Teaching literacy in the city benefits learners, tutors

The mostly immigrant adults attending Centro Latino for Literacy in downtown Los Angeles usually speak only Spanish. They come to learn to read and write their language, motivated by a panoply of hard-luck tales that they share with the UCLA interns who teach them to trace the letters of the alphabet.

 

There's the garment worker, paid by the piece, who realized he'd been signing forms acknowledging making only 60 pieces a day, when he should have been paid for making 100. There's the father, ashamed to let his first-generation American children know that the reason he won't help them with homework is because he can't read their textbooks. There are the adults who can't read maps or street signs, who navigate relying on an extraordinary memory of landmarks.

 

UCLA's Center for Community Partnerships (CCP) helps fund and support a UCLA partnership at Centro Latino that studies how to best teach Spanish literacy, and instructs teachers and tutors in those methods. Separately, the literacy center also receives help from about two dozen UCLA students who join tutors at Centro Latino in helping immigrants conquer the written word. The students get more than just class credit and a warm-fuzzy feeling from their work – they also see rapid improvement in their own Spanish language skills from practicing with native speakers in a real-world setting.

 

"It's not just going out and doing good. It's also a two-way street," explained Professor Concepción Valadez from the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies (GSE&IS), who earned CCP funding for her projects at Centro Latino. She began working with the center 15 years ago, helping them fine-tune their now-computerized online curriculum aimed at the 210,000 Latino adults countywide who struggle to master literacy. "UCLA and Centro Latino have developed a model partnership."

 

It's the kind of teamwork that CCP likes to see, said Margaret Leal-Sotelo, director of the Center for Community Partnerships.

 

"The funding support that our center offers is just one element. Our center is really a portal for community engagement by the university," Leal-Sotelo explained. "Centro Latino, like all of our partnerships, is about improving quality of life in the community and creating new knowledge. Each partner recognizes that what they bring to the collaboration is equally important, and that the knowledge produced is going to be of mutual benefit to the campus and the community."

 

Centro Latino teaches literacy to about 500 immigrants annually, and also offers English-as-a-second-language classes, and higher-level literacy classes that include skills such as how to balance a checkbook. While Valadez’s background as a language-and-literacy scholar contributes guidance on how to best train tutors and how to teach literacy, the graduate students develop skills as applied researchers. Both graduate students and undergrad student interns gain unexpected benefits from their experiences at Centro Latino. UCLA undergrads are awed by the dedication they see among the literacy learners, said Applied Linguistics Professor Susan Plann, who started designing classes requiring students to intern at Centro Latino 15 years ago.

 

"They're always amazed to meet people who work two or even three jobs to stay afloat, but still manage to find time to attend classes and learn how to read," Plann said. "Undergraduates tell me they are 'humbled' – that's the word I invariably hear again and again – when they see how learners struggle to master things we take for granted."

 

For many of the UCLA interns, seeing how hard the literacy students work motivates them to become more dedicated in their own studies, Plann said. Depending on how much time the literacy students can spare away from home and work, they can graduate from the program in about five months.

 

"It really depends on whether they've had even the smallest bit of schooling as children. Some of them arrive and literally don't even know how to grasp a pencil," Plann said. "It helps if they understand that words can be broken down into sounds, and that letters represent those sounds. That seems obvious, but it's a strange and difficult idea to grasp."

 

Plann became involved with Centro Latino for Literacy when she grew frustrated seeing Spanish majors graduate without ever getting to use their language skills outside of the classroom. Sending them into the community exposed UCLA students to the native Spanish-speaking population so that these majors not only improved their own Spanish but made a difference in people's lives.

 

"They learn to really use their Spanish, because it's an immersion setting, where if they don't speak Spanish they can't speak at all," Plann said. "My students always talk about how patient the literacy students are with them. It's an interesting equalizer – it really levels the playing field, to have one person learning to speak while the other is learning to read."

 

Students thrive on the experience. Graduate students are writing dissertations on how service-learning at Centro Latino helps undergrads with second-language acquisition, and developing creative-writing workshops at the center to study adult literacy. Undergrads like Jeff MacMullen come to Centro Latino to tutor. MacMullen, a recent political science graduate who tutored this year during his senior year, said it had benefits he never anticipated. Beyond improving his Spanish skills, it's also the reason why he hopes to continue doing similar work now that he has graduated.

 

"I only learned Spanish in college," MacMullen said. "I never thought I'd be headed to downtown L.A. to teach literacy. It was amazing to see it make an impact on people – and people whom I never normally would have had a chance to talk to. It's one of the most valuable things I've done in college."