Northeastern Illinois University is the only university in Illinois to have been awarded Title V funding this year. NEIU will receive more than $2.8 million from 2007-2012 for the “Improving Retention through Academic Literacy” project. NEIU is one of only 30 colleges and universities in the nation to receive a Title V grant this year.

Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the Developing Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) Program (Title V of the Higher Education Act) provides funding to HSIs to build their capacity to serve Hispanic and low-income students. An HSI is defined as a non-profit institution that has at least 25 percent Hispanic full-time equivalent enrollment.

The NEIU Title V project is part of the University’s strategy for addressing critical barriers to its mission as an urban university of excellence and access. NEIU, the only public four-year Hispanic Serving Institution in the Midwest, serves a highly diverse student population:

• 80% of all incoming freshman are first-generation students
• 56% of undergraduates attend NEIU full-time
• 26 is the average age of NEIU undergraduate students

NEIU will use this funding to create dozens of new writing intensive courses, at least one in every major course of study in the University. It will also address student retention and increase graduation rates by improving key academic literacy skills, creating a Center for Academic Literacy to provide tutoring services and writing support, revising the first-year writing program, and implementing student writing evaluation resources to accurately asses performance.

“Writing skills are important for both academic success and professional development after graduation,” said NEIU Provost Lawrence Frank. “Because the NEIU writing program will be based in every major, it is designed to improve the overall graduation rate and to help graduates build successful careers after they complete their studies.”

CTC READwELL Grant

The U.S. Department of Education recently awarded the NEIU Chicago Teachers' Center (CTC) a five-year, $1.5 million grant to fund a professional development program for teachers who work with English Language Learner (ELL) students. Beginning with the current academic year, two Chicago Public Schools (CPS), Hancock and Mather, will work in partnership with CTC to equip teachers with techniques to improve instruction for ELL students.

Program director Pat Gleason, Chicago Teachers’ Center, said that while many ELL students can communicate with “social” English, a lot of them struggle with the academic language skills necessary to succeed in school. She said, “A lot of students who enter school at the secondary level really can do the math and science. They just can’t articulate the knowledge they have.”

The program, called Reading Enables Academic Development with English Language Learners (READwELL), will address this problem by helping teachers more effectively provide language and literacy instruction while using discipline-specific content. “The program is a hybrid of English as a Second Language (ESL) pedagogy and content-area literacy pedagogy. We really want to marry these two,” said Gleason.

Teachers, school personnel, teaching artists, and parents will participate in seminars, workshops, on-site graduate level courses, educational conferences, team-teaching opportunities, and arts integration projects at two Chicago high schools.

Hancock and Mather high schools were chosen because they both have large populations of ELL students yet have very significant differences. Hancock is a very small school with a small ESL/bilingual program and a student body that is nearly 100 percent Latino. About half of the ELL students were born in the United States. On the contrary, Mather is a relatively large, multi-ethnic school. It has one of the largest ESL/bilingual programs in CPS high schools and serves a very high percentage of refugee students. These vast differences should allow the most effective teaching practices for ELL students, despite different backgrounds and across differing educational environments, to emerge after periodic evaluations during the five-year period.

While this program is open to all teachers at Hancock and Mather high schools, the focus will be on ninth and 10th grade teachers because this transition period largely determines whether or not students stay in school and graduate. Gleason said that already nearly 150 teachers between the two schools have expressed interest in the program. The goal is to get over 90 percent teacher participation.