词汇大师(Wordmaster)--International Newcomers' Academy

Broadcast on "Coast to Coast": June 5, 2003

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- it's the end of another school year in America, which explains why our guest had time to talk to us.

RS: Sandra Madriaga supervises an intensive English program in the local school system in Evansville, Indiana. The program, called the International Newcomers' Academy, started in January 2000. It's for middle and high school students. Buses take them to spend part of each school day at a central middle school or high school to learn English.

AA: Twenty-four-thousand students attend the public schools in Evansville. About two-hundred of them speak English as a second language. That's a small number, yet Sandra Madriaga says it was large enough that local educators had to do something to meet the needs of immigrant students.

MADRIAGA: "Our immigrant population here in the Midwest was changing rapidly. And locally, where we didn't have an immigrant population about 10 years ago, it started increasing, and more and more immigrants started coming. And while we do have a Hispanic population here, we also have a large Russian population, which is a little bit unusual for the state of Indiana. We have Chinese, we have some Pakistani and, like I said, quite a few Hispanics."

AA: "So now you've just wrapped up another school year. Tell us what were some of the things the students learned this year."

MADRIAGA: "Well, in the state of Indiana, and actually throughout the nation, we now have what's called English language proficiency¹ standards. And this is something that is rather new in the United States and it is based on some legislation called No Child Left Behind, where every state has to come up with some standards. The way it applies to the immigrant students is that our immigrant population has to meet those same rigorous academic standards."

RS: "What is the difference between what they can learn in the classroom with their peers and what they can learn in an intensive center?"

MADRIAGA: "In a regular education program they are competing in a sense against students that have all the language skills that they're lacking. By coming to the academy, we take each child where they are and we assess when they enter the academy what their proficiency skills are. And then we design a program that's going to help them be able to exit from the International Newcomers' Academy and go into the regular ed program within a year or two years."

RS: "Now what happens to elementary school children? I see you talk about middle school and high school."

MADRIAGA: "In elementary school we have itinerant² ESL instructors³ who travel around from building to building and serve the students in a one-on-one pullout program. We generally are able to meet with the student maybe three times a week and maybe for 40 minutes a day during those three visits. With the intensive program it is a daily three-hour program."

RS: "Let me ask you a question here. I think that a lot of our listeners would be interested in knowing, what is the key to learning English quickly? You run an intensive program, what's the key there?"

MADRIAGA: "I think something that you really need to dwell on is vocabulary, vocabulary development. If they can get some audio tapes, listen to audio tapes, get the pronunciation down. When you learn a new word, maybe keep a notebook of what that word means. In some cases I think something that was very successful for my students this year is we made flash cards. Many of them are very visual learners and that helped them with the spelling as well. So we would put the vocabulary word on one side and the definition and the part of speech on the other side.

"And then we would work with writing sentences and also trying to find those words in other parts of their life. I know at one time this year we had a whole unit on space vocabulary, and then the Columbia disaster happened -- "

AA: "The shuttle ... "

MADRIAGA: "The shuttle, so then they brought in newspapers and so forth⁴, and so that was, you know, a real good application for the things that we had studied, that in fact these are not isolated⁵ words but really have application throughout their whole life."

AA: "Now what about American idioms -- how do you introduce kids to those and to acronyms⁶, abbreviations?"

MADRIAGA: "That's really hard. I know that every week I'd put one idiom up on the board that was just kind of a fun thing that we would try to use throughout the week. We had things like 'floating on a cloud' or to be 'on cloud nine.'"

AA: "Meaning to be happy."

MADRIAGA: "To be happy, right."

RS: And one of the things that made the students happy was to learn the meaning of not just common idioms but also common educational jargon⁷:

MADRIAGA: "When their first report cards came out, and at the bottom of the report card it had 'GPA' -- which stands for grade point average -- they didn't have any idea what a GPA was and why they heard other American students talking about the GPA."

AA: Sandra Madriaga, talking about the International Newcomers' Academy in Evansville, Indiana.

RS: And that's Wordmaster for this week. Our e-mail address is [email protected]. And our programs are on the Web at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

1 proficiency   

n.精通，熟练，精练

参考例句：

• He plied his trade and gained proficiency in it.他勤习手艺，技术渐渐达到了十分娴熟的地步。
• How do you think of your proficiency in written and spoken English?你认为你的书面英语和口语熟练程度如何？

2 itinerant   

adj.巡回的；流动的

参考例句：

• He is starting itinerant performance all over the world.他正在世界各地巡回演出。
• There is a general debate nowadays about the problem of itinerant workers.目前，针对流动工人的问题展开了普遍的争论。

3 instructors   

指导者，教师( instructor的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The instructors were slacking on the job. 教员们对工作松松垮垮。
• He was invited to sit on the rostrum as a representative of extramural instructors. 他以校外辅导员身份，被邀请到主席台上。

4 forth   

adv.向前；向外，往外

参考例句：

• The wind moved the trees gently back and forth.风吹得树轻轻地来回摇晃。
• He gave forth a series of works in rapid succession.他很快连续发表了一系列的作品。

5 isolated   

adj.与世隔绝的

参考例句：

• His bad behaviour was just an isolated incident. 他的不良行为只是个别事件。
• Patients with the disease should be isolated. 这种病的患者应予以隔离。

6 acronyms   

n.首字母缩略词( acronym的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Scratch the subject of defence and acronyms, abbreviations, and buzzwords fly out. 话题触及国防，缩合字，缩写字和行话就满天飞。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Some acronyms as scientific terminology are used as a lexical item. 一些科学术语缩写用作词汇项目。 来自互联网

7 jargon   

n.术语，行话

参考例句：

• They will not hear critics with their horrible jargon.他们不愿意听到评论家们那些可怕的行话。
• It is important not to be overawed by the mathematical jargon.要紧的是不要被数学的术语所吓倒.