Literacy Councils Train Tutors : Immigrants Learn Picture-Perfect English

“The word is ‘bird.’ Say ‘bird,’ ” Alma Cavell told her small but eager group of students.

“Bird,” they repeated obediently, then erupted into self-conscious giggles.

“Good!” Cavell said, beaming at the 10 women huddled in the plain, small classroom at Sepulveda United Methodist Church.

Cavell, a small, sprightly woman in her 60s, of the Antelope Valley Literacy Council, has been an apprentice tutor-trainer nine years. On a recent Saturday afternoon, Cavell, guided by trainer Mary Stout, drilled the would-be tutors on how to teach English-as-a-second-language, or ESL, classes.

Traveling Trainers

The course given at the Sepulveda church was arranged by the San Fernando Valley Literacy Council, which also uses the church as its main office. The council has been operating the ESL center and tutor-training courses, which are given by traveling trainers, since the late 1960s.

There are eight such ESL centers throughout the Valley, offshoots of California Literacy Inc., a statewide corporation founded in 1957 by a follower of Frank C. Laubach. Laubach invented a phonetic method of teaching English while working among the Moros, a Muslim Malay tribe in the southern Philippines, in the 1930s. The method uses pictures with super-imposed letters to associate sound with sight, such as a girl with her hair curved into the letter G to represent the sound of the letter and the word.

More than 50,000 volunteer tutors have logged over 2 million teaching hours nationwide, said Betty Duncan, training director for California Literacy Inc. In California alone, tutors have put in 229,000 teaching hours, she said. There are now 35 councils and more than 200 Laubach centers throughout California, many of them operated at churches, schools and libraries.

Strict Methods

Under the Laubach method, no deviations of the stock phrases are allowed. Even when tutors compliment their students, they must use only one word: “Good!” Other words of praise might confuse students, Cavell said.

With two lessons behind them, and one more all-day session to go, Cavell’s students will soon complete the 18 hours of training to become either private tutors or tutors at one of the literacy centers.

New tutors are assigned one or more adult students whose English often is limited to the words “yes,” “no” or “hello,” Cavell said. Tutors are trained to teach adults how to read, write and speak English up to the sixth-grade level, she said.

During a session in which the women tutor-trainees played the parts of both students and tutors, they repeated the perfunctory Laubach phrases with the words “bird,” “fish” and “girl.” At the end of the half-hour session, Dorothy Staley, 65, nudged her partner and whispered: “By George, I think we’ve got it!”

Staley, who lives in a senior-citizen center in Sepulveda, said she decided to take the course after reading a newspaper ad. “I felt it was something I could do at my age,” Staley said. “I got a pretty good education, so I thought I could teach someone English.”

Staley’s partner, Diane Lujan, 23, of Panorama City, said Staley encouraged her to take the course. Lujan, a part-time worker for the Los Angeles County Department of Social Services’ Home Chore Program in Sepulveda, which performs domestic duties for the elderly, said she was surprised at what she had to learn.

“There were a lot of gestures and ways to approach it that I didn’t think were necessary to teach people English,” Lujan said, referring to a requirement that she sit only on a student’s right and point to words and pictures with her finger poised at a particular angle.

Despite the exactness of the teaching methods, Cavell and Stout encouraged the tutors to develop their own styles in communicating with their students. Both women said props, such as dolls, plastic fruit and magazine pictures, were a fun way to help students remember new words. Cavell warned the tutor-trainees against putting too much pressure on their students and recommended that they tailor their lessons to each individual’s pace.

‘Greatest Mimics’

Cavell said many immigrants are “the greatest mimics in the world” and will often repeat phrases without comprehending them, so tutors must guard against being fooled and going too quickly through the lessons. A simple shuffling of phrases can usually weed out the mimics, Cavell said.

Rhea Walco, 57, a teaching assistant at Arminta Street School in North Hollywood, said she took the course to help her deal with non-English speaking students in her classes and also to help them teach language skills to their parents.

“They struggle,” Walco said. “Life is more difficult for them and they tend to ghetto-ize. They eventually come to realize that English is the spoken language and they must learn it.”

Walco said she still keeps in touch with some of the young students she helped teach English to when she worked at Dixie Canyon Avenue School in Sherman Oaks three years ago.

“When they learned to read the signs at Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm they were so excited,” Walco said. “Now they can say: ‘I want a hamburger,’ or ‘I want popcorn.’ ”

As the training session came to a close, Jack Hanshue, director of the Encino ESL center, dropped by the Sepulveda center to add a serious footnote to the day’s lessons.

“We don’t know if they’re here legally and we don’t ask,” Hanshue told the trainees. “It’s hard when they come in and tell you how they’re treated in their jobs. It’s hard not to tell them they’re being abused.”

Many students never finish the course. Because they get another job, move away or become disappointed with their own slow pace and quit, it is difficult to determine how many students actually complete the course, Hanshue told the trainees.

“Make tonight count because we don’t know when we’ll ever see them again.”