Larry Ferlazzo has initiated creative initiatives to use computer technology to assist beginning English Language Learners.

Larry teaches a class of recent Hmong refugees at Sacramento's primary inner-city high school.  Most of our students are English Language Learners.   About two thousand Hmong refugees have come to Sacramento in the past year, and most high school age Hmong refugees in the Sacramento School District are sent to our high school (Burbank).  We have about ninety newcomer students now, who have never been in any school before. More are coming each week.

Larry has initiated a Family Literacy Project assisting Hmong newcomer families.  The Project is providing home omputers  and Internet access that the families can use to access the massive amount of free material on the web designed to help people learn to read, write, listen and speak English, particularly through a website that he created:
http://www.bayworld.net/ferlazzo/englishbeg.html.

This project is building on the successful Computer Lab after-school program that Burbank, again at Larry's initiative, hosted last spring and has expanded this fall to include all the Hmong newcomer students and many other English Language Learner students.  This program resulted in substantially increased reading assessments  (a fifty percent greater reading assessment improvement than those students who did not participate in the program)  In this before and after-school program, students are able to access thousands of audio and animated books and reading activities linked to a website Larry created and each newcomer student works one-on-one with a peer tutor who is a bilingual Hmong student.  Other English Language Learners also participate in the after-school program and are experiencing similar assessment gains. Over one hundred students participate in this Lab.

Parents participated in several in-school events where their children demonstrated what they were doing on the Internet.  In follow-up conversations and in home visits, many of the families identified both language and transportation (difficulty in getting to English classes) as their primary challenges.  There was great interest from them in the possibility of getting a home computer and Internet access, and in participating in a variety of other activities related to this project, such as:

* Families reading books or doing other language learning activities
that are on the website together at home.

* Families inviting other families into their homes to see what they
are doing and to identify other families who could use a computer to
help learn English.

* Families helping to organize and lead meetings at Burbank and in
their homes to learn more about how to use computers, to share what they
are learning, and to identify other community concerns and how they
might respond to them.

Computers for families of students in one class will be distributed in December, and we anticipate expanding it to many others early next year. Thank you for your consideration of this nomination.

Christina Bainbridge, ELD Teacher
Luther Burbank High School
Sacramento, California