How Does it Work?
Classes are structured to facilitate and enhance direct and sensitive contact with individual clients within their own community.
Nellie, a LVL tutor for 20 years, has been working with Xiaowen in English as a Second Language for five months. They meet once a week at the library. Xiaowen has been in the U.S. from China for only eight months, and is proud of the progress she’s made. She hopes to study at the university and then get a job. “I was depressed because I couldn’t speak English. Nellie has taught me and it makes me feel good.”
For Nellie, the interaction has proven valuable too. “It’s a good feeling to be able to help someone to do something she hasn’t been able to do, especially when she is so eager to learn. Words can’t explain how grateful I am to be able to help someone.”
Another LVL tutor recalls a student she’d been tutoring for months. “He was working hard to read the first book he’d ever taken out of the library. He struggled through pages. And then one day it just sort of came together. He read a paragraph, and then a whole page, without stopping. And then there was a long silence. ‘I can read,’ he said with wonder in his voice. ‘Oh thank you, thank you.’ He was thanking me for a gift. – the gift of reading. But he gave me a much greater gift. He taught me that giving is receiving. I’ll never forget that.”
LVL’s work is done in 3 primary contexts: the workplace, the family & community.
In the Workplace
Millions of today’s employees lack basic skills in reading and writing. This situation is costly to business because it leads to low productivity, workplace accidents, poor product quality and lost management and supervisory time. LVL has a unique and essential niche – providing workplace-related instruction for those most often neglected by corporate in-house programs & community job preparation classes.
In the Family
LVL has found that one of the most common motivating factors that bring adults into literacy programs is the desire to help their children succeed. LVL has made a major, long-term commitment to the continuing development of family literacy initiatives, assisting parents in their goal of reading with their children. Families who share a love of reading are the keys to an informed & free society – a society in which democracy can flourish.
In the Community
Working in and through communities is LVL’s most traditional and long-standing method. Virtually every social problem, from poverty to racial tensions, has roots in a lack of education. Thus LVL’s work to educate adults who have somehow been bypassed by the system can be very effective in mitigating the full range of social ills. An adult who is given the gift of literacy is on the path to self-sufficiency & success.