Andrea Johnson/MDN
Madison Leier and Kelsey Kuehn, speech language pathology graduate students from Minot State University, work with English Language Learners at the Minot Adult Learning Center earlier this month.
The Minot Adult Learning Center is offering a great opportunity for people who want to earn their high school general equivalency diploma or learn English at the same time as they are studying to become certified as a certified nursing assistant.
Jennifer Kraft, Adult Learning Center director, said the center received an Integrated Education and Training Grant that will fund the classes.
The classes are free of charge to people who meet the requirements. Students must be enrolled in either a GED program or learning English at the center.
The first session of the program will begin on Jan. 6. Students in the cohort will take either GED or EL classes on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays for a minimum of three hours each day and will be enrolled in CNA training all day on Fridays. The CNA classes will be taught by a registered nurse. Hands-on training for the classes will be taught at the lab at Minot High School-Magic City Campus, during hours when high school classes are not in session. Another session is scheduled to begin March 15. Interested students should contact the Adult Learning Center for more information about class times and how to register.
Kraft said there is currently a great need in the community for CNAs. On one day in early December, she said Trinity Health had 40 openings for CNAs.
Helping the Minot community means a lot to the staff at Adult Learning Center.
The grant will also help the students at Adult Learning Center learn skills that can help move them into jobs and potentially further education.
The Adult Learning Center has also formed other community partnerships that benefit students and the community as a whole.
For a number of years, speech language pathology graduate students at Minot State University have been working with students learning English at the Adult Learning Center.
EL instructors Nadine Nelson and Janae Ronning said they have learned so much about how to work with English language learners over the years and the English learners benefit from having professionals evaluate their speech patterns and help them speak more clearly.
Robyn Walker, an assistant professor of speech language pathology at Minot State, and her students came to work with the EL speakers about once a week during the past semester. Walker has been coming for about five years and other MSU professors had worked with the program previously. The COVID-19 pandemic put a halt to in-person learning for some time, but they were able to resume working in person with the EL students by last spring.
Nelson and Ronning said native speakers of other languages tend to have different difficulties in learning English. A speaker of a language that originated in an Asian country might have trouble with consonants at the ending of words. For example, Vietnamese words end in vowels, not consonants, they said. A Japanese speaker might have trouble forming an English ‘r’ or ‘l’ sound. Spanish speakers might have trouble with the English “t” sound.
Minot State students have helped the English learners articulate more clearly, perhaps by helping them be aware of how the speaker positions his tongue or how he opens his mouth when he is enunciating a word.
MSU students also enjoy working with the English language learners, who are so eager and grateful for the help they receive.
It is just one of many ways that the Adult Learning Center is able to help people in the community, said Kraft.
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