UMaine Grant to Prepare Teachers for School Languages Challenge
Contact: Laura Lindenfeld, 581-1843; Gisela Hoecherl-Alden, 581-2081; George Manlove, 591-3756
ORONO — The University of Maine has received a $1.5 million, five-year grant to better prepare Maine teachers to work with a growing number of students just learning or still perfecting their English language skills.
The U.S. Department of Education Title III grant will enable research and teacher training in the area of English as a Second Language (ESL). The program being created through the grant also is expected to sensitize teachers to the diverse and specific educational needs of a range of students who bring cultural, language and even significant religious differences to the classroom.
“I think it’s going to enhance everybody’s teaching experience,” says Gisela Hoecherl-Alden, a professor of German and a co-director of the program with Laura Lindenfeld, a professor of mass communication and the university’s Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center.
Maine schools now have more than 3,000 children and young adults who speak Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Serb-Croatian, Somali, Sudanese, Russian, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy or American Sign languages, according to the Maine Department of Education. To accommodate that growing number of students, the population of ELS-trained teachers in Maine “is growing exponentially,” Hoecherl-Alden says. While the classroom focus for multicultural students typically has been on learning English, Hoecherl-Alden and Lindenfeld say students should be encouraged to retain their native languages, since so much of their cultural identity is reflected in language.
“It’s imperative for the University of Maine to reach out to teachers to help them provide the best possible support for the state’s ESL students,” Lindenfeld says. “We think it’s very important to value people’s languages and their cultural heritage.”
“By allowing them to lose their native language, we’re impoverishing the state of Maine and its ability to become a player in a global economy,” Hoecherl-Alden adds.
New teaching methods designed to accommodate limited-English students also could help English-speaking students with learning disabilities, according to Lindenfeld and Hoecherl-Alden.
Several new classes are being developed for inclusion into the curriculum of the College of Education and Human Development to reach a specified number of education students and a group of current Maine school teachers, who will take the classes during the summer. The courses include a focus on English as a Second Language in math, science and mainstream classrooms.
Grant requirements also mandate that UMaine and the Maine Department of Education create a faculty research team to produce research in ESL teaching methods, and offer workshops on the subject for all teachers.
“The reality is every teacher, whether an ESL teacher or not, will face a diverse classroom,” Hoecherl-Alden says.
The program begins this fall with 10 undergraduate and graduate students who will receive a stipend to assist with expenses. Additionally, the program will provide coursework leading to state ESL certification for teachers already in the field. After the five-year grant period concludes, Lindenfeld and Hoecherl-Alden expect 50 UMaine student teachers and 30 teachers already practicing will be certified as English as a Second Language teachers.
Anne Pooler, interim dean of the College of Education and Human Development, says the grant is welcome news as the university rises to meet the challenge of increasing multiculturalism in Maine’s classrooms.
“We recognize the changing demographics in the country, in Maine and in the number of students who are of limited proficiency in English today’s classrooms,” she says. “As a college, we’ve been looking toward adding a concentration that would allow our students to be ESL certified, so this helps us accelerate a program we were about to design. This just propels us further.”
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