‘Most students speak non-standard English’

Bilingual issues directly affect “in several ways” the Northern Marianas College’s School of Education baccalaureate degree program in Elementary Education, according to the recently released NMC 2005 Annual Report.

Most students of the School of Education, as well as in public schools in the CNMI, speak non-standard English, said the report, although the textbooks, standards, tests, and curriculum standards, plus the curriculum for NMC, the CNMI Public School System and local private schools, are based on U.S. mainland curriculum standards, where Standard American English is also the official medium of instruction.

“To further complicate the situation, the PSS has a bilingual policy that does not follow the usual procedure of providing mother tongue instruction to students as a transition to English,” said the report.

The report further stated that the policy of the PSS is to maintain the Chamorro and Carolinian languages and children whose mother tongue is other than English, Chamorro and Carolinian should attend either Chamorro or Carolinian classes.

The CNMI is increasingly absorbing large numbers of immigrants from the Philippines, Korea, Japan, China, and other Pacific islands, yet there is no English as a Second Language instruction provided by PSS. The report said this is due to the lack of ESL specialists and ESL classes in schools, even for students who are just beginning to learn the English language.

The NMC’s School of Education therefore remains responsible in providing the CNMI teachers with the necessary language skills to meet the needs of the students for a wider range of English language abilities, the report said.

NMC is now providing a course that intends to meet this challenge. The ED 306 Teaching Linguistically Diverse Students is a required method course that develops the capacity of future teachers to assess language abilities, use second language teaching techniques and design and teach lessons that integrate ESL objectives with content instruction.

NMC said that students who transfer from non-U.S. institutions have English language proficiencies that are often inadequate for college-level standards.

“There is a constant tension between the effort to meet the needs of the CNMI within the realities of the cultural context, on the one hand, and that of meeting U.S. institutional standards of performance, on the other,” said the report.

NMC’s School of Education is continuously working with the college’s Languages and Humanities Department to address the problems in this area. Some of the measures they are implementing right now include strict adherence to the English prerequisites before education courses can be taken and working with other departments to raise the English prerequisite levels for core required courses at the freshman and sophomore levels, in Math, Science, and Social Sciences from “93/94 Developmental English to EN 101,” among several other measures.