A Family Literacy Curriculum for Community ESL Courses A Family Literacy Curriculum for Community ESL Courses

by Bailey, George William

This project describes the piloting of a family literacy curriculum developed for use in a community ESL course. The purpose of this curriculum was to teach family-literacy-oriented English to students in the community ESL courses that are part of Brigham Young University’s TESOL Teacher Training Course (TTTC) held at the University Parkway Center on BYU’s campus.

Students in BYU’s TESOL Graduate Certificate program are required to complete a one-semester teaching practicum in the TTTC program. This program regularly offers English courses that enroll approximately 100 ESL students from the local community who are non-native speakers of English. These ESL students have an oral proficiency interview before classes begin and are placed in an appropriate level according to their ability to communicate in English. Graduate students (hereafter referred to as teachers) design their own course and syllabus and teach classes in pairs. Classes last for approximately ten weeks. The TTTC administration allowed the author of this study, a student in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at BYU, to design a family literacy curriculum for the teachers to implement for two weeks of their classes.

This report relates the preparation of the curriculum, the needs analysis of the students, the needs analysis of the teachers implementing the curriculum, the situational analysis of the TTTC program, the design of the curriculum, and its implementation and evaluation. In addition, this report describes the instruments used to evaluate the curriculum. Finally, it draws conclusions about the worth of the curriculum, and it gives suggestions for future work in family literacy curriculum development for speakers of other languages.