Sunday, April 22, 2007

Multilanguage Federal and State Resources

I have been crawling through the internet for the past several days, looking for the 96 questions in other languages. The last six pages of the M-476, the USCIS Guide to Naturalization, which was published in English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, & Hmong, had the 96 questions, but the M-476 has been removed from the USCIS website (hopefully because the USCIS is updating the M-476).

What to do? A great resource is the new USCIS Welcome to the United States: A Guide for New Immigrants (M-618), published in many languages. Of particular interest are two sections: first, "Learning about the United States" which jumpstarts an immigrant's education about US History & Government; second, "Becoming a US Citizen" which would be of paticular interest to a Citizenship student.

I then went to Firstgov.gov, which hass been renamed as USA.gov. On the top left-had side of USA.gov, the is a direct link to the Spanish version GobiernoUSA.gov and another link Other Languages that will bring you to the The Federal Citizen Information Center Links to Multilanguage Publications (Warning: their Citizenship links are out-of-date).

Back at USA.gov, I searched on the following terms: Amharic, Arabic, and Vietnamese. Each search pointed me to Social Security & Medicare Multilanguage Publications, a gold mine for EL/Civics! And the California State analog from the CA Dept of Social Services is even better! Most of the larger states have multilanguage material (of particular interest Minnesota's DHS which features several African languages), but the standout is Washington State's website, which is published in English, Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, and Cambodian.

Why collect multilanguage material? Students can gain the experience needed to fill-out the N-400 by practicing on govenment forms (authentice materials!) in English and their own native language.

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