Editor's note:
Sharing space at 51 Brattle Street with the Harvard Extension School and Harvard Summer School are two other successful Continuing Education ventures--the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement (HILR) and the Institute for English Language Programs (IEL). The article below recounts the unusual synergy developed in recent years between some HILR members and IEL students, a volunteer partnership to the mutual benefit of members of both programs.

HILR Outreach Program

In fall 1992, the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement (HILR) Council decided to organize outreach activities that would simultaneously promote HILR's academic mission and permit members to capitalize on their presence in Cambridge on the days they were participating in classes. Wishing to reciprocate the privileges they receive from the Division of Continuing Education, members chose to volunteer their talents and long years of experience by serving as weekly conversation partners for Extension students in the Institute for English Language Programs (IEL). Thus began a uniquely welcome and popular program, through which HILR members form liaisons with IEL students from many parts of the world and across a wide spectrum of social and educational groups.

At the beginning of each academic year, IEL Program staff set goals with HILR volunteers for the conversational sessions, and students sign up for their preferred meeting times. An elaborate matching process is then orchestrated by the outreach coordinator--Carol Johnson Sledd in 1993 and 1994, Ruth Medalia in 1995 and 1996, and Susan Goldsmith from summer 1996--and before long, conference rooms at 51 Brattle Street are abuzz with cross-cultural and cross-generational communication throughout the day.

In two semesters of volunteering, Jack Lawrence met with IEL students from Russia, Greece, Korea, China, and Puerto Rico, many of whom intended to stay on as students in the US, some of whom were mature visitors to the area, and all of whom were "interesting people who helped me to realize some of my own deficiencies!" Lawrence found reading the comics with his students was a very good tool for introducing "real speech," so that while they were "having laughs all right," the conversations often forced him to review his assumptions about usage and check his spelling.

A conversational group last fall matched a Kuwaiti foreign service officer with an HILR member who was open and frank with him. "Right at the beginning I asked him to be tough with me, to stop and correct me if I pronounced something wrong," the IEL student reported, "and we both benefited--in learning about each other's cultures, in understanding American economic and foreign policy, and in discussing sensitive questions. My language has improved, not only from studying, but from speaking with him."

In Fall 1995, more than 100 of HILR's 475 active members volunteered to meet with two or three IEL students each week. And yet, as the numbers of IEL students have grown over the past three years, many more students have requested conversation partners than could be matched with HILR volunteers. Consequently, participation in the program last year was limited to those with the greatest need and the least opportunity to find native-speaker interlocutors, so that those students at the two lowest levels of proficiency were addressed. While this plan succeeded in satisfying many of the most needy students, there were limitations to the amount of actual conversation that could take place. In 1996, the program will expand again so that students at the low and high-intermediate levels will be able to participate. Together, we look forward to many more years of mutually fulfilling conversations and sharing of perspectives and experiences.

Editor's note:
Dr. Haynes discusses the immigration picture in Massachusetts and the IEL response to the needs of recent immigrant populations in the article below. The importance of the IEL Program to Continuing Education efforts cannot be stressed highly enough: Addressing the needs of recent immigrants is well within John Lowell, Jr.'s vision of providing for an educated citizenry in his native city.

IEL Serves Recent Immigrants

Massachusetts has accepted approximately 25,000 legal immigrants annually since 1989. In 1994 more than 59 percent of legal immigrants to the US fell into the preferential categories for family members--with women forming a slight majority--while over 40 percent of employment-based immigrants came because they were recruited for their special professional or technical skills. Inasmuch as Massachusetts is renowned for its family-based work ethic as well as for a commitment to professional and academic excellence, legal immigrants to the area have also tended to fall into these two major categories.

With the exception of Ireland, the major immigrant-sending countries--Mainland China, 12 percent; the former USSR, 11 percent; the Dominican Republic, 9 percent; and Vietnam, 8 percent--do not use English natively, and an important consequence for Harvard's Institute for English Language Programs (IEL) has been that naturalized family members, or those who have become somewhat established in the community, usually bring their relatives here to begin to learn English or to improve their language skills in various areas.

In addition, many of those with impeccable specialist credentials who have come to Massachusetts to further their research or professional practice quickly determine that they cannot compete satisfactorily or participate fully in the broad range of social and workplace interactions shared by their colleagues with native English language skills. This is the group that has begun to register in highly advanced or specialized language courses in writing and oral communication, or request IEL to develop such courses for their specialties.

By responding to these populations of recent immigrants as creatively as it can, IEL has seen enrollments rise each term since 1993. The most recent dramatic increase occurred this summer, when 15 percent more students enrolled in part-time evening classes and there were five sections for highly advanced students, many of whom fell into both of the dominant immigrant categories of family members and professionals. In addition to making scholarship grants to Tiananmen Square leaders arriving under the Chinese Student Protection Act, IEL has also run special courses for researchers and postdoctoral fellows at Harvard's Longwood campus. In these courses, the language syllabi are designed to develop students' abilities to present professional papers successfully in English at international conferences, as well as to converse in a variety of informal contexts.

IEL also seeks to address the needs of immigrants who still only fall into the family-member category. Recent initiatives include assisting with training undergraduates who serve as tutors and instructors in summer programs for refugee youth, and discussing with teachers in local schools some ways in which bilingual and two-way immersion educational strategies might become more successful in preparing recent immigrants to participate fully in academia and the adult workforce when they grow up.

Recent immigrants certainly provide IEL with many challenges and opportunities to develop outreach and instruction to expand the field of second language learning while contributing to the prosperity of Massachusetts and its individual residents from around the world.