Tadias Magazine
By Tadias Staff

Friday, April 13, 2012

Los Angeles (TADIAS) – Enrollment is now open for the summer UCLA language classes for high school students who speak, understand and or hear Amharic at home and want to learn to read, write and expand their listening and speaking skills.

“It is not a foreign language program and it is not a second language program,” Kathryn Paul, UCLA’s High School Heritage Executive Director, said in a promotional video. “It is specifically designed for heritage language students.” Other courses include Arabic, Armenian, Persian, and Russian.

The program targets students whose households speak primary language other than English. “Heritage students grow up learning a language at home, which is their family’s language and there are lots of heritage language speakers in Los Angeles,” Ms. Paul said. “What happens is that in Kindergarten they start learning English and pretty quickly English is the dominant language. Their [home] language proficiency is stuck at basically a four-year-old’s level.” She added: “We begun to recognize that there was a group of students that were coming to UCLA that did not fit anywhere, that they weren’t beginners or they weren’t intermediates, so we started this high school language classes to give these students an opportunity to study their family’s language and culture.”

Ms Paul noted that the program also allows the students to receive high school credit. “We have negotiated with most of the school districts that the number of hours we teach are equivalent to one year of high school credit,” she said.

The classes will be held from June 26- July 26, 2012 on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 9:00am- 12:30pm along with afternoon tutorials at the UCLA campus. The cost is $150.
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Learn more at www.hslanguages.ucla.edu. For general information, call : 310.825.2510 or email: hslanguages@international.ucla.edu.