Ihen adult basic education (ABE) teachers think of transitions, the subject usually concerns how to prepare students for their next steps at a higher level-college, the GED, job training, or the work force. Transitions also can be formed and strengthened at lower levels, offering adult learners clearer paths as they move through the educational system in their communities. In this article, I will focus on the experiences of a seven-year-old ABE transitional program in Boston's Chinatown. The story involves not only cooperation, collaboration, and communication among neighborhood educational organizations but also tighter connections between various adult education programs inside the same agency.

Getting Started
In late 1992, a collaboration began between the two largest adult education providers in Chinatown with Bunker Hill Community College. This collaboration became one of only five national demonstration projects (three of which were in Massachusetts) established under a federal grant through the Massachusetts Department of Education (DOE). These three projects were known by the acronym MELD (Massachusetts English Literacy Demonstration). Along with Bunker Hill, the key players in Chinatown were the Asian American Civic Association (AACA) and the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center (BCNC, formerly known as the Quincy School Community Council). Both of these agencies have long histories and are household words in the Boston area Chinese community. They have provided, and continue to offer multilevel ESOL classes for immigrant and refugee adults.

The goal of the MELD project was to help students improve the foundation skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking as well as to help them acquire new skills such as note-taking, time management, and educational/career planning so they would be successful at higher academic levels. At that time in the community, many students coming out of the highest ESOL classes were failing to make the transitions to job training programs, community colleges, or alternative high school diploma classes. MELD was created to serve as a bridge so students could reach these next steps. What began as a two-level transitional program involving teachers and counselors from both AACA and BCNC has grown to a four-level program run entirely by AACA. There are two full-time teachers and a half-time bilingual program counselor. In 1995, when a five-year Massachusetts DOE grant was approved, the formal collaboration with Bunker Hill ended, although the agencies continue to have regular communication with the college's ESL department. In recent years, the program has been renamed the Chinatown ABE English Transitional Program. Most students simply call it ABE.

Making and Keeping Connections
Ever since classes started in January 1993, a majority of ABE program students have come from ESOL classes in the community, especially from AACA or BCNC. In the ABE program cycle from September to December, 1999, 60 percent of the students had previously attended an ESOL class at either AACA or BCNC. The first two ABE counselors were also counselors for the BCNC's adult ESOL program, the largest in Chinatown. Since 1996, the program counselor at AACA has split her time between the ABE and family literacy programs, so many potential students have been easily identified and introduced to ABE as a logical next step. The counselor makes regular presentations to the two highest levels of AACA's ESOL classes near the end of their program cycles, informing students of upcoming ABE testing and information sessions. All other AACA teachers, as well as the ESOL and counseling staff at BCNC, receive recruitment flyers for ABE's three cycles per year.

Curriculum Issues
An ongoing effort is underway to reconcile the curricula of a student-centered, content-and theme-based ABE program and the survival skills-based curriculum of AACA's ESOL classes. For the past several years, there has been extensive, informal sharing of ideas and materials among ESOL and ABE teachers in the teachers' room and at monthly staff development sessions. ABE wrote a description of "What You Will Learn in ABE Level 1" so that teachers of the highest levels of ESOL could better inform their students and align their curriculum with what their students would see in the ABE program.

Recently, the staffs of both programs met to rearticulate their respective goals and philosophies and to get a better idea of what really goes on in their classrooms. Despite obvious differences of students' needs-survival English for lower- level students as opposed to more critical reading and writing for ABE students-we found some common ground. The teacher of the ESOL literacy class has her students do brief presentations, as do all four levels of ABE. The teacher of one of the higher ESOL classes is doing journals and longer pieces of writing with her students. Stories about the changing nature of work in the United States, used in the highest ABE class, may also be useful for students in the refugee ESOL class where funding requirements specify strong preparation for work. Ongoing ABE assessment tools developed under a curriculum frameworks grant in 1998 could easily be adapted to ESOL classes, and ESOL teachers are seeing ABE teachers as more of a resource. At the end of the meeting, all of us agreed to continue the dialogue. Another goal is to observe each other's classes. In our agency, we feel we are contributing to building a "seamless continuum of services" for students from ESOL literacy to higher educational levels, to quote the language from our original grant and the new ABE grant that so many organizations are now working on.

Richard Goldberg coordinates and teaches in a four-level ABE transitional program at the Asian American Civic Association in Boston. He can be reached by e-mail at goldber@massed.net or by phone at 617-426-9492, extension 310.