A problem emerged not long after the Jewish Community Center of Staten Island opened its English as a Second Language program: Its Mexican students in many cases needed to be taught the basics of Spanish before they could even start to learn English.

“If you don’t know how to conjugate a verb in Spanish, it’s almost impossible to learn a second language,” the director of education and vocational training, Rose Shargo, said. Six weeks ago, with donated materials from the Mexican government, the JCC started a new tactic: Its Spanish-speaking students now have the opportunity to learn to read in Spanish before being taught English. The increase in interest, Ms. Shargo said, has been “tremendous.” Students have been dressing up for class and arriving early, she said.

The Staten Island JCC is one of 12 programs throughout the five boroughs participating in a new initiative, for which the Mexican government donated $4 million of resources to enhance educational offerings to Spanish speakers in New York.

At New York University tomorrow, a bi-national agreement will be announced to expand the Plazas Comunitarias program to provide Spanish language, English as a Second Language, and academic content free of charge with the support of state and city educational agencies.

The kickoff event is a way for educators to learn about instructional materials now available, such as basic literacy, math, science, and other subjects. In addition, there are online materials in Spanish that parents can use with their school-age children to help them with homework.

The initiative comes at a time when the population of immigrants who have trouble communicating in English is expanding drastically in New York. According to the 2000 Census, nearly one quarter of adult New Yorkers, or about 1.5 million people, have a problem speaking English. The Department of City Planning reported a 30% increase during the 1990s in the number of New Yorkers with problems speaking English, and predicted that the rate has remained constant since 2000.

The increase reflects the rapid transformation of immigrant New York over the past decade. The executive director of the Literacy Assistance Center, Elyse Barbell Rudolph, said immigrants to New York 10 to 15 years ago were in most cases arriving with relatively high levels of education, such as upper- and middle-class Russian and Chinese immigrants. “That immigration wave has changed,” she said. “The class of people who are coming through now are largely poor, and largely uneducated.”

Lack of education is creating new challenges for educators of English as a Second Language. At Little Sisters of the Assumption, which offers ESL in East Harlem, teachers became concerned a few years ago when the mostly Mexican immigrant students kept dropping out of class.

“We were really, really worried about the new wave of immigrants,” the director of community programs, Flor de Maria Eilets, said. Her students, she said, are part of a group with the “lowest level of education ever known in the country” and come from “rural areas where they didn’t have easy access to education.”

After inquiring about education levels, she learned that many had finished only the first or second grade in their countries. These problems were compounded because many Mexican immigrants spoke Mixteca, an indigenous language, not Spanish as a first language.

Now, she said, there is a waiting list for the classes that use the Plazas curriculum. One surprise, she said, is that a technology component that allows students to use computers to help them learn English is one of the most popular portions of the class. “They never ever had access to computers,” she said, but “that’s the part they really prefer.”

In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, another hub of Mexican immigrants in New York, basic education in Spanish is “something that the students themselves have asked for,” the ESL coordinator at Lutheran Family Health Center, Jesus Canchola Sanchez, said. Now that education in Spanish is available through the Plazas program, he said he would like to add Arabic education to serve another immigrant group with literacy problems. The problem, he said, is that there generally is little “funding for teaching people through their native language.”