The ESPJournal, Vol. 3, pp. 91-96, 1984 0272-2380/84 $3.00+ .00 Pergamon Press Ltd. Printed in the USA. Copyright © 1984 The American University

From t h e G u e s t Co-Edi tor

A d u l t ESL: T h e O t h e r E S P

J o A n n Crandal l

The last ten years have brought a great deal of activity in adult ESL, that portion of postsecondary education outside of the four-year college or university which is designed to meet the needs of immigrants, refugees, and limited English proficient residents. Most adult ESL falls into the category of ESP (see Crandall and Grognet 1983 for a fuller exploration of this idea), since adult ESL courses are designed specifically to assist adults in coping or surviving in a new environment, in acquiring the literacy or other basic skills necessary to complete a high school equivalency program or gain entry to other education or training, or in acquiring the general skills to become employable, to participate in vocational training, or to obtain a specific job.

The level of activity in this nonacademic area of ESP has not been evident from available materials or texts, since relatively little has been published about adult ESL, perhaps because the field of ESP has traditionally addressed the English language needs of professionals such as doctors or lawyers, scientists or engineers, rather than those of workers in the semiskilled or skilled trades of electronics assembly or machine shop, or the paraprofessional areas in medicine or law.

This issue of The ESP Journal is designed to highlight the level of activity in adult ESL and to document some of the growth in this area of ESP. The articles included are concerned with the two main types of vocational ESL: (1) the general-employment-related or pre-employment courses offered to adults seeking entry into the job market or examining new areas for retraining, and (2) the more occupationally-specific VESL courses such as machine shop, auto mechanics, food service or similar service, assembly, or maintenance jobs. The ten articles in this issue are distributed evenly between these two types of VESL. The first five address general-employment VESL, focusing on needs assessment, program design, and classroom methodology as they apply to adults seeking diverse entry level jobs or training programs. The last five examine these same aspects of curriculum and instruction, but from the per- spective of particular occupations.

Together, these articles constitute an interesting introduction to the concerns and scope of vocational ESL, collectively describing a variety of approaches to needs analysis (task, worker centered, work centered, and situational); curriculum design (integrating employment content with linguistic content and skills); classroom management and methods (including suggestions for converting the classroom to a simulated worksite, shifting the teacher-student relationship

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to that of supervisor-trainee); and finally, to questions of assessment (for placement purposes and program evaluation).

The VESL programs described here are located in a variety of instructional settings: language or vocational classrooms, vocational-technical schools, work- places, and even refugee camps where pre-employment training is being provided to refugees prior to resettlement in the United States. Despite these diverse settings, however, there are a number of commonalities which emerge from these programs. The authors all present the goals of the VESL programs in terms of teaching the language required for successful participation in training programs or for job performance. In their discussions about the role of job content or the basic skills portion of the curriculum, an implicit (or sometimes, explicit) perspective is that the role of the basic skills activities or job tasks is to serve as the occasion for the language instruction and practice, and for familiarization with the attitudes and expectations of the training site or work- place. VESL instructors do not feel compelled to teach the vocation, but rather the ESL relevant to it.

A second general observation which can be made about the articles concerns the possibility of providing a "core curriculum" for VESL, one which represents common language functions and structures evidenced in all employment. Most of these authors--whether developing courses in general-employment or oc- cupation-specific VESL--assert that this is possible. This is a controversial issue, but one for which we will have to reserve judgment, since there is not enough data available to decide it. One would hope that such a core curriculum would be possible, however; it is clearly desirable, given the diversity of educational and linguistic backgrounds and occupational experiences and goals of the adults in many of these programs.

It is also interesting to note the degree to which there is commonality in the overall curriculum design or syllabus being developed in these programs. The functional syllabus is dominant, though it is often embedded in a competency- based or performance-based model. The approach in these courses is a com- municative one, often with a variety of activities designed to keep the language and cultural orientation instruction constantly focused on real world requirements.

Finally, the ultimate objective of each course or program is to increase the employability or trainability of the adult student, and in doing so also to meet the needs of the vocational instructor, supervisor, and employer.

The article by Peter Furnborough and Roger Munns, on "Communication for Employment and Training," offers an interesting starting point for the issue, since it describes the entire process of program design and implementation, beginning with a survey of unemployed South Asian textile workers in England and applying the results of that survey to the development of an integrated vocational and communication skills training program. The authors use a three- tiered approach to curriculum, addressing learning strategies and communica- tion strategies before linguistic skills. (One may note that a similar rationale underlies competency-based VESL programs in the United States and Canada.) Furnborough and Munns emphasize generic skills (those transferable to other

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settings) for both training and employment, focusing on communications for training in the early stages and shifting to communications for employment in the later. They suggest that an important component of their program is the training offered to indigenous staff (such as vocational skills teachers and employment personnel) in the linguistic and cultural differences which affect learning and training.

David Prince, in "Workplace English: Approach and Analysis," describes the various types of analyses which VESL planners can undertake in developing workplace VESL programs. These include goal analysis, job analysis, and language analysis. Of these, goal analysis is perhaps the most important since it represents the client's reasons for providing the training and serves as the basis for measuring the success of the program. Job analysis, whether oriented toward analysis of the processes and procedures of the work or toward the human behaviors of the workers, provides the basic content of the VESL program and serves as a guide for identifying the language to be taught. Prince suggests that both job-specific and more generic, transferable language should be taught.

With the next two articles, by K. Lynn Savage and John Latkiewicz, the focus moves from needs analysis and program design to considerations of classroom instructional models and classroom management techniques. Savage, in "Organizing Instruction for VESL Classes," identifies three major purposes-- survival, academic, or vocational for which adults study English and around which programs organize their instruction. Vocational instruction is further divided into general VESL and occupation-specific VESL. Savage points out that differences in the numbers of students, instructional settings, student goals, and student language proficiency result in different configurations of students and different instructional responses. Thus instruction may have to be organized to accommodate adults with similar English language proficiency but a variety of different purposes who are enrolled in the same class. In other situations, adults who share similar occupational goals may be of differing levels of language proficiency, requiring a different kind of instructional accommoda- tion from the teacher. Finally, where there are sufficient numbers of adult students to permit offering classes which are defined by both language proficiency and purpose, the instructional methods are again different. Savage provides examples of classroom activities (whole group and small group) for each in- structional situation.

In "A Work Setting Laboratory: An Idea and a Tentative Plan," Latkiewicz describes an instructional model in which teacher and student roles shift to those of supervisor and employee-trainee. His plan offers a means to integrate basic skills, VESL, and cultural orientation into one instructional program. The basic skills, such as measuring, sorting, or estimating, serve as the occasion to practice the VESL or the cultural behaviors expected in the workplace, rather than as the focus of the instruction itself. Latkiewicz identifies the basic components of this work setting laboratory, using task analysis and work flow analysis (similar to Prince's work-oriented and worker-oriented approaches),

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and then provides a detailed example of a custodial work setting laboratory and the activities which might be generated within it. Many of these involve problem-solving situations which adults are likely to encounter in the work- place, especially those arising from cultural differences. Although Latkiewicz's audience for the proposal of the work setting laboratory is a refugee camp program in Southeast Asia, the model is applicable and relevant in other settings. He does not advocate replacing the traditional classroom instruction, where activities and skills are likely to be introduced and taught singly, with the work setting laboratory, since many students (especially those who are nonliterate or newly literate) may need that segregated instruction, but he does suggest that the laboratory can provide a means of integrating the various elements addressed within the formal classroom into a relevant simulation of the worksite.

"Work-Simulated Activities Belong in the Classroom," by Julia Lakey Gage, offers a useful complement to Latkiewicz's article, dealing with the shift in behaviors required of VESL teachers when they take on the role of supervisor in a workplace simulation. She identifies many of the factors governing the supervisor-employee relationship, including supervisory style, training style, and workplace communication and conditions. Like Prince, she argues for the use of generic job skills in the simulation, citing tasks such as assembly, sorting, cleaning, and quality control which apply to a range of worksites. Gage emphasizes the safety component in both classroom and simulation activities and discusses what might be the fundamental goal of most pre-employment VESL programs: to assist adults in understanding employer-employee expectations and in becoming more employable. She agrees with Latkiewicz on the need to retain part of the instructional period for classroom activities and traditional teacher-student roles.

With the next article, by Linda L. West, on "Needs Assessment in Occupation- Specific VESL, or How to Decide What to Teach," the focus of the issue shifts from general-employment-related VESL to specific occupations. West offers a detailed examination of the needs assessment or analysis which is required to develop occupation-specific VESL curricula, whether for classroom settings, work experience settings, or workplace programs. The target situation analysis approach she uses serves to identify the language (vocabulary, situations, functions, structures, and register) required to communicate on the job, and the content areas (equipment, tools, machines and materials; safety; mea- surements and math; procedures and processes; quality control language; and job preparation) into which the language information is organized. West provides a "grid" which illustrates the ways in which content and linguistic areas are integrated and presents a sample lesson drawn from restaurant work.

The next two articles treat medical English as it is required by health para- professionals in a variety of jobs. Carol Svendsen and Katharine Krebs describe course development for VESL for central supply technicians and hospital trans- porters; Sigrid Vivian describes two courses for nursing assistants and home health care workers. In the first instance, training takes place at the hospital site; in the second, it occurs in a combination of vocational and VESL classrooms.

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Svendsen and Krebs, in "Identifying English for the Job: Examples from Health Care Occupations," use a combination of site observation and interview to identify the linguistic content for the program. Offering guidelines for gathering the best possible data and avoiding common pitfalls in the process, they discuss the problems of self-reported data; the need to supplement tape recorded data with clear notes which identify participants, situations, and the referents for "this here" or "over there"; the benefits of being on site frequently enough so that some data is relatively free of observer influence; and the importance of gaining the confidence and cooperation of supervisors and employees to get accurate interview information. They identify three kinds of language which need to be included in a medical paraprofessional English course--language for immediate job duties, language for greater flexibility and increased re- sponsibility, and social language--and provide a number of examples of each.

Vivian's "ESP for Nursing Assistants and Home Health Workers" offers examples of how vocational content and language content and skills can be integrated into one course or taught in two separate courses with close col- laboration between the vocational instructor and the language support instructor. She gives a number of suggestions for classroom activities, addressing the various needs of the VESL students for vocational instruction, for successful completion of vocational examinations, and for practicing the vocation.

In a shift to an EFL setting, Elsayed Abe Mosallem reports in "English for Police Officers in Egypt" on the results of a survey of English language use among officers of the national police force. Although the degree and kind of English language use differ among the various police jobs, Mosallem found enough general needs to justify the development of a core curriculum. In describing this core curriculum, Mosallem diverges somewhat from the position of other authors on curriculum design, arguing for the need to develop control of grammatical structures before attempting to master their uses. That is, learners might focus on the grammatical structures used in eliciting information about the cause of an injury before moving to more functional or communicative exercises such as receiving calls from people who are reporting accidents. He cautions against trying to teach a number of grammatical structures expressing the same function, because of the confusion this can cause, and argues for teaching one grammatical structure at a time.

The last article, "Developing Competency-Based Placement Tests for Machine Shop Training," by Cynthia P. Coad, reviews the development of a test package designed to place students into machine shop training and to identify their needs for remediation. The basic package consists of tests of numeracy skills, reading, and listening, with optional supplementary tests of oral proficiency and manual dexterity available. Examples of each type of item are provided. The package is designed to complement other competency-based assessment instruments, following a model which is becoming more widely used in the United States. Although the test package was developed for use with limited English proficient adults, it can be used with native English speaking adults as well.

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Following the ten articles are three book reviews which represent the kinds of texts available for adult ESL. The first, A New Start, by Linda Mrowicki and Peter Furnborough (one of the authors in this issue), is a combination of textbooks for survival ESL instruction. The presence of a literacy workbook in the set makes it possible to provide low-level survival ESL instruction to both nonliterate and literate adults in one class, or in a combination of instructional settings. The other two textbooks, English for Work by the British Columbia Ministry of Education and English for Your First Job by two other authors in this issue, David Prince and Julia Gage, are representative of the newly available texts for use in general-employment-related ESL programs. The absence of similar texts for specific occupational areas within VESL illustrates the present state of publishing in this field. Most classroom materials for specific occupations are still distributed in photocopied form through informal networks. The need for commercially available, reasonably priced text materials in VESL is great.

However, the number of new literacy ESL textbooks, survival ESL texts (especially those which are competency based), and pre-employment texts and materials attests to the activity in the field and offers promise that in the future more of these materials, as well as new materials addressing specific occupations, will become available. With the large number of refugees and immigrants entering the workforce in English speaking countries, the increasing use of English as a medium of communication on the job in multilingual situations, and the continued need for retraining and job upgrading, the future for adult vocational ESL is a bright one. The contributions being made by professionals such as those represented in this issue assure that.

REFERENCES

Crandall, JoAnn and Allene Guss Grognet. 1983. English for Special Purposes in Adult ESL. On TESOL '82: Pacific Perspectives on Language Learning and Teaching, 273-284. Mark A. Clarke and Jean Handscombe (Eds.). Wash- ington, DC: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages.