eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Statistical and anecdotal evidence documents that even states with relatively little ethnic or cultural diversity are beginning to notice and ask questions about long-term resident immigrants in their classes. As shifts in student population become more widespread, there is an even greater need for second language specialists, composition specialists, program administrators, and developers in colleges and universities to understand and adapt to the needs of the changing student audience(s).
This book is designed as an introduction to the topic of diverse second language student audiences in U.S. post-secondary education. It is appropriate for those interested in working with students in academic settings, especially those students who are transitioning from secondary to post-secondary education. It provides a coherent synthesis and summary not only of the scope and nature of the changes but of their practical implications for program administration, course design, and classroom instruction, particularly for writing courses. For pre-service teachers and those new(er) to the field of working with L2 student writers, it offers an accessible and focused look at the “audience” issues with many practical suggestions. For teacher-educators and administrators, it offers a resource that can inform their own decision-making.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472029938 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 04/17/2013 |
| Series: | The Michigan Series On Teaching Academic English In U.S. Post-Secondary Programs |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 184 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
Read an Excerpt
Teaching College Writing to Diverse Student Populations
By Dana R. Ferris, Patricia Byrd, Joy M. Reid, Cynthia M. Schuemann
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2009 University of MichiganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-03337-9
CHAPTER 1
Defining L2 Student Audiences
The picture that emerges ... is of a tremendously diverse student population along continua of language proficiency, language affiliation, and academic literacy backgrounds.
— Harklau, Siegal, & Losey, 1999, p. 5
Higher education in the United States is changing rapidly. More students than ever before are attending at least some college — by some estimates, nearly 75 percent of American adults will do so (Wurr, 2004) — and the linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity of the student population is unprecedented (Schwartz, 2004; Shin & Bruno, 2003; U.S. Department of Education, 2003; Wurr, 2004). This volume focuses on the second language student in two- and four-year institutions and specifically at how the "second language" (L2) population has shifted over recent decades, evolving into not one but at least three audiences, or groups of students, with distinct characteristics and differing needs. The purpose of this initial chapter is to provide definitions of terms and descriptions of these L2 student audiences (see Figure 1.1) — international students, late-arriving resident students, and early-arriving resident students — and to outline practical questions arising from these distinctions that will be addressed throughout the book.
History of Second Language Higher Education: Teaching and Research
Before defining the three student audiences more precisely, we will first consider second language students in higher education from a historical perspective. To begin, some basic definitions are in order. The term second language students refers here to "any student whose primary or first language is not English." The term will be used regardless of whether or not the L2 student is also literate in his/her L1 or knows/speaks/writes in additional languages. As we will discuss, in the case of some early-arriving students, it can be difficult even to identify which language is the "first" language, but in most instances it will refer to the language primarily spoken by parents and other adult relatives in the home during the student's early years, prior to beginning school or becoming literate. It should also be noted that the terms ESL and the more recent multilingual student appear in the literature, and they will be used at times in this book as synonyms to L2 students.
In the brief history of L2 instruction in higher education, most attention has been focused on international students (Matsuda, 2006a; Matsuda & Matsuda, 2009). The number of international students in U.S. colleges and universities (including community colleges and pre-university intensive English programs) has increased rapidly since the end of World War II, from a mere 6,570 in 1940 to more than half a million in 2007 (Institute of International Education [IIE], 2007; Matsuda, 2006b; Matsuda, Cox, Jordan, & Ortmeier-Hooper, 2006). As for first-and second-generation immigrants, relatively few attended college: The rate of college attendance in the United States overall was much lower at the beginning of that era than it is now, and immigrant students especially were constrained by economic limitations and family/cultural expectations (see Matsuda, 2003a, for a historical overview).
However, student demographics began to shift in the 1960s following major changes to U.S. immigration law and to admission policies at institutions of higher education, particularly community colleges (Bosher & Rowekamp, 1998; Browning et al., 2000; Harklau, Losey, & Siegal, 1999; McKay & Wong, 2000; Roberge, 2002; Singhal, 2004). As a result, the L2 population at post-secondary institutions increasingly consisted not only of international students but also resident immigrants, such as refugees from war-torn Southeast Asian countries and others seeking economic opportunity or religious or political asylum. While some arrived in the United States as adults and sought higher education to learn English and/or for economic advancement, most arrived as children or adolescents with their parents, graduating from U.S. high schools prior to matriculating at colleges or universities.
As noted by Bosher and Rowekamp (1998), the changing student audience in post-secondary ESL classes was not immediately noticed because the first wave of Southeast Asian refugees in the early-to-mid 1970s was relatively affluent and well educated and thus relatively similar to the existing international student population. However, later immigrants had fewer economic and educational advantages, and as their children made their way into college, the differences between these students and the "traditional" ESL population became more apparent. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the proportions of bilingual long-term resident immigrants in U.S. higher education increased, and in some states they comprised the vast majority of L2 writers in ESL writing courses (Goen, Porter, Swanson, & vanDommelen, 2002; Harklau, Siegal, & Losey, 1999). More recently, in a 2006 survey of undergraduates in the University of California system, it was found that some 60 percent of the current students are either immigrants themselves or children of first-generation immigrants, and 35 percent reported that English was not their first language (Locke, 2007).
Although secondary and post-secondary ESL teachers (especially in high-immigration areas) have noticed the growing number of resident immigrant students in their classes for the past 20 years or so, serious scholarly attention to the shifting demographics and blurring boundaries really began in the late 1990s with the publication of an edited collection entitled Generation 1.5 Meets College Composition (Harklau et al., 1999). Despite the contributions of the Harklau et al. volume, a theme issue of the CATESOL Journal (Goen et al., 2002), a theme issue of the online Reading Matrix journal (November, 2004), and various other pieces published in journals and books over the past ten years, we are still in the early stages of understanding the characteristics and needs of what McKay and Wong (2000) call "the new immigrant" in college and university writing/language programs. Empirical research on immigrant student writers has been scarce and largely confined to small-scale case studies (Harklau et al., 1999), and with the exception of a study by Bosher and Rowekamp (1998) and a forthcoming study completed in New Zealand by Bitchener (2008), no direct quantitative comparisons between international and immigrant student writers have been attempted.
This brief history of L2 students in U.S. higher education over the past 50 years informally highlights the three L2 student audiences who are the focus of this book: the "traditional" ESL international (visa) student, late-arriving residents, and early-arriving residents (children of first-generation immigrants). As we will see, defining these populations is not as straightforward as it sounds, as there is some dispute among scholars as to where "early arrival" begins and ends, and terms such as Generation 1.5 are not always used consistently in the literature. Before we turn to these definitions and debates, perhaps a clearer picture of the three audiences can be painted through three stories of real L2 students currently pursuing degrees at state universities in California.
Different Student Audiences: Three Stories
John is a senior business major at a large state university in California. An international student from Hong Kong, he has been pursuing his undergraduate degree in the United States for five years. When he was interviewed, he was taking an ESL class in the campus Learning Skills Center to improve his writing so that he could pass the university's Writing Proficiency Examination (WPE), which he had already failed once the previous semester. This class was the lowest-level course in the program, a full two semesters below the first-year composition level. However, it also enrolled upper-division students such as John who needed to improve their skills to meet graduation requirements. Before coming to the United States for college, John had studied English in Hong Kong beginning in the eighth grade. He is well educated and literate and fluent in his first language, Mandarin. He feels that he has a strong grasp on English grammar rules because grammar was the main focus of his EFL classes in Hong Kong. However, he did not have much experience writing in English before entering the United States.
John does not feel confident as a writer in either his L1 or L2, and when asked what he considers his strengths in writing, he said that he did not have any. However, he had a lot to say about his weaknesses. According to John, he has a very hard time putting his thoughts to paper, and writing in English is more difficult because he tries to translate from his L1. He seems frustrated that he does not have a larger vocabulary in English. He wants to use more sophisticated language and sentence structure but is unable to.
A sample of John's writing (shown and discussed in Chapter 2) demonstrates strengths in macro- and micro-level organization and weaknesses in idea development, grammar, and word choice. He has clearly learned some things about inter- and intra-paragraph cohesion (such as the use of transitional phrases to mark relationships among ideas), but his writing still shows many problems in both content and accuracy. Based on this sample, if he does not make rapid and substantial progress, he will pass neither the course he is in nor the WPE. John wonders why at this late stage of his degree program and after so many years of English study he is still in such a low-level ESL class and why he has so many problems with his writing. It is a legitimate question.
Hector, who is 19 years old, is a late-arriving resident student from Ensenada, Mexico, and he has been in the United States for two years. He currently attends a state university in southern California and is taking a freshman composition course. (This program, like many others, does not offer separate or designated sections of the first-year course for L2 students.) Although he has been in the United States for a very short time, he began learning English in school in Ensenada when he was six years old. Hector can speak, read, and write both English and Spanish, but it is unclear what his prior experience in writing academic English has been. Over the years, he has had a good deal of exposure to English; however, his writing (shown and discussed in Chapter 2) reflects his relatively limited exposure to the English language.
Hector does not enjoy writing in English and only writes what is required for school. A sample text he provided was a summary based on several chapters of Huckleberry Finn, which his class was reading at the time. His summary shows that he has good basic comprehension of the plot and conflicts in the novel. However, it does not necessarily show competent academic summary-writing skills, and there are errors in spelling, word choice, sentence boundaries, and punctuation. Though there are strengths in his writing that show good acquisition of written English, if his writing continued at this level, he would most likely not pass freshman English and might have trouble succeeding in other classes.
Luciana is an early-arriving resident student and a freshman at a California State University campus. Born in California to Mexican migrant-worker parents, her life and education have been divided seasonally between Mexico and the United States. She is thus what Roberge (2002) described as a transnational student. She is enrolled in a basic writing course (one semester below the college composition level) in the mainstream (native-speaker) track, though a parallel course for L2 writers was available. Prior to registration, she was unaware of the multilingual course option but might not have considered it if she had known, given her status as a native-born U.S. citizen (see also Costino & Hyon, 2007).
A text sample (shown and discussed further in Chapter 2) demonstrates that Luciana's writing is more sophisticated than Hector's in both content and rhetorical structure, but her errors are more frequent and more stigmatizing, especially given her status as a non-native speaker of English in a mainstream composition class. Luciana's instructor is a graduate student teaching associate with composition training but no TESOL training. The instructor reported that eight of her 20 students (40 percent) had the same profile as Luciana. This teacher felt unequipped, both in terms of training and time available, to meet those eight students' individual needs, either in or out of class, so she sent the students to the campus Writing Center for one-on-one help. The students were told at the Writing Center that it was "against policy" to give them the sentence-level assistance that they and their teacher were looking for. The teacher, frustrated, asked: "What do we do when the 'ideology' of a program conflicts with the students' actual needs? And how am I supposed to meet the needs of these students with no training and no support?"
These three stories and their student subjects provide a snapshot of the complexity and challenges of educating "non–native English speakers" at English-medium colleges and universities today. The three L2 writers have extremely different backgrounds, and their writing (which will be examined closely in Chapter 2) has features not only different from the writing of native English speakers but from one another. It is also interesting to observe that only one of the three students (John) is enrolled in a specially designated English language or composition course even though all three are easily identifiable from their texts as L2 writers. Finally, the institutional barriers — a graduate writing examination that even a senior such as John was unable to pass, no ESL support options for Hector, an under prepared instructor and no assistance in the writing center for Luciana — are, unfortunately, far too typical and even representative of the experiences of L2 writers at U.S. colleges and universities.
Though John, Hector, and Luciana are real individuals who are at this moment of writing still pursuing their studies in state universities in California, they are also in a sense prototypes of the different "audiences" of L2 writers we are considering. John, of course, is an international, or visa student, pursuing an American degree with the stated intent of returning to his home country after completing his studies. Hector is a late-arriving resident student who moved to the United States, after graduating from high school in his home country, not only for his university studies but to live and work here after completing college. Luciana, born in the United States, is an early-arriving resident student, the child of first-generation immigrants. These are the three distinct groups or audiences of second language students at U.S. colleges and universities whom we must consider in our programming, assessment, and instruction.
As more researchers and teachers have become aware of the complexity entailed by the term second language students and have turned their attention not only to classification and description but to models of curriculum and instruction that might best (or better) meet these students' needs, some helpful generalizations and issues have emerged. These in turn raise practical questions about how best to support and help those L2 students. Such questions include:
• Should college/university students such as John, Hector, and Luciana receive writing/language instruction or assistance specially designed for L2 students? If so, what kind(s) of assistance?
• What kinds of course placement options and support services are most appropriate and beneficial for an increasingly complex L2 student audience?
• What mechanisms will most successfully identify and place students? Which will be most successful for the greatest number of students?
• Who should teach those students — trained L2 specialists or mainstream writing instructors?
• How should L2 specialists be prepared?
• How can mainstream composition teachers and tutors be better prepared to work with multilingual writers?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Teaching College Writing to Diverse Student Populations by Dana R. Ferris, Patricia Byrd, Joy M. Reid, Cynthia M. Schuemann. Copyright © 2009 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.