The issue of customizing curricula to the needs of specific worksites is related to the confusion between training and education. As was discussed above, some programs are offering short, discrete courses in such topics as teamwork and accent reduction, and advertise that they will further customize these courses to the specific company that purchases the program. In California, state funds support a project administered through the California Community Colleges State Chancellor's Office, that funds 10 resource centers serving 100 community colleges throughout the state. These resource centers provide training for community college faculties in workplace education and distance learning technology. The centers also offer specialized courses for practitioners and would-be practitioners of workplace ESL education on such topics as how to do needs assessment and how to market oneself. Further, the resource centers will develop customized courses for companies upon request, as well. (Mission College, 1995). Customizing courses is extremely costly, however, as it requires the work and time of a trained educator. The NWLP required its grantees to customize courses and provided funds for doing so. However, programs operating without this funding reported difficulty in getting companies to agree to pay for customizing time. Some of the service providers interviewed from projects not funded under NWLP, especially private consultants, spoke of having been "burned," that is, having spent unreimbursed hours of work on site observing workers, interviewing supervisors, and collecting printed matter, followed by many more hours of developing a curriculum from this. Some service providers, such as LinguaTec, say they will no longer customize a curriculum for a project unless the business will pay. Others, such as Fairfax County, are still willing to "invest" some of these hours, hoping to get a foot in the door, and perhaps get enough repeat business from a certain company or companies to cover this extra expense. The Pima County Adult Education project's stance on charging for customization falls somewhere in the middle: PCAE tries to load the cost of customization in the charge per instructional hour rather than charge directly for all customization time. Although the NWLP required that all curricula developed for projects it funded be worksite and job specific, education providers, at final meetings held for all grantees, stressed the need for curricula to be replicable and transferable to other programs and settings (United States Department of Education, 1992). And now, as companies cover larger portions of the costs for instruction, this transferability of curricula may be a necessity. Companies may be reluctant to fund course customization because they often do not know what outcome they want from the ESL instruction. Some programs (REEP's, Pima County's) report that companies often do not really know how they would like the courses to be customized, and when asked, either say they would rather leave it up to the educational provider or say they just want the participants "to be able to speak English." How can curricula be both generic and specific? Programs can develop curricula with competencies or instructional objectives that are described in task-based terms such as "students will be able to read a chart" (Peyton & Crandall, 1995). These terms are applicable to work in general, but use language and examples from the specific workplace. For example, instruction on the generic competency "reading charts and schedules" could utilize specific charts, such as work schedules from the individual workplace, to provide the practice (U.S. Department of Education, 1992). Of course, it is the responsibility of the program to make the connection overtly from the lifeskills being learned to their application to the specific workplace and to other aspects of life (e.g., to reading charts in a doctor's office, or reading a bus schedule). Pima County Adult Education Workplace Education Project has found its generic competencies useful in that they minimize the work needed to customize the curriculum. With written materials such as signs and policy manuals from the individual sites, and with stakeholder interviews and the observations at the worksite, the Workplace Education Project is able to tailor the program to each site. Having offered workplace ESL classes since 1988, the Workplace Education Project has been able to establish a list of generic competencies for the language and literacy needs of the language minority worker. The topics for the competencies were personal information; socializing at work; tools, supplies, equipment, and materials; learning, doing, and teaching the job; working in teams; health and safety on the job; company policy; and performance evaluations. At the Center for Applied Linguistics, Grognet (1996) has also developed a list of generic competencies that include such topics as workplace communications and expectations, company organization and culture, and skills upgrading. Related to this issue is the current national focus on tying adult education funding to instruction that will prepare learners for the workplace (although not through direct grants to workplace projects). In 1992, the Secretary (of Labor)'s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) published a list of foundation skills and workplace competencies that all adults need to be successful at the workplace (See Whetzel, 1992, for a discussion of the SCANS skills). Now, with the current welfare reform limiting the participation of public aid recipients in adult basic education and ESL classes, some educators feel that adult ESL programs should address workplace competencies. At the TESOL conference in Orlando in April 1997, at least four presentations dealt specifically with teaching the SCANS skills in adult ESL programs. One of these was given by Fairfax County Adult Education. With a small grant they won from the Center for Applied Linguistics, they are creating lessons for the general ESL curriculum that incorporate the SCANS competencies. Preliminary results show that feedback they are getting from instructors and from learners is valuable from the standpoints of both curriculum development and teacher training.