the process of what it takes to get here. It takes them almost three years to be cleared."
West Virginia has been a welcome place for her students as they settle in and wrap their minds - and tongues - around the English language and American life, she said.
Many of her students have an image of America shaped by Hollywood and the glamor and moneyed lifestyles of big cities like New York and Los Angeles, said Knapp-Smith.
"I think they've chosen West Virginia because of the quality of life, the fact that it costs less than a lot of our bigger cities," she said. "To be able to come to West Virginia and make a decent life for themselves, I think, for them is very rewarding."
The classes work two ways, Knapp-Smith added.
"I have learned so much from my students, and I think for me that is the most rewarding part of my job."
For more on Literacy Volunteers of Kanawha County visit www.literacyvolunteerskc.org or call 304-343-7323. For more on the ESL classes at Garnet, visit charlestonwvesl.weebly.com or call 304-348-6670, ext.113.
Reach Douglas Imbrogno at
douglas@wvgazettemail.com
304-348-3017 or follow
@douglaseye on Twitter.