Good Morning to all,

 

My name is Lydia Grinnell. Thanks for all the interesting conversation! I work as a Higher Education Specialist at the Crittenton Women’s Union. I work in two of their programs specifically GED and Workforce Development however also provide my services to our Young Parents program as well as our Housing guests. In my position I teach weekly to both groups of my primarily clients as one of our goals of my position and of the GED and Workforce Development programs is to not only ready but expose students to careers, college, and the possibilities and value of higher education. I also provide one on one counseling to those students looking to go to college or a training after our program. 

 

Of the difficulties I face, there are many. 

1)       students wanting to go back to school that have defaulted student loans and no money to pay them back 

2)       students with low level skills (mostly GED recipients) that fall into developmental classes

3)       students who have been out of school a long time and get denied acceptance to a university (even with one student that has her Associates Degree from 17 years ago and had a 2.4 GPA) 

4)       students with children that don’t want to be separated from their children 

5)       students that have children and are in need of childcare AND to work and go to school

6)       students with lack of or no support at home

 

My thoughts on transitioning students to higher education or work is that there are not enough “transitional supports” available to all. I often refer my students to a college prep program however it is the only one in the area and operates at night when students do not have childcare available. I also run into a bump with the large amount of students I find with defaulted student loans from “career schools” of which they left due to unsatisfactory conditions or pregnancy, incarceration, etc, etc. 

 

At the moment, at my organization we do not have the funding for a full fledged transitions program, so all we have is my position as well as a career specialist who works on placing students into jobs and internships as well as teaches job readiness. Between our two positions we cover a lot, but due to constraints find it difficult to do as much as we would like. I am not a certified ABE teacher and neither is the career specialist. We teach in our areas, though often to students that simply preparing for their GED or a job and hence our positions become persuading those not interested to be interested in learning what we are trying to help them learn. Self-sufficiency is our mission and it is not an easy one. 

 

I found the articles very interesting and helpful, thank you!

 

Sincerely,

Lydia Grinnell

 

Lydia Grinnell

Academic Specialist

Crittenton Women's Union

Education and Workforce Development

 

(Monday/Wednesday/Friday)

10 Perthshire Road

Brighton, MA 02135

t. 857-559-2146

f. 617-254-7966

 

(Tuesday/Thursday)

One Washington Mall, 2nd Floor

Boston, MA 02108

t. 617-259-2928

f. 617-247-8826

www.liveworkthrive.org <http://www.liveworkthrive.org> 

 

Live. Work. Thrive.

________________________________

From: assessment-bounces at nifl.gov [mailto:assessment-bounces at nifl.gov] On Behalf Of Barbara Jacala
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2009 9:16 PM
To: 'The Assessment Discussion List'
Subject: [Assessment 1567] Re: Transitions Discussion begins today!

 

We have advanced ESOL students who keep coming back because they want to improve. However, their CASAS score is too high that we are not seeing any more gains and they are therefore showing up in our reports as failures, i.e. continued in the same level or left the program before completion. I am thinking that we should try to move them over to the postsecondary developmental English courses. We are also considering offering an academic ESL course to transition such students to postsecondary. What are your thoughts?

 

Barbara Jacala

Guam Community College

 

________________________________

From: assessment-bounces at nifl.gov [mailto:assessment-bounces at nifl.gov] On Behalf Of Wendy Quinones
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2009 2:07 AM
To: The Assessment Discussion List
Subject: [Assessment 1559] Re: Transitions Discussion begins today!

 

Hello and welcome everyone,

I'm Wendy Quiñones, an ABE teacher at a community-based learning center, the Community Learning Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  I also taught for two years in our college transition program while Cynthia Zafft, whom you'll also meet in the course of the discussion – was head of NCTN.  Recently – this past Saturday, in fact – I also began teaching a high-level ESOL communication class at a private tw-year college in Boston, Urban College.  This class consists of women who are family day care providers working toward a certificate; they have had all their content courses in Spanish and are now trying an academic English course for the first time.

 

Marie asked me to talk about the "process" at my learning center for transitioning students from ESOL into ABE.  I can name it in a word:  none.  Our ABE program aims to move students toward a GED; many of our ESOL students have no need of or desire for one.  We are also fortunate to receive a number of scholarships to the ESOL program at Harvard University's extension school, so our advanced students who want to work hard at improving their English often go there.  We tried a specific transition class one year, but it was the only time we had a large enough cohort of students who were "stalled" in high-intermediate ESOL but wanted a GED.

 

However, when students do move into the ABE program from our ESOL classes, or they enter the ABE program with skills that are too high for ESOL but low by ABE standards, they generall go into a low-intermediate reading and writing class which I taught for two years.  Higher-level students who already have a high school credential (and sometimes college as well) in their home countries often entered our transition to college program.  

 

As we all know, these students are very different from native speakers in the same classes.  In his research on low-intermediate adult learners, John Strucker noted the following distinction between native speakers and ELLs: 

**       Native speakers tended to have relatively stronger "meaning-based skills" [like comprehension and vocabulary] as compared to "print-based skills," [for example, word recognition] while non-native speakers exhibited the opposite pattern. Chall (1991) reported similar findings. 

**       Many second-language speakers in ABE classes had surprisingly low levels of oral vocabulary in English (GE 2 to GE 4), despite their fluent levels of conversational English. Similarly low levels of oral vocabulary occurred among some inner-city young adults who were native speakers.  Strucker, John.  "What Silent Reading Tests Alone Can't Tell You: Two Case Studies in Adult Reading Differences," Focus on Basics, May 1997.  http://www.ncsall.net/?id=456 

So the question is, how do we cope with these learners with different needs?  At my center, teachers are mostly left to our own devices.  In the lower-level classes, where student need is universal for vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension instruction, concentrating on those is easy.  At higher levels, it gets more complicated.  In my GED class, using "The Lord is my shepherd" to demonstrate methaphor, my ELL students didn't know the word "shepherd"; in my college class, my Spanish-speaking students didn't know the word "rhyme."  

 

One year in the transitions class, I tried to differentiate the instruction, having the lower-level ELLs work with an ESOL teacher for an hour of the 3-hour class.  They learned the same vocabulary words but in contexts they could understand, and their writing assignments and grammar instruction paid attention to more specific ESOL issues in which to this day I have not been trained.  We learned that while we could expect these ELLs to learn the words, we couldn't use the same tests; their tests needed to be much more similar to the examples they used in class.  Native speakers and higher-level ELLs could be expected to know the words in different contexts.  I also gave some readings at different levels – either different materials or in many cases short stories for which I provided both an adapted version and the original, like O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi."  Except for the fact that all the students were exposed to great American short stories, I can't say that any of these techniques worked particularly well.

 

So I'm still hunting for a "process" that will help ELLs to transition into ABE and college classes.  I imagine many of you have much better ideas than I do.  I'm looking forward to hearing about them!

 

Regards,

Wendy

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