Hamline MA graduate Amna Kiran has been working for years on getting a bill passed in the state legislature to help simplify Minnesota drivers' tests. The bill recently passed. She is an ESL teacher in Anoka, and she noticed that many of her students were passing their driver education classes but flunking the written test for a driver’s license.
After doing a study, she found that this was a common occurrence, even for native speakers of English, and that it appeared to be at least in part because of the complexity of the language on the test. She got backing from a Republican representative and a Democratic senator to back a bill to change the language of the driving test to plain English, It asks the state government to comply with the federal Plain Language Guidelines.
