This past April, I had the good fortune to spend a week in Montreal, bumming around la belle ville, barely missing the chance to use Bixi bike-sharing, and everywhere I went trying to pull together the bits and scraps of French I'd learned in the U.S. (and was learning there): at my hostel, at the grocery store, on the street. I had enough grammar to purchase my share of wine, if too little vocabulary to discuss whether it was any good, to say nothing of follow the conversations that pinballed around my hostel's rather cramped and enlivened dining room once that first (second, or third) bottle had been uncorked.
I got by--indeed without having to fall back on English too often. And I got better. But eight months later, grad school has intervened and made those bits and scraps suddenly seem all the more infinitesimal. It's a situation any of us who has labored through the beginnings of a foreign language as an adult can attest to: three steps forward, a few months off, two steps backward. Language "attrition," as it's known, is only one of a murderer's row of hurdles facing adult language learners. For adult ESOL learners, whose language acquisition is quite a bit more high-stakes than anything I've experienced, it's a big concern. And an issue that raises important questions about helping adult ESOL learners access their "next steps"--how to help them keep studying English once they've maxed out the opportunities within a single program.
Given the demand for ESOL in Massachusetts, it has been heartening to see how many small programs exist in all imaginable corners of the city: in the pocket-sized human-services agency where I used to work, in school-based community centers, housing projects, daycare centers, churches, prisons. There are still the established, state-funded, multi-level programs, but who's kidding themselves? The state can't or won't fund all the demand.
The challenge with storefront programs like the one I worked at is that they may not have the multiple levels provided by the state-funded bulwarks. Students put 6 or 9 months in, then what happens? In my five-month program, students did a number of things to prepare for graduation and the inevitable search for a next course. For more on that, stay tuned. But after a few months, either through the grapevine or formal follow-up, I would tally up the progress of my alumni. The result was usually this: about half were studying English elsewhere, another quarter were looking or were on a waitlist, and the rest I either couldn't get in touch with or had ceased looking for more English.
I wasn't concerned about the 50 percent still studying. These students were the obvious successes of our next-steps preparations. It was the other 50 percent that got me thinking. I hardly expected every student to keep studying English. Life happens, especially for the low-income immigrant folks who came through our doors. In one of many such examples, a student once had to drop my class right after starting because her daughter had a baby. She was now a rather heavily-involved grandmother; English could wait.
I was curious about those three, four, or five who wanted to continue but didn't have the relatively immediate opportunity to. Like virtually all my students, they had entered my program with clear goals for learning English: To defend myself in everyday situations. To help my daughter with her homework. To get a job (or a better one). By the same token, I cannot remember a single student who didn't want to keep studying English once she got a taste of a class. In following up months after graduation, I found that many were waiting for a call back, and many were on a waitlist--often at multiple programs.
That wasn't surprising, given demand in our area. The main adult-education program in Cambridge has a waitlist of 439, a smaller program, 128. In Somerville, the waitlist for the program run through the public schools currently stands at 1011. In Boston, an organization in Chinatown runs to 296, another in South Boston to 211. It was an accomplishment that my students had the motivation and wherewithal to get on those waitlists in the first place. That can't be overlooked. But the waits that inevitably ensued--three, four, five months or more--were a frustration to my old students. And the likelihood that they were squandering to attrition some of their hardwon language skills ought to be a concern to all of us in the field.
Many a student--current or former--complained to me about this situation. Nearing the closure of one cycle I taught, my beginner-level crew teamed up with an offer I wish I hadn't had to refuse: Would I make my next class intermediate-level, and keep them all on board for the next six months? I couldn't, but it only reinforced my efforts to prepare students for what could come next. Still, the mixed results of future groups suggests new ways to think about next steps. Indeed, not every program has the bloated waitlists of the ones I mentioned above. But how do we go about finding out what's available, and where? And how do we get students into those spaces?
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