USA Learns - Immigrant Integration (Access America course)

Access America is an innovative and free “integration ESL” course that helps immigrants and refugees improve their English language skills and gain the knowledge and skills necessary to navigate systems and acclimate to life in the United States. It is located within the USA Learns website.

Author(s) Organizational Affiliation
Sacramento County Office of Education (SCOE)’s Internet and Media Services Department
Project IDEAL Support Center at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research
US Dept. of Education - Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education
California Dept of Education Adult Education Dept.
Publication Year
2008
Resource Type
Instructional Material
Target Audience
Abstract

Access America is a self-paced or teacher-guided course that covers all three pillars of immigrant integration: linguistic, civic, and economic. It includes 23 contextualized intermediate ESL lessons, including hundreds of multimedia elements, that promote learners’ access to the knowledge, skills, resources, and services necessary for success in the United States. 

This course was developed with the desire to help new Americans build their English language skills while developing their own unique pathway to socioeconomic success in the U.S.

Benefits and Uses

Access America is a self-paced or teacher-guided course that covers all three pillars of immigrant integration: linguistic, civic, and economic. It includes 23 contextualized intermediate ESL lessons, including hundreds of multimedia elements, that promote learners’ access to the knowledge, skills, resources, and services necessary for success in the United States. 

This course was developed with the desire to help new Americans build their English language skills while developing their own unique pathway to socioeconomic success in the U.S.

Key features of Access America:

• Aligned to EL Civics objectives and IELCE/IET goals. The course covers a wide range of integration topics, including community resources and participation, financial literacy, education, child care, career, and health and well-being.

• Aligned to Employability Skills objectives. Access America also covers a variety of topics related to finding a job and succeeding at work, including conducting career research, finding training resources, searching for a job, writing a resume, interviewing, seeking promotion, and developing soft skills.

• Promotes and fosters digital literacy. Each lesson includes a digital skill focus, including topics such as internet security and privacy and ways to navigate a variety of useful websites and apps.

• Connects learners to resources and support services. Topics include getting legal help, applying for citizenship, and accessing a wide variety of community resources.

• Connects learners to their communities via In Your Community activities that take the online course into the ‘real world’ and encourage learners to apply their knowledge to their local area.

• Develops listening, reading, writing, and speaking skills. The course includes extensive vocabulary practice and listening comprehension activities, as well as reading, conversation and grammar skill practice.

• Builds learners’ understanding of the integration process.

Each unit is aligned with an immigrant integration stage as the course follows the story of the Martinez family during their first five years in the United States after immigrating from El Salvador. 

The courses offer various units (e.g., Managing Your Money, Getting a Job, Finding Child Care, Dealing with Healthcare, Communicating with the School, Building Good Credit, Job Skills, Interviews and Promotions, Expanding Horizons, and much more) that are further broken into learning lessons. Video “conversations” learners watch the characters as they interact with others and simultaneously practice the English vocabulary, grammar, and conversation skills.

Each unit offers an introduction, animations and videos that are central to the learning unit, listening, comprehension, vocabulary, dictation, speaking, and self-check exercises. 

The Lessons and units are uniformly structured so that once a learner understands the process s/he can move with ease through the different lessons. 

The website provides a Teacher’s Guide, a Curriculum and Scope Guide that lists the vocabulary, main grammar, language functions, and life skills covered in the units.

Teachers can register on the USA Learns for Teachers website (https://www.usalearns.org/teacher), create classes based on USA Learns’ content, and easily monitor students’ progress and time spent.  Tips and directions for doing so are included.  Teachers can also register themselves as a student using a unique email address (https://www.usalearns.org/) to preview the course content as a learner would see it.

There are technological requirements to be able to access the site:  The site has been optimized for use on computers, tablets, and smartphones. It requires a reasonably fast broadband Internet connection, Web browser, and the equipment needed to play audio, watch videos, and record one’s voice.

The following links are useful to teachers:

USA Learns homepage: http://www.usalearns.org/ 

Teacher homepage / registration: https://www.usalearns.org/teacher 

Resources for teachers: https://www.usalearns.org/resources-for-teachers
Instructions for teachers: https://www.usalearns.org/teacher-instructions/home

Required Training

Teacher instructions are available on the teacher site.

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