Serving Immigrant Communities with KQED Education’s Online Resources

One third of the residents of Silicon Valley in California are immigrants and two thirds of children under 18 have parents who are immigrants. This is the demographic profile of a major segment of KQED Public Media’s broadcast area and it is why we offer public media resources to support ESL (English as a Second Language) educators, who work in colleges with these diverse immigrant communities.

Our online resources are free and available to all educators and their students. The idea is to enrich curriculum content with multimedia resources to support learning and language acquisition. By integrating KQED video and audio clips into lesson plans, we hope to engage ESL learners by working with new vocabulary, and illustrating issues which resonate with their everyday experiences.

Digital media has transformed the way students learn. It is a language that can translate complex concepts into visual and graphical explanations that make sense to non-native speakers. It can illustrate ideas, foster creative expression and make relevant connections between language acquisition and students lives.

For these ESL resources check out http://www.kqed.org/esl. Scroll down and view the different projects which cover topics such as financial literacy, health literacy, eco-literacy, green tech, immigrant voices. Our latest project is Work Voices which features a series of authentic interviews with former ESL students who are employed in vocational areas that offer interesting career opportunities.

All of these curriculum projects have been developed with ESL instructors, widely field tested and used by them.

• Try out these resources
• Let us know how you have used them
• Join our focus groups and be involved

Find KQED’s nationally-recognized ESL resources at http://www.kqed.org/esl.

Posted by: Maxine Einhorn, Project Supervisor and Master Teacher, KQED
Contact: ESL@kqed.org
Image: reused with permission from KQED