Programs struggle to teach English to least educated immigrants

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Before Bob Jansen can teach English to the adult immigrants in his lowest-level class, he has to show about a quarter of them how to hold a pencil.

"It takes a lot of patience to teach this class," Jansen said before his students recited the alphabet and practiced vowel sounds during a recent phonics lesson at the Don Bosco Community Center.

Adult education teachers like Jansen are finding themselves starting from scratch as uneducated immigrants and refugees from conflict regions of Africa and rural areas of Mexico and Central America flock to the United States.

Jansen's students are among an estimated 400,000 legal and 350,000 illegal immigrants who are unable to read or write even in their native language, according to a July 2007 report from the Migration Policy Institute, an independent Washington think tank.

During one recent session, Jansen drew male and female stick figures on the dry erase board and taped pictures of different modes of transportation alongside the sketches. Students crafted sentences like, "He is on the orange airplane."

Sahro, left, and Sred, who are both from Somalia, recited vowel sounds recently during a phonics lesson in Bob Jansen's English 1 class at the Don Bosco Community Center in Kansas City, Mo. Most of Jensen's students are uneducated immigrants and refugees from war-torn regions in the world who are unable to read and write in their native language. (ED ZURGA ~ Associated Press)

A group of five Somali women clad in long head scarves talked as they worked. The class also serves immigrants from other African counties as well as Latin America, Asia and the Middle East.

One of the students, Rebeka Goup, had attended no school in her native Sudan before immigrating to the U.S. in 2000.

"I need to learn English to talk to people," she said. Her English remains broken after seven years in the United States, but she is one of the most fluent students in the class. Asked in English where they are from, many of Goup's classmates instead offer their names or addresses.

These immigrants, some of whom attended school for the first time in refugee camps, tend to flounder in classes that include students who have attended school in their native countries.

Being penalized

And service providers like the Don Bosco Center complain they are being penalized for the slow progress these students make and discouraged from offering separate classes for them. That's because more states are looking at student performance as they decide how to distribute federal dollars to programs that teach English to adult immigrants.

"One hand of the government is letting preliterate people come here as refugees," said David Holsclaw, director of Don Bosco Community Center's English as a Second Language Program, which serves about 2,500 students a year, "and another hand of the government is making it hard to serve them because they want to tie our funding to testing."

The reason these uneducated immigrants struggle is easy to understand, said Barbara Van Horn, co-director of the Goodling Institute for Research in Family Literacy at Pennsylvania State University.

"If someone is literate in one language, they will be aware of the concepts of books, words, putting the words together into sentences, reading those sentences and understanding so you find out what is being written," she said.

Not so with people who aren't literate in their first language.

"They haven't made the connection between their oral language and the fact that what is printed, those letters represent sounds that are used to make up words. They don't have that basic understanding of what literacy is about."

Cheryl Keenan, director of adult education and literacy with the U.S. Department of Education, said the assertion that immigrants with little to no ability to read or write in any language make slower progress than more educated students was overstated. She noted the completion rate for adult immigrants in the lowest-level classes was greater than for the highest-level classes.

But she readily acknowledged that service providers are "quite challenged in how to address the instructional needs of these beginning literacy students."

Service providers first began noticing large numbers of unschooled immigrants after the Vietnam War when throngs of Laotian Hmong war refugees arrived with no traditional written language.

But most programs were slow to respond to their needs, said Heide Spruck Wrigley, a nonresident fellow with the Washington-based Center for Immigrant Integration Policy.

She said the latest immigration influx, which includes many immigrants with low levels of schooling, has refocused attention on non-literate immigrants.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, the number of foreign-born adults with less than a fifth-grade education increased 25 percent from 1.74 million immigrants in 1990 to 2.18 million in 2000 and then dipped 2 percent to 2.12 million immigrants in 2006.

Wrigley said programs seeking to serve the lowest-level students know more about what works and what doesn't than they did after the Vietnam War, thanks to new research. But programs continue to struggle.

Service providers are under pressure to maintain large classes and often lack enough non-literate students for a separate class. Often, the non-literate students are lost as soon as the teacher writes a sentence on the board.

Wrigley said the result is many of the immigrants most in need of education drop out, convinced they're not as smart because their classmates find it so much easier to learn to read and write in English.