Northwest Arkansas Writing Project to Offer English Language Learner Advanced Institute

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The Northwest Arkansas Writing Project wants to help more teachers gain the expertise to teach children whose first language is not English.

The National Writing Project awarded a $4,000 mini-grant last month to the northwest Arkansas affiliate based in the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas. The money will pay for a three-day workshop this summer called the English Language Learner Advanced Institute. The term English language learner is used by the Arkansas Department of Education to describe a student whose native language is not English.

The workshop is open to 10 teachers who have previously participated in the Northwest Arkansas Writing Project's four-week invitational summer institute and earned what the project calls teacher-consultant status.

Samuel Totten, professor of curriculum and instruction, established the Northwest Arkansas Writing Project in 1997, now the longest running site in the state. Chris Goering, who became director last year, collaborated with Janie Weber, assistant professor of education at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith, on the grant proposal to conduct the institute.

For information on applying for the institute, teacher-consultants may contact Goering at cgoering@uark.edu. More information about the Northwest Arkansas Writing Project is available online.

Teachers Lynette Terrell from the Springdale School District and Kelly Buckley from the Rogers School District, teacher-consultants with the writing project, will co-direct the institute with assistance from Weber and Goering, an assistant professor of secondary English and literacy education in Fayetteville.

"The advantage of having National Writing Project sites across the country is that we design what we offer based on the needs of the community," Weber explained. She became a teacher-consultant in 2005. She was working then as a literacy coach at Barling Elementary in Fort Smith and joined the UAFS faculty two years ago.

"All of us (teacher-consultants) have had so many English language learners that we started thinking about what we could do to assist teachers trying to help these students improve their writing and literacy," Weber said. "Offering the advanced institute to teacher-consultants provides a sort of post-graduate level of experience for them. They will be able to go into their communities and share what they learned. They will be available to provide professional development to other teachers."

The demonstration lessons used in the institute will become part of targeted in-service offerings and an open summer institute next year. The institute will also provide information on the ways in which English language learners develop writing abilities differently than their counterparts.

Differences in sentence structure, phonemic awareness and the thought process that includes language translation are some of the factors, Weber said.

The educational systems in the region may be the infrastructure most affected by the increase in immigrant populations of recent years, according to the proposal, and the writing project's teacher-consultants are well-equipped to help schools improve student achievement in writing.

"By providing teachers with the skills to teach writing to students learning in a second language, students are also being given the tools to read, think and communicate with others more effectively," Goering said. "By combining the talent of existing teacher-consultants, we plan to provide a cadre of outstanding people ready to help teachers and schools work with English language learner populations."