Students from several Samoan Studies Institute (SSI) classes at the American Samoa Community College (ASCC) will take part this semester in an innovative learning program initiated by the National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM). 

The program called ePathway enables students of Samoan language and culture at ASCC to meet online to exchange academic and social information with students taking similar courses at UHM and Farrington High School in Honolulu.

While still in its developmental stages, ePathway has already earned an enthusiastic response from participating students, according to SSI instructor and ASCC ePathway Coordinator Evile F. Feleti.

Feleti explained how selected students, mostly from his class SAM 111 (Introduction to Samoan Language) go online on their own time to visit a Pathway Café set up by the NFLRC.

In this “virtual café”, students dialogue on line with peers and facilitators in a learning community via forums or threaded discussions. The café features a social area for free chat, a discussion area for instructor-guided interaction, a grammar clinic for focus on form, and a gallery for sharing pictures of the students’ schools and communities.

Since the first SSI students at ASCC participated in ePathway in fall 2008, over the next three semesters Feleti and other SSI staff continued to work with their partners in Hawaii to refine the program.

Describing their progress so far, Feleti said, “Many students expressed their support and interest in the ePathway project by showing a lot of enthusiasm in their postings and also when meeting face to face with their off island partners via Video Teleconference.

Results from our evaluations suggest that students are very keen to learn through the medium of online connections. Our ASCC students take noticeable pride in sharing information concerning the Samoan language and culture with their fellow participants at UHM and Farrington.

They also act as role models to encourage their high school brothers and sisters at Farrington to continue their education on to college. In this sense, in addition to helping students learn Samoan, ePathway represents a path to help guide them from high school to community college to the university level.”

Feleti clarified that at this point participation in ePathway is not a course requirement for his SSI students, but rather an extra credit option similar to the Service Learning options now incorporated into many ASCC classes. Nevertheless, he expressed high optimism that ePathway represents an exciting new trend for the future of Samoan language instruction.

“I think this will eventually lead to the introduction of Samoan Online courses,” said Feleti. “We’re in the pioneering stages of a program that I believe will put more and more Samoan instruction online. Because we believe strongly in this direction, we’re currently looking for grants to support further development of the ePathway project.”

Feleti shared that besides the current partners in Hawaii, the ePathway project has attracted the interest of one Samoan cultural group in California as well as a number of schools in New Zealand.  

In order to improve the nation’s capacity for teaching and learning foreign languages, the United States Department of Education provides grants under the Language Resource Centers program for the establishment and operation of centers that serve as national resources through teacher training, research, materials development, and dissemination projects.

In 1990, UHM was granted funds to develop the National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC), one of three such centers at the time--the number has since grown to fourteen.

For more information on the NFLRC, visit their website at: http://nflrc.hawaii.edu. For more information on the American Samoa ePathway project, contact Evile F. Feleti by calling ASCC at 699-9155 and asking for ext. 326, or by emailing e.feleti@amsamoa.edu.