Sharing Words With Northern Virginia

Five years after moving to the United States, Jolinar Suliman has seen her future in greater clarity with the help of the Falls Church-based Literacy Council of Northern Virginia.

In April of 1999, Suliman left Sudan, leaving behind the world and language that she knew, to join her husband in the United States. After having spent years reading and writing in Arabic, including a year of college, Suliman faced the challenge of starting a new life with only a rudimentary knowledge of the English language.

Despite her previous education, Suliman was unable to continue her schooling without more comprehensive language skills, and faced the prospect of being unable to go to college and work towards getting her U.S. citizenship.

With a recommendation from her son’s kindergarten teacher, Suliman found out about the Literacy Council of Northern Virginia. Hoping to create new opportunities for herself, she started meeting with a literacy tutor for two hour sessions, twice a week.

With the help of the tutor, Suliman focused on learning not only to read English but also to understand U.S. government and history, in order to pass the citizenship test. She plans to take a literacy test in sixth months prior to restarting her education at Northern Virginia Community College.

The Northern Virginia Literacy Council, located on Annandale Rd. between Rt. 29 and Rt. 50, has been providing adult education opportunities in Northern Virginia for 42 years. The council started its work out of the basement of a church in 1963, with the help of dedicated volunteers who made it their mission to help eliminate adult illiteracy in the region.

Today, even as their programs have expanded, it hasn’t gotten away from its grassroots style in helping adults learn to read.

Despite the amount of people that need assistance, the council still follows their original statement; “Each one, teach one.” The statement, still the basis for the majority of their work, mandates that their teaching of literacy is done one-on-one, between tutor and a student.

Patricia Donnelly, Executive Director of the Literacy Council, talked to the News-Press about the importance of the student-tutor relationship. “For some of our students, a classroom session just didn’t work for them,” she said. “But our one-on-one tutoring is an approach that seems to be very effective,” said Donnelly.

Donnelly said that one of the main advantages of individual tutoring is handling the complex lives of adult students, that aren’t easily fit into consistent and stable classroom sessions. Instead, they need the flexibility of working with one person who is able to adapt to their changing needs.

Illiteracy in the Northern Virginia area is a problem much larger than most people imagine. It is generally assumed that nearly all adults living in the United States are at least functionally literate, able to read at a fifth grade level. For many, though, that is not the case.

According to the National Institute for Literacy, there are 129,000 Northern Virginia adults that function at the lowest literacy level, and over 20% of adults read at or below a fifth grade level.

While many of those are New Americans and speak English as a second language, there are still quite a few American born adults functionally illiterate. The Council works to provide basic literacy for adults and then will refer them to more advanced educational organizations to continue their education.

The focus of the group has had to shift slightly with the increase in the New American population which has grown rapidly in Northern Virginia over the past 20 years.

Some of these people are literate in their own language but need assistance in taking on the challenges of learning to read English, while others have never been able to read and are learning the process for the first time.

As a result of the large scale demographic changes the Council has added new programs to its original adult education tutoring sessions. The programs include classroom sessions to teach literacy in groups and individual sessions working with ESL criteria to teach English as a second language. They also have developed a family program that works with entire families to teach literacy in a group setting.

Donnelly told the News-Press how learning literacy as a family doesn’t only teach the adults how to read but it goes a long way in helping their kids become more easily accustomed to American schools.

For many, the program goes a long way in helping people turn their lives around. The correlation between literacy and financial stability has been well documented.

According to the Virginia Department of Education, 72% of all Virginians on welfare have not completed high school, and 52% of all prison inmates are functionally illiterate.

With the amount of people that need help, the Council is often stretched as they try to handle the high demand. It is the only organization in Northern Virginia teaching literacy to adults and last year helped 1,994 adults.

At the end of June, Former Redskin Dexter Manly spoke at the Council’s Annual Awards Ceremony. The former Redskin and pro-bowl defensive end, spoke about his own battle with illiteracy.

While a successful football player, leading the Redskins to two Superbowls, Manley was constantly aware of his inability to read.

His need to learn was hammered home in 1985 when he witnessed his teammate, Joe Theismann, suffer a career ending injury during a Monday Night Football Game. He saw how Theismann had something to fall back on after football, and it highlighted his own lack of opportunities.

The revelation led to Manley starting night school to learn how to read at the age of 30.

Donnelly asked Manley to speak to the group because she wanted people to realize that illiteracy is something people should not be ashamed of, and that illiteracy can be overcome.

“Hopefully, it will take away some of the stigma,” said Donnelly. “When someone in the public eye speaks about it, it can provide courage and a really strong role model.’”

But while Manley gave a public face to the organization for one night, the group has a lot of difficulty making the public aware of its mission. Much of the difficulty, due to the sensitivity of the subject for those who are illiterate.

The Council often works with people who don’t want others to know about their illiteracy. Quite often they have been able to hide their illiteracy for a long time.

Donnelly said that many people who are illiterate have been able to go a lifetime without ever letting on that they couldn’t read. “There are little techniques that people use,” she said. “You wouldn’t immediately assume they couldn’t read.”

Donnelly described how people can get by without reading. She said that they will often use other people without other people realizing it. She used an example of a person in a grocery store. Without an ability to read labels, an illiterate person will often tell another person that they can’t find something and ask for help.

By phrasing the request a certain way they change the focus from their inability to read, to their inability to find. Donnelly said this is just one example of the ways that those unable to read have adapted.

Donnelly pointed out that being illiterate has not stopped some people from being successful. She described a man who ran his own business without ever letting on that he couldn’t read. At meetings he would use a recorder to take notes and then dictate to his secretary when he needed to write something.

These strategies highlight the fact that illiteracy doesn’t indicate a deficiency in intelligence, but they also indicate the lengths that people will go to rather than admitting their lack of reading skill.

The Council is able to ultimately convince many people to take steps toward becoming literate by assuring them their privacy. In order to do this, the group sets up its lessons to be low-profile.

Tutors are matched up to students living in the nearby vicinity. The one-on-one sessions are held at convenient locations, sometimes a coffee shop or a library, the process followed through, day by day, often without anyone else knowing about it.

Angela Chasteen, Suliman’s tutor, has only recently started volunteering with the Council. A new resident of Northern Virginia, Chasteen has moved around the country because of her husband’s work in the U.S. Army. In her experience, she has discovered that volunteering has helped her settle into a community more easily.

Chasteen was looking for a way to volunteer and came across the Literary Council on the Arlington County website.

She talked about what interested her about working with literacy. “Reading has always been such an important part of my life,” she said “I thought, ‘What better way to pass on this gift?’”

As part of the training, Chasteen learned about the unique aspects of teaching literacy to adults. “You have to be aware of the individual students and what their needs are,” she said.

As she has tutored Suliman, Chasteen has combined work with literacy with her student’s desire to become a U.S. citizen. Chasteen, a former student of U.S. history and politics, has been able to pass on her cultural knowledge as well as the ability to read.

She pointed out that while she may be the teacher, her work with Suliman has taught her an equally valuable lesson. “I learned that being able to help somebody to be a citizen, to realize those dreams, to me, is what America is all about,” she said.