Literacy Programs work with uneducated immigrants

[Harold Schiffman]

Programs work with uneducated immigrants
By Heather Hollingsworth
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
12/16/2007


KANSAS CITY — Before Bob Jansen can teach English to the adult
immigrants in his lowest level class, he has to show about a quarter
of them how to hold a pencil.  "It takes a lot of patience to teach
this class," Jansen said before his students recited the alphabet and
practiced vowel sounds in a recent phonics lesson at the Don Bosco
Community Center.  Adult education teachers such as Jansen are finding
themselves starting from scratch as uneducated immigrants and refugees
from conflict regions of Africa and rural areas of Mexico and Central
America flock to the United States. Jansen's students are among an
estimated 400,000 legal and 350,000 illegal immigrants who are unable
to read or write even in their native languages, according to a July
2007 report from the Migration Policy Institute, an independent
Washington think tank.

In one recent session, Jansen drew male and female stick figures on
the dry erase board and taped pictures of different modes of
transportation alongside the sketches. Students crafted sentences such
as, "He is on the orange airplane." A group of five Somali women clad
in long head scarves talked as they worked. The class also serves
immigrants from other African counties as well as Latin America, Asia
and the Middle East.  One of the students, Rebeka Goup, had attended
no school in her native Sudan before immigrating to the United States
in 2000.

"I need to learn English to talk to people," she said. Her English
remains broken after seven years in the United States, but she is one
of the most fluent students in the class. Asked in English where they
are from, many of Goup's classmates instead offer their names or
addresses. These immigrants, some of whom attended school for the
first time in refugee camps, tend to flounder in classes that include
students who have attended school in their native countries.

And service providers such as the Don Bosco Center complain that they
are being penalized for the slow progress these students make and
discouraged from offering separate classes for them. That's because
more states are looking at student performance as they decide how to
distribute federal dollars to programs that teach English to adult
immigrants.

"One hand of the government is letting preliterate people come here as
refugees," said David Holsclaw, director of Don Bosco Community
Center's English as a Second Language Program, which serves about
2,500 students a year, "and another hand of the government is making
it hard to serve them because they want to tie our funding to
testing."

The reason these uneducated immigrants struggle is easy to understand,
said Barbara Van Horn, co-director of the Goodling Institute for
Research in Family Literacy at Pennsylvania State University.

"If someone is literate in one language, they will be aware of the
concepts of books, words, putting the words together into sentences,
reading those sentences and understanding so you find out what is
being written," she said.

Not so with people who aren't literate in a first language.

"They haven't made the connection between their oral language and the
fact that what is printed, those letters represent sounds that are
used to make up words. They don't have that basic understanding of
what literacy is about."

Cheryl Keenan, director of adult education and literacy with the U.S.
Department of Education, said the assertion that immigrants with
little to no ability to read or write in any language made slower
progress than more educated students was overstated. She noted that
the completion rate for adult immigrants in the lowest-level classes
was greater than for the highest-level classes.

But she readily acknowledged that service providers were "quite
challenged in how to address the instructional needs of these
beginning literacy students."

Service providers first began noticing large numbers of unschooled
immigrants after the Vietnam War when throngs of Laotian Hmong war
refugees arrived with no traditional written language.

But most programs were slow to respond to their needs, said Heide
Spruck Wrigley, a nonresident fellow with the Center for Immigrant
Integration Policy, based in Washington.

She said the latest immigration influx, which includes many immigrants
with low levels of schooling, had refocused attention on nonliterate
immigrants.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, the number of
foreign-born adults with less than a fifth-grade education increased
25 percent, to 2.18 million in 2000 from 1.74 million immigrants in
1990, and then dipped 2 percent to 2.12 million immigrants in 2006.

Wrigley said programs seeking to serve the lowest-level students knew
more about what worked and what didn't than they did after the Vietnam
War, thanks to new research. But programs continue to struggle.

Service providers are under pressure to maintain large classes and
often lack enough nonliterate students for a separate class. Often,
the nonliterate students are lost as soon as the teacher writes a
sentence on the board.

Wrigley said the result was that many of the immigrants most in need
of education dropped out, convinced they're not as smart because their
classmates find it so much easier to learn to read and write in
English.

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/missouristatenews/story/772F001E535A16AA862573B2001D1C27?OpenDocument

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