Free local program teaches English, provides resources for immigrants

“Do you want to repeat?” asks Norma Elliott, enunciating each word slowly with a special emphasis on the final “t.” She is addressing five students who have just completed watching a movie specially made for English learners. Elliott runs workshop sessions at the Riverside Language Program, which has offered classes at its home in Riverside Church for 30 years to provide free classes in ESOL­—English for Speakers of Other Languages—for more than 200 adults.

The program draws immigrants and refugees who speak about 30 different languages and represent more than 50 countries. Among them are homeless people and victims of human trafficking and torture. Some, because of customs, poverty, or war, have never gone to school. Others have the equivalent of doctorate degrees in their native countries. The youngest student is 17 and the oldest is 70. All have legal status and a desire to learn English as quickly as possible.

Many of the students live in Brooklyn, Queens, or Staten Island and travel up to two hours each way to the Upper West Side. “Because we are a free and intensive program, people are willing to make the effort,” said Phyllis Berman, one of the directors of the program, who herself commutes from Philadelphia every day.

The school was established in 1979 with the help of government funding. Before that time, only public schools received financial support for adult education, which was a concern among immigrant communities since these were the schools where many had originally failed.

“They hadn’t been able to learn there as kids, so they didn’t want to go back to the site of former failure,” Berman said. “They felt that communities could do a better job at educating adults than public schools.”

And while the Riverside program is maintained largely through government funding, Columbia Community Service also contributes to its budget. “Columbia doesn’t stand over us and determine where each penny is going,” Leslie Robbins, co-director of the program, said. “It’s a gift, because there aren’t exactly strings attached and it helps the very people who need it the most.” Some of this money goes toward transportation of people who cannot afford to come to the neighborhood on their own.

The University’s involvement in the program is not purely financial. Many of the conversation partners who work with language workshop participants are Columbia work-study students. According to Berman, having the chance talk to “real Americans, especially the young ones who are so loud on the subway,” encourages the students to use their English outside of the classroom. SEAS students also designed a computer lab for the facilities.

After visiting refugee resettlement agencies, the program’s directors found a need for intensive classes that would allow students to learn English quickly so they could find a job and gain an income. “They’ve come here with the clothes on their backs and two suitcases. They can’t be in a social program that lasts forever.”

With this philosophy, the school offers 6-week sessions of classes that meet five times a week. In order to accommodate the program’s popularity, students are accepted through a lottery system.

While all classes involve teaching basic reading, writing, listening, and comprehension skills, the teachers—who all have master’s degrees in ESOL—are given liberty with the material they teach. The teachers are encouraged to direct class in a way that is most useful to that particular group, which allows them to develop close relationships with their students. In one case, a student from Turkey ended up marrying his ESOL teacher. They now have two kids.

Aside from classes, students can take advantage of counseling services that offer support with medical, housing, immigration or personal issues and assist with finding a job or getting into college.

While Berman professed that the program aims to “teach English, well and quickly so people can go off to college, get jobs and keep jobs,” she added that this is only one part of the lesson. “People in class sitting next to people who they thought of as their enemies,” feared because of “different races, religions, politics, socioeconomic classes ... get to learn how much more alike they are.”