Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
Walk in the front door of the Alternative Learning Center most any evening and you will find yourself in the beginner classroom for English as a second language classes.
The first thing you'll notice will be the concentration and enthusiasm of the students, who range from a few children to adults and include many nationalities.
On a recent evening, the beginning students were learning about weather, with their teacher pointing to pictures of various kinds of weather symbols while they repeated the words and busily wrote things down.
"Rain," instructor Tasha Leichty said as she pointed to a picture of raindrops. "To rain - a verb. It rains in March. Is it raining now?"
Heads turned to look out the front door at the setting sun in a cloudless sky.
"No," the students said.
The atmosphere is relaxed, with students helping each other and talking to Leichty, who knows all of the approximately 20 students by name and speaks to some of them in Spanish.
Warsaw's ESL class, which is growing by leaps and bounds, is quickly gaining a statewide reputation for size and for excellence: it is now considered the No. 2 ESL program in Indiana.
When ESL classes began in 1985, said Maria Oler, administrative assistant for the ALC, there were 10 to 12 students in the first class. Last year the school averaged about 40 students per class, offered 15 classes and had a total of 534 students in ESL classes.
While the majority of ESL students speak Spanish (coming from Columbia, Honduras, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, among other places), Oler said, the school also has students from Cambodia, Poland, Russia, Korea, Germany, China, the Philippines, France and the Sudan.
During the last school year, Oler said, the program had more than 10,000 hours of ESL instruction.
"It's a huge program," she said. "People don't understand the extent of our program."
Brenda Utter is the ESL program facilitator and an adult basic education instructor at the ALC. She said this year they began testing students to track their progress.
"Most of the students are going up a level in about four months, when it's supposed to take about a year," she said. "They're motivated and they work so hard. They work so hard."
Why? "I think these people know that the only way they can advance and be useful in the community is to learn English," Oler said of the adult students, who often come to classes after working an eight- to 10-hour day.
One of the things the instructors must deal with, Utter said, is that the adult students start with differing levels of literacy in their native languages.
"People who have not been to school don't know how to learn," she said. "College-educated people advance faster - they know how to learn, how to study. ... We're often dealing with a literacy problem as well as a language problem at the same time."
"Obviously those who have never had any type of education are going to learn at a slower rate than those who have had high school or college or higher education," Oler said.
The ESL program often uses peer tutors or volunteers from Kosciusko Literacy Services, as well as Grace College students, to give ESL students one-on-one help.
Utter, who previously taught high school Spanish, is fluent in that language as well. She teaches advanced ESL classes and also is responsible for beginning and intermediate classes.
And she calls her job "the ultimate teaching experience."
"There really isn't anything about the teaching part of it that I don't love," she said, adding the staff and students are "the best." "I don't have to motivate anybody and there are no disciplinary problems."
The ALC also offers GED and citizenship classes, which are popular, Utter and Oler said.
Cultural differences also must be taken into account when developing curriculum, Oler said.
"For example, the Hispanic students. Very often they don't know when their birthdays are because it's not a matter for celebration where they're from," she said.
The biggest hurdle now, both women said, is the number of students and the size of the ALC building.
"The building is bursting at the seams," Utter said. "There really is no place that is quiet for testing."
And it's that testing that's letting them see exactly what the students need and how successful the classes are.
"It's really great to see (foreign students) coming in hardly being able to communicate and advance to being able to read at the level of Americans," Oler said. "So learning is happening and it's happening at a greater rate than we ever imagined."
