Thanks to a $1 million grant awarded to the UB Graduate School of Education, graduate students will have the opportunity to receive training to better serve the more than four million students nationwide who have been identified as having limited English language proficiency.
Lilliam Malav?(c), director of bilingual education in the Graduate School of Education, said the grant would help fund an academic program that will allow graduate students to receive New York State certification in teaching English as a Second Language (ESL).
In a UB News Services press release, Malav?(c) said money from the grant would also establish a professional development program that will train 25 teachers from Western New York to better assist Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students.
Malav?(c) is currently on sabbatical and could not be reached by The Spectrum for further comment.
Olga Rico-Armesto, supervisor of bilingual education and ESL for the Buffalo Public Schools, said the impact of this new program would benefit the Buffalo Public School district, which has over 2,500 LEP students.
"We're desperate to have certified teachers," Rico-Armesto said. "(The program) will provide a service that is sorely needed in our schools. The teachers that are trained at UB are of the highest quality."
According to the Web site for the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition (NCELA) at George Washington University, close to 4.6 million ESL students are enrolled in public schools across the United States.
"These children need help - not only with language, but with the cultural peculiarities of this country," said Elena Dokshitskaya, a graduate student in the School of Education's Department of Learning and Instruction.
According to the NCELA, LEP enrollment nationwide has increased 88.6 percent in the last decade, making LEP children between the grades of kindergarten and twelfth the fastest-growing population in the United States.
A report from the NCELA stated that of the 41 percent of teachers nationwide with LEP students in their classrooms, only 12.5 percent have participated in eight or more hours of ESL-related professional development in the past three years.
Dokshitskaya, a native of Belarus, said it is very important for graduate students to receive training in this field.
"I am an ESL student myself, and I know the problems students face," she said.
Dokshitskaya said certification recipients would employ a number of different strategies to train LEP students.
"We prefer to mix native and ESL students, and do different projects aimed at communication skills and improving academic language proficiency," Dokshitskaya said. "Hands-on projects are good, and small groups are important as well - students have no choice but to speak."
Photo: Courtesy of SUNY
