Language course bridges gap in construction trade

GREELEY — According to the 2000 U.S. Census, 31 percent of the Spanish-speaking population in Weld County speak little or no English. In Larimer County, it’s 21 percent.

That’s more than 12,000 people in the region who cannot communicate proficiently in the native language. Many of them are gainfully employed, which can create huge communication breakdowns in the workplace.

Take BMC West’s truss plant in Greeley for example. Of the 36 shop employees there, 30 don’t speak English.

Without a bilingual co-worker around to translate, the language barrier can make even the most mundane exchanges confusing at best.

“I hate to go out to the shop and have Roger tell everyone good morning for me,´ said Steve Guynes, truss plant manager.

So, Guynes decided to do something about it. He contacted Weld County’s work-force center to find out how to provide English lessons for his Spanish-speaking employees. Today, 20 workers are enrolled in a class provided by Catholic Charities.

But that wasn’t enough for Guynes. He decided he should learn some Spanish.

He again contacted Weld County’s work-force center to find out if they could help, and his timing was perfect. The center had just secured a $52,000 grant from the state’s Workforce Development Council to develop resources for employers whose employees don’t speak English.

Using a small portion of the grant, the work-force center teamed up with Aims Community College to develop a pilot program called Survival Spanish.

Today, eight BMC employees spend two hours, twice a week, learning the very basics from Aims professor Greg Maldonado. The course focuses on construction-specific terminology, skipping the hassles of punctuation and conjugation.

“Obviously, they’re not going to become fluent in 30 hours,´ said Roseann Guyette, director of training and development for the continuing education division of Aims. “That’s why we’re calling it Survival Spanish.”

The college developed an English-to-Spanish pocket dictionary for the course that covers basics like numbers, colors, tools, equipment, emergency phrases and phrases commonly used in the construction trade.

Need to know when the roof will be done? According to the pocket dictionary, just ask, “Cuando va a terminar el techo?”

Notice an employee without his hardhat on? Ask him, “Donde esta su casco?”

But the need is not only in the construction industry, Guyette said. “We’re experiencing people in all types of jobs having difficulty with simple communication,” she said. “Things like ?have a nice weekend’ or ?you need to be here at this time.'”

So the college is expanding the program to other industries. The next project in the works is a course for emergency services workers, again based on the bare-bones Survival Spanish concept.

“If a fireman is running into a burning building where the people don’t speak English,” Guyette said, “he’s not going to be worried about conjugating verbs.”

The 32-hour course costs $3,680, but with the grant from the work-force center, half of BMC’s bill is covered. Guyette said the college will tailor the class to fit the business and encourages companies to collaborate in joint class time to reduce the costs for each.

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