LACC Will Use Federal Grant to Help Foreign-Born Students With English
Los Angeles City College will refine its English-language programs this fall and establish an orientation center for foreign-born students with a $2.5-million federal Department of Education grant awarded to the college this month.
The grant also provides funding for the Los Feliz-area community college to purchase a mainframe computer to make records of its 15,000 students available to faculty throughout the campus. Five staff members to operate the computer will be hired using grant funds.
City College applied for the grant to meet the needs of a growing ethnic majority at the school.
“The curriculum that city college has had for the last 60 years has been geared toward the student whose first language was English,” college spokesman Fred Piegonski said. “Now we have so many students whose first language is other than English that you have to adapt the instructional material at all levels to help those students.”
The orientation center will help multilingual students register for classes and will stock pamphlets in several languages explaining what is available at LACC, Piegonski said. The center will also keep files tracking students’ progress throughout their course of study, Piegonski said. A language laboratory containing audio-visual equipment for English study will be developed on campus.
More than 33 languages are spoken by students at LACC, Piegonski said.
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