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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