The 1998-99 school year was the first that the English Department developed a curriculum that allowed students to certify to teach English as a second language. Th e English Department hired Sally Zengaro to teach the 12-hour English as a Second Language (ESL) program. "The Arkansas Department of Education asked Harding to set up a program that offered a certification to those students who wanted to teach English to chi ldren who did not have a large Eng li sh background," Zengaro said. "There has been a large increase of nonEnglish speaking people to come to Arkansas in the past couple of years." Zengaro said that many Hi spanics are no longer content to settle in the "border states" of Ca li fornia, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas. Instead, they were moving north into states such as Arkansas, Oklahoma and Colorado. "There has been a spillover of Hispanics into several Arkansas communities," Zengaro said. "Several Hispanic communities have moved into Arkansas, creatinga huge problem for the public school system. The state is desperately searching for teachers who are certified to teach English as a second language and Harding is helping the state reach that goal." The 12-hour curriculum includes four classes that can be taken to obtain the teacher's certification. Those classes are Cross Cultural Communication, Testing andAssessment, Second Language Methodology and Second Language Acquisition. Seven students enro ll ed in the fall Cross Cultural Communication course, the first of Tom Eddins, professorofBible, andEnglish professors Alice Jewell, Sherry Organ and Gary Elliott lead a faculty panel discussion as part of the program before the induction ofnew members into the English honor society. The topic ofdiscussion was the list of the 100 greatest English novels of the 20th century. • 166 ACADEMICS the four classes to be offered in the program. "Two of the first students were employed in theArkansas public school system," Zengaro said. "Two other students are preparing to return to Romania within the next few years and they just wanted to also have the certification in case they wanted to teach English as we ll. " Several of the students in the teaching curriculum believe there is a developing need for English as a Second Language teachers. "You can just look around campus and see the number of international students and see that there are so many students that need an ESL class to help them because you can study a foreign language for many years, but you can 't be entirely fluent until you have lived there," senior TracyTodd said."There isa huge Spanish-speaking population in Arkansas and more ESL teachers are needed. There really hasn't been a program to train teachers, but Harding is moving in the ri ght direction because we will have more Christians in public schools. This is such a big mission field; it's more ofan exciting mission field because of the non-American culture that is involved." Harding currently offers one ESL program. Engli sh 101 is generally recommended for international students who may need a little help before moving to English 100 or 11l. "I think that learning Engli sh is one of the most difficult things I've had to do," freshman Klaus Schmidt of Guadalajara, Mexico, said. "The ESL class lets students like me find out many of the wo rds that I did not know before." - Philip Murphy ~ . --- . ' ~ . , 1 Photo By Salomon Pineda
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