Abul Azad loves teaching English to Long Island City High School students who recently emigrated from his native Bangladesh. There is only one problem: The school system doesn’t supply any Bengali-language books to teach the lessons.

“For the last five years, I have begged the Board of Education for these books,” said Azad, 49, who immigrated in 1980. “The teaching tools are absent. Books are the single most important tool.”

The lack of Bengali- language textbooks was just one of the issues discussed in Flushing recently at the Symposium on the Education of Bengali Limited English Proficient Students.

The symposium, organized by the State Education Department’s Office of Bilingual Education, was founded to discuss the needs of Bangladeshi students, one of the fastest growing non-English speaking immigrant groups in New York.

In a city that is seeing the largest influx of immigrants since the turn of the century, the forum highlighted changes in language education and cultural awareness that schools need to make to educate the newest arrivals.

This year about 3,600 Bangladeshi students enrolled in the city school system, most in public schools in Astoria and Long Island City, said Shikha Dalal, a Bengali resource specialist with the Asian Languages Bilingual Educational Technical Assistance Center in Brooklyn.

“There are a thousand and one different challenges,” said Dalal, whose center is funded by the State Education Department’s Office of Bilingual Education. “They are coming in fast and there aren’t services for them. We needed an organized way to talk about this.”

At the symposium, 150 teachers, education officials and members of the Bangladeshi community came to talk about increasing the number of Bengali-speaking teachers, buying Bengali-language books and handling cultural issues such as the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. During the 30-day period, which ends Jan. 19, some Bangladeshi students will follow tradition and fast during the day.

“There is a lack of understanding of cultural issues in some of the schools,” said Florence Pu-Folkes, an organizer of the conference. “In South Asia, many of the schools were closed during Ramadan. Here some teachers don’t understand why Bengali students aren’t eating. We need to teach understanding.”

Part of teaching understanding is having more Bengali-speaking teachers, Pu-Folkes said at the conference. There are about six such teachers in schools this year, she said.

Farhed Ahmed, a 19-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant and Long Island City High School student, said the most pressing issue has been the lack of books.

In his school, teachers must photocopy Bengali-English dictionaries, workbooks and other textbooks.

“They can’t keep giving us photocopies,” said Ahmed, an Astoria resident who spoke at the forum. “We need real books.”

While teachers and advocates have been asking for books for five years, none of the Bengali-language books has met the committee’s approval in terms of quality, Pu-Folkes said.

Officials from the Board of Education said they were unsure and didn’t have records of what happened to the approval of books from Bangladesh.

But Judith Chin, the executive director of the Board of Education’s division of instruction support, said her division is happy to review any new books that schools have gathered.

“We want to work with the communities,” Chin said.

School officials invited the Bangladeshi community to resubmit books for review.

Those at the symposium say something has to be done.

“I spend several hours each week photocopying my books from Bangladesh,” Azad said.

“It hurts the students not to have books. We want them to be able to stand tall and proud. That’s what this conference was about.”



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