Developing a Native Language Literacy Program

Michelle Brown
Director of Education, Employment and Training
Centro Hispano de Chelsea
Chelsea, MA

Tool co-developed with Seidy Rodriguez-Ham

For five years, Centro Hispano de Chelsea needed a Native Language
Literacy class in Spanish to meet the needs of our population. When I started at Centro Hispano, one program taught ESL with a medical emphasis for students who tested at an SPL level of 5-6. This program is designed for 1) foreign licensed medical professionals , 2) individuals currently working in acute care hospitals, and 3) individuals pursuing a career in the health care industry. Needless to say, the students in this program have a much more established and formal educational background and were an excellent match for this program.

Initial elation over the success of this program didn’t last long however. Teachers began getting feedback and suggestions from students on how the program could better meet their needs. When these suggestions were not implemented, attrition began to rise. It became apparent that our education department was severely lacking.

While we were meeting the needs of our target population, these same students were asking about the needs of their families. Their parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and children were all in need of English and other referral services. The requests for other ESL classes were overwhelming. We went after funding to expand our ESL offerings.

We started to build our ESL base with informal classes where we assessed students via the BEST (Basic English Skills Test). Our funding agency mandated this tool in our first program, so we considered it as good as any other tool for our new program. It also seemed that when writing proposals or communicating with funders, they understood the language of the BEST SPL, MELT etc.

Yet, the BEST was often off the mark. The placement test never seemed to coincide with what the teachers thought about the levels of students. It gave us some information for placement but not the information we needed to do it accurately.

Specifically, it did not account for all the variables in our ESL population. Students were ending up in classes and had to be moved after the beginning of a cycle. Still we were able to work things out. Our ESL classes were meeting the needs of many more people. We had a long waiting list, but we had a program we felt was meeting a large community need.

It wasn’t long however, before we noticed a rather peculiar thing. The teachers had brought to my attention their frustration with not being able to move the classes along because of a few students. While most of our students were making excellent progress and were moving up to higher levels of ESL or out of the program altogether, some were making little or no progress at all. These students were staying in the same class and ESL level for upwards of a year and even two in some instances. As a result, some beginning ESL classes were full and accepted very few new students from the waiting list.

We decided it was time to look closely at the classes we were offering. Was some-thing missing in our program that could account for this? We started by spending a whole in-service day evaluating different components of our program as a whole group.

We began by looking at the numbers. How many students had come in? What were their BEST scores when entering? What were their scores from class work, quizzes, etc.? and what were their BEST scores when ending each cycle? We discovered that most of the students who repeated two or more cycles were in the lower level classes, while the higher level classes saw little to no repetition. So we narrowed our inquiry to lower level classes and moved our focus from student to instruction: Was the teacher appropriate for the class? Was the material appropriate for the class? Was the method of teaching appropriate for the class? The majority of the class was doing well and showed mobility into the higher level classes. All teacher evaluations written by students had come out very positive, the class curriculum was suitable, and the course work all seemed to be in order.

One of the teachers suggested we ask all the students in the lower level classes to write a short paragraph in Spanish (their native language), perhaps about their early educational experiences. We expected some issues with their native language but we wanted to see what those issues were. Was it a literacy problem? Was it an issue of a bad educational experience? Was it a result of a learning style difference? After the students provided us with a writing sample, the results were so clear and relevant that they gave us two major pieces to the puzzle.

The first was that the lesser-developed paragraphs with the most mistakes all belonged to those students who had remained in the lower level class for more than two cycles. These mistakes ranged from spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, poor sentence structure, to malformed letters, such as backwards p’s etc.…also the actual writing on the page was not smooth flowing but looked as if a lot of effort was put into writing each word.

The second was that all the students were over 55 years of age. None of these students had education in their own country beyond the third grade (even that was considered advanced); some had absolutely no formal education in either reading or writing. All considered themselves “campesinos,” persons who grew up on a farm. Their family priorities were to work on their farms starting at a very young age so they had few opportunities to further their education in their native language.

We needed a class to fit these specific Native Language Literacy (NLL) needs. We believe that people have better success at learning literacy of a second language if they have literacy skills in their native language. This belief led us to pursue funding for a Native Language Literacy Class. Centro Hispano de Chelsea then joined forces with Bunker Hill Community College and other agencies in Chelsea: Chelsea City Hall, Chelsea Community Volunteer Center, Cambodian Community of Massachusetts, Refugee Services, Consilio Hispano de Cambridge, and the Chelsea Community to respond to a request for proposals through the Massachusetts Department of Education. Through this consortium we are able to provide ESOL, GED and pre-GED in Spanish and English and two NLL programs in Spanish and Khmer.

We could now finally start our program, but the next stumbling block was finding or developing the proper assessment tool. As previously stated, we had used the BEST for our other programs as well as supplemental materials. This test could not address our need to measure Native Language Literacy. We had to look elsewhere for a tool.

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We looked at various alternatives, including resource people like Yvonne Lalyre at the Mass. Department of Education and Seidy Rodriguez-Ham, our literacy teacher. Seidy drafted our own in-house Native Language Literacy Assessment Tool (see Tool, next page). This tool began to assess students’ knowledge of the alphabet, sentence structure, and basic math applications. With invaluable assistance from Diane Paxton, the Elderly Program Life Skills instructor at Centro Hispano, we were able to get an even more advanced assessment and form a more comprehensive curriculum for the NLL program. Seemingly all segments were in place, but there was one last – and probably the largest problem left.

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We had identified the students who needed the classes and had found an instructor. We had then developed the necessary assessment tools as well as the curriculum. Yet the students were extremely dissatisfied , and many of them refused to come to the class. Many of them denied their need for classes in native language literacy. Others admitted they needed to learn to read and write in their own language, but wanted and needed to learn English. There was also the issue of being viewed as an “alphabeta(o)” and the stigma attached to not being able to read and write. This was hard for some students to overcome. It was also hard for us to convince students that this was the best path to learning English. Some students resisted and wanted to just learn English. After listening to their concerns, we then developed what we hoped would be our last solution to the issues surrounding our Native Language Literacy Program.

We offered the students a supplementary class which taught ESL life skills (shopping, emergency procedures, going to the doctor…). They could take the literacy class Monday through Wednesday and take the Life Skills class Thursday and Friday. This would assist them with their literacy skills, while at the same time teach them survival English. This option was extremely popular and even helped us solve other problems we were having in our ESL classes mainly dealing with issues of stereotypes and prejudices from students coming from different parts of Latin America.

Students coming from some Latin American countries are very strong in their English reading and writing skills, seemingly due to learning English in school, some as early as first grade. This English instruction was generally taught in Spanish and emphasized reading and writing, yet did little to develop their oral/aural skills.

Individuals from other Latin American countries, however, have been in this country for a long time and have relied much more on the oral/aural skills to survive and work and have had few or no opportunities to develop their reading and writing skills.

Our Multi Level ESL Life Skills class served a dual purpose in the education , employment and training department. Not only did it see success with our diverse students from Latin America, but also helped up to implement and see success in our Native Language Literacy Program. Our two classes brought together students from different countries in Latin America for a common purpose. Through these classes we were able to facilitate conversations and learnings that helped people see the similarities and differences in their languages, phrases and terminology and as a result gave students a more accurate picture of the different cultures.

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Originally published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 9 (December 1996),
SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 1996.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.