ESL Offers Words of Encouragement

Saudi Arabian economist Abdullah Alfuraih hardly spoke a word of English when he enrolled last October in UC Irvine’s program in English as a second language, and he was leaving his country during a tumultuous time.

“My company sent me for the English language,” said the 25-year-old Alfuraih, who works for an oil refinery in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. “I never understand English before.”

But in the few months that Alfuraih has spent at UCI, he has gotten more out of the ESL program than just the English he needs to enroll in an American university.

He has found new friends and a support group he deeply appreciated when war broke out in the Persian Gulf.

“When war begins I feel very sad and worried about my family,” he said. “I call them every day (but) they move to another city . . . for three or four days I didn’t know what happened. After that they call me and I feel comfortable here.”

Alfuraih said he will never forget his teachers and friends, all of whom made a special effort to be “more friendly with me” during the war.

Student activities coordinator David Lippeatt said the Saudi student’s experience is not unusual.

Lippeatt arranges activities, trips and pickup softball games for some 250 ESL students from countries across the world. He also lends a sympathetic ear when necessary.

Students credit Lippeatt, a Mission Viejo native, with much of the success of the UCI program. He serves as something of a relative to students like Alfuraih, helping them study for driver’s license tests, spending weekends at Disneyland and the beach with them, and greeting individual students in their own languages.

As he walks past students lounging outside the ESL program area, he greets several students in Japanese and Portuguese. At last count, he could exchange greetings in 20 different languages, including Russian and Cantonese.

“He knows we love him,” said Swiss student Hans Peter Stadlin, 26, a mechanical engineering student who lives with an American host family, as many ESL students do.

“This is a good experience to meet foreign people,” added Stadlin, who shares a room with a Japanese student. He studied English for four years in Switzerland, but thanks to his experience at UCI, he is starting “to speak Japanese and write Japanese. I eat with chopsticks . . . (this) I never have done in Switzerland.”

Some of the UCI extension program’s students will eventually become leaders in their countries, Lippeatt said.

“If we take people who will end up running their countries and show the human side of other people from all over the world, we feel we’ve done something,” he said.

Lippeatt has seen the breaking down of stereotypes between such typically hostile groups as Palestinians and Israelis, or Japanese and Koreans.

“There are a lot of past bad feelings and stereotypes outside of those that we are familiar with in the United States,” said the 25-year-old Stanford graduate. “ESL is a great way to break down those stereotypes and help students to trust each other. They return to their countries with a broader perspective, better able to lead their countries.

“English is the means by which you understand each other,” he said.

“People make the program special,” said Vicki Bergman-Lanier, director of the ESL program for the past eight years. “It’s staffed with personally caring and professionally solid individuals.”

The 11-year-old program began at the request of a Japanese educational exchange company and a Saudi Arabian education mission.

“It started in a motel” with 20 students, Bergman-Lanier said. Currently, some 250 students representing 35 different countries are enrolled, taking different levels of English classes depending on their ability.

“It’s a full-service program from pickup at the airport to arranging for housing and personal counseling . . . and how to get a California driver’s license,” she said. “There’s a lot of learning way beyond the classroom.”

At the heart of the program “is an acknowledgement that beyond different backgrounds and cultural conditioning is a heart and soul that is in common, a kind of humanity,” Bergman-Lanier said. “(In) a day-to-day sort of way people learn that here. It kind of gives you hope. We see great results.”