Dear Colleagues,

To address the employment needs of the growing language minority population
in the US, educators implement initiatives that link service providers from
a variety of fields (i.e. basic education, Vocational ESL and technical
skill training).  Such collaborative efforts combine basic skills upgrading,
vocational/workplace training and other pre-employment skill enhancement.

It would be helpful to learn from and build upon promising practices. To
that end, I am inviting you to participate in a survey that attempts to get
at the nature of interagency and interdisciplinary collaboration.  Kindly
take a moment to reflect on ways you may have worked with others as well as
encountered challenges and/or obstacles with regard serving adult immigrants
seeking skill training.

My hope is that those on this listserv would be especially interested in
sharing their practices w/regard to serving language minority adults seeking
better jobs.  The survey focuses on ways in which educators collaborate with
others (or not) and urges you to elaborate on specific practices,
limitations, strategies to overcome obstacles.

The purpose of this survey is to synthesize the quantitative and qualitative
data gleaned from those "in the field" and share it with those who are
dedicated to improving their agencies' response to the growing need to train
language minority adults in family sustaining jobs.  Those on this listserv
are in positions of educational leadership and thus could speak and respond
to these complicated issues and, hopefully be interested in what others
report.  I'm collecting the data to include in a paper (w/the working title:
"How much English do I need to paint fingernails?") and to analyze for my
doctoral coursework in TESOL at Temple University.

To complete the brief, 15-item survey, please go to the following link:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=36945513908.

Thank you in advance for your participation.  I look forward to sharing the
results to assist educators who prepare immigrants for the labor market.

Sincerely,
Laurie Ketzenberg
Temple University