| February 5, 1999 |
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Calvin College Chimes
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ESL minors to be added to By Amanda Whittaker Calvin has created plans for the implementation of three minors in English as a Second Language. According to English professor William Vande Kopple, “In the past, Calvin has had nothing to offer students who wanted to major or minor in ESL. When students came up to me and asked me what they should do if they wanted to take ESL classes, the best I could do was refer them to Aquinas, or some other school.” Vande Kopple has written an essay for the proposal of three new ESL minors. In the essay he suggests where interest in ESL training first became evident. “In January of 1995 Professors Vande Kopple and Vanden Bosch decided to do an informal check on the level of student interest in ESL at Calvin by offering an interim course in ESL. The course attracted 28 students.” Finding that there was interest in adding ESL as a minor, an ad hoc committee on English as a Second Language was formed and headed by Vande Kopple. The committee put together three possible minors: an interdisciplinary minor in ESL, an elementary-education minor in ESL, and a secondary-education Minor in ESL. Freshman Lindsay DeKoter, an English-Spanish major, is interested in the prospect of Calvin offering minors in ESL. “I want to reach out to Hispanic communities. ESL would give me the skills necessary to teach Hispanics English speaking skills.” Spanish professor Jan Evans explained that ESL is taught differently from the traditional bilingual class: “ESL repudiates learning any subject in the mother tongue and works on getting the student to a functional knowledge of English.” In bilingual classrooms, students are taught courses in their native tongue while English is incorporated into the curriculum later. In ESL classrooms, all the courses are taught in English, which forces the students to learn the English language and customs much faster. Erin Coleman, a student at Goshen College, where ESL programs for the students already exist, believes that ESL “is a comfortable and less pressurized environment for the international students.” “Bilingual education is under fire right now as keeping students too long in their own language and not assimilating them into American language and culture soon enough,” Evans added. She also noted that California voters have recently decided to shut down all bilingual programs and replace them with ESL programs. The ESL Interdisciplinary Minor was approved by the Planning and Priorities Committee in the fall of 1998, and will be offered to students this coming fall. The elementary and secondary education minors were “approved by the Calvin College Faculty Senate on September 28, 1998,” wrote Vande Kopple in his essay. They “must still be approved by the Michigan Board of Education.” Leroy Stegink, chair of the Education Department, sent the proposals to the Michigan Board of Education in late fall, and expects that they will be approved in March or April. Elementary and secondary-education ESL Minors are expected to become official minors in the fall of 1999. |