Kirkwood courses for English learners build skills, opens doors for opportunities
As coordinator of the English Language Acquisition courses at Kirkwood Community College, Dr. Catherine Schaff-Stump has seen and heard plenty of insights into our modern global culture. One recent event started with an African tune playing on the sound system in her office.
“One of my Sudanese students walked into the English department office and heard the song. He looked surprised and asked me, ‘you like El Mosley?’ I said I did. I let that thought sink in. Then I asked him what he knew about him. The student replied that ‘he is huge back in my country! He is a rock star there.’”
Schaff-Stump smiles as she thinks of the payoff moment.
“I asked him if he would like to meet him, and told him he was also a student at Kirkwood.”
The student with the stage name of El Mosley is a refugee of the struggles in Sudan, as are dozens of other Kirkwood students currently on the ELA class rosters. Most have Arabic as their birth language. Many others bring French, Spanish, Korean, Mandarin and dozens of other tongues to the five levels of courses taught. A majority of these students are refugees from war-torn native lands, while others are seeking college opportunities at Kirkwood, then plan to return to their homelands. Within one to three years, most emerge more able to converse, write and engage in productive employment in their new home communities in Iowa.
Since the founding days of the college, Kirkwood has welcomed students from well over 100 nations to eastern Iowa and the opportunity to learn. For many students of all ages, that learning path by necessity begins with building English language skills.
Kirkwood’s English Language Acquisition student numbers have averaged between 300 and 350 students a year over the past decade, melding students from every corner of the globe around the common purpose of English proficiency. Overall, students from other nations studying at the college can total more than 500 per year, but a sizable number come to Kirkwood already proficient in English.
Schaff-Stump starts her overview of the college’s courses by explaining that the name is different than the traditional “ESL” structures found in both high school and college settings.
“Several years ago we recognized that a good number of our students coming to Kirkwood already had some background and proficiency not only in their native tongue but one, two, sometimes more languages, too. So we heard ‘English as a Second Language” as really a misnomer for those students. We wanted to recognize and respect the education and life experiences of these students in our title,” she observed.
A classic example of that language diversity is reflected in the background of Elena Boryuk. The Russian native came to the Iowa City area in 2007 with her husband, Irakliy Surguladze and their three children. They both had good jobs and two advanced college degrees, but tensions between Russian and Irakliy’s homeland of Georgia proved too dangerous for them to stay in either country.
“We asked the people in the American embassy if we could get asylum. They told us we should get to the U.S. somehow, then apply for asylum. So that is what we did. We came to America as tourists, then applied for asylum here,” Boryuk recalled.
The “here” was Iowa City, thanks to one of her husband’s childhood friends. Both she and her husband have completed two semesters of Kirkwood ELA classes and intend to continue studying English as they build job experiences in eastern Iowa.
“My friends back in Russia have wondered about how we chose Iowa,” Boryuk says with a smile. “’You are a woman from large city of Moscow. How can you live in cornfield?’ I tell them that in this cornfield are amazing and wonderful people! We have received such wonderful support from Iowa people,” she added.
That support included ongoing assistance for both parents and their children to obtain the more permanent resident “green card” status. Boryuk observed that “more than five years and four lawyers” later, the former residents of the former Soviet Union nations did finally obtain green card status in the spring of 2013.
Schaff-Stump uses the lives and educations of these two ELA students to point out and debunk a “persistent myth” of people coming to the Kirkwood language courses.
“There seems to be a common image that our ELA students have limited educational backgrounds before they seek out our classes. Elena and her husband are strong evidence that it is just not the case! We have students who come to America and Iowa with advanced degrees. They are often people who held leadership positions in their home countries and prominent work and social positions. I have so much admiration for the incredible risks and sacrifice they took to get to us,” she said.
The people taking those risks for a chance at a better life in the U.S. continue to come. A recent report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security showed that just over 58,000 people from all over the world came to the U.S. as refugees or asylum-seekers in 2012. The leading countries for those seeking refuge were Bhutan, Burma and Iraq.
Kirkwood ELA students in 2013 represent recent inflows of refugees and those seeking asylum from recent conflicts in Africa. College records indicate a large enrollment of students originally from Sudan, South Sudan and the Congo, all sites of armed struggles in the past 10-15 years.
Academically, Kirkwood’s ELA courses strive to give students a solid knowledge base for speaking, writing and understanding English in both everyday use and for further academic studies. The classes are sequential, from levels one through five. Courses in writing, grammar and phonetics are core to the classwork, with the latter being crucial to the students’ ability to converse and be understood in daily work and community settings. Schaff-Stump says the “sympathetic listening” in the courses are a big benefit to students.
“We spend a lot of time making sure that students can speak and write understandable English, and that student’s English can be understood. We can’t count on sympathetic listening outside of ELA, so we try to help our students move toward language independence,” she added.
By the time Kirkwood ELA students are in Level Four, they are “doing well in daily life,” as Schaff-Stump sees it. “They are understood in stores, on the job, in the basic parts of our community. When they move on to Level Five, that is where they really get prepared for higher academics. They get the more formal English skills of grammar and writing and are really ready for college at the end of our Level Five work.”
Those higher skills are a big part of Arslan Rozyyev’s near-future goals. The 19-year-old Kirkwood ELA student is a native of Turkmenistan in central Asia. He found an opportunity to study in the U.S. via the Future Leaders Exchange, or FLEX project. In 2011 Rozyyev traveled from his oil-rich homeland to the rural setting of What Cheer, Iowa, and a senior year living the farm-centered life with the Leroy Leer family.
His senior year at the Tri-County Community Schools included putting a lifetime of soccer experience into the new Iowa sport of football and engaging in math, literature and other high-level academics. Rozyyev’s host family encouraged him to start his college pursuits at the nearby Kirkwood campus.
This fall, the active Turkmeni student will enter his second year of studies at Kirkwood. While not yet official, Rosyyev is seriously looking to complete his college work in Ames, pursuing an engineering degree from Iowa State University.
In a few weeks, thousands of other new students will also enroll at begin at Kirkwood Community College. More than nine out of 10 will be from the state of Iowa. Several hundred others will have come from much farther away, in many senses of the term. For those hundreds who will need English skills ahead of more focused studies, Kirkwood’s ELA courses and instructors will be standing by for that assistance that will lead to assimilation and success.