I wanted to look at one additional specialized journal this week with the hopes of discovering more about what and why we are doing what we are doing inside of our ESL and composition classrooms. In the Journal of Basic Writing I found two articles from 2011 dealing with curricular reform for basic writing courses in efforts to best help ESL writers. I have continued to seek out answers to the question of how we are preparing teachers for these populations, but I am not sure that I found the answer this week, despite hoping these articles would shed some light. However, I think they are useful in looking at the motivations of institutions and what they hope to teach ESL writers, which is useful in continuing to think through some of the gaps in these two fields.
First, in Shawna Shapiro’s “Stuck in the Remedial Rut: Confronting Resistance to ESL Curriculum Reform,” she presents a case study of a university ESL program that attempts to prepare students for college credit English, but ends up remediating more than what she refers to as “mediating” or helping prepare students to “navigate the academic curriculum” (25). She argues that remediation focuses more on grammar concerns and “fixing” writing and also acts as a “solution and a scapegoat for literacy and language problems” for a particular institution, noting that by separating the program from other credit-bearing courses, the ESL program can be diminished in value and other parts of the institution can point the finger and blame that particular group for not getting students up to circular speed (25-27). While other institutions have moved away from “basic skills” such as grammar, and towards things like academic literacy and critical thinking, her own institution, Northern Green University (NGU), had not (28).
Aside from the remedial model of grammar drills, she also noted that NGU’s ESL focused heavily on testing, not only for placement but also for passing the class (30). They also felt that it was their job to be sure they taught students sufficiently enough that they would not be a “burden” on other discipline faculty (32). Because of these practices, students frequently failed the class, which they felt was not only too difficult, but did not emphasize the skills they did have, but simply penalized them for the skills they did not. They instead wanted more difficult reading and more attention to the types of skills they would need in the university, rather than simply grammar, and they felt that the ESL program was simply trying to take money from them, rather than give them functional skills (31, 34).
Because of these disagreeable outcomes, in 2009, the program developed a new curriculum that involved more reading and writing instruction, and assessments other than test alone counted towards the final grade. The program also asked for student input regularly to tweak the curriculum and make it more useful, and focused more on the types of writing assignments they felt students would need for the rest of their college experience (39). Though Shapiro notes that lingering problems do remain, the students found the program to be greatly improved and morale was boosted (40).
This article gives, I think, a good overview of the divisions between ESL and credit-bearing English courses that I have noted in many of the other readings over the last several weeks. The idea of ESL being about grammar and “fixing” writing rather than helping student encounter the types of reading and learning they will experience in the rest of their coursework is intensely problematic. While this institution did make an effort to change their curriculum, knowing how such changes have trickled down to other institutions (and in what percent) would be useful to know.
Shapiro also pointed out something very interesting in her discussion at the end of the article. She noted that ESL was marginalized at her university because it was seen as a gatekeeper function to keep linguistic differences out of the rest of the disciplines, and by looking at it in this way, that marginalization “prevented [ESL] from recognizing what information it was lacking, as well as what expertise it had to offer to the broader conversations about writing and learning that were already taking place. In essence, this case study illustrates how institutional isolation breeds ignorance and alienation” (40-41). I think this is very insightful because if ESL courses are continually looked at as places of remediation before we allow students to do other coursework, by isolating them from the rest of the college and the work of those institutions, communication issues will continue to marginalize faculty in ways that are likely to prevent them from more fully encompassing institutional norms that would be a service to students. This is something I think I am seeing at my own institution. Although ESL and composition are housed in the same division at NOVA, there is very little interaction between ESL and composition in ways that are likely alienating to ESL and proving to be a disservice to our students.
Finally, I think it is worth pointing out that this article shows, yet again, that may ESL programs highly value grammar as a basis for its curriculum. This would explain why we are hiring so many applied linguists in the field, or why TOEFL programs value this skill so much. However, if we are to break out of this “rut” towards greater inclusion in the other types of writing and thinking expected in the college, we may need to also think about how to retrain these teachers; if I have a single answer to the question I set out to answer this week, it is that we simply have not yet begun to prepare our ESL teachers to face these varying challenges.
Similar outcomes to the NGU program were found at Indiana University in Doreen E. Ewert’s “ESL Curriculum Revision: Shifting Paradigms for Success.” When Indiana hired Ewert, she also noticed that their developmental English curriculum was dominated by an emphasis on language competence over academic literacy, despite L2 “making strides” in acknowledging the importance of the latter (6). The effort was created change the emphasis of a series of eight ESL support courses, in which students tested in, based on placement tests, to somewhere between one and all of these courses with “no regard for sequencing” resulting in students taking more advanced and easier courses at the same time (8). Additionally, there were no stated objectives for any of the courses, allowing teachers to create any course they “felt fit the needs of the students.” While some of the teacher’s courses were “well-grounded in current approaches” there was so much variation that the entire program was very problematic (10).
Ewert started by drawing on current literature in regards to how to best work with L2 students as she began to envision a new sequence of courses. She first wanted the teachers to see reading and writing “as a unified whole rather than … two separate components.” Likewise, she decided to create courses that focused on fluency before accuracy, in which students focus less on language structure and more on “reading repetition, reading under time pressure, and extensive reading” as well as reading and writing to learn because evidence showed this would strengthen students more than “attending explicitly to the accuracy of specific linguistic features” (13-15). Finally, the new courses focused on thematic content because they wanted students them use and re-use language in ways that would help build up “conceptual and linguistic knowledge with which to read and write more fluently” (16).
Overall, students and faculty found the newly revised classes to be highly beneficial. Students used language more frequently in class (17), and they focused more on clarity and fluency instead of accuracy (20), resulting in many benefits including higher GPAs, as well as greater student satisfaction (23). Likewise, teachers in first year composition noted the benefits these students received and the greater skills they came into the classroom with, including skills that often exceeded students who were not required to take those courses (27).
What I particularly liked about this article is that it does not suggest, as much scholarship (or perhaps legislative initiatives) is pushing nowadays, that we completely dismantle ESL/basic/developmental writing sequences or placement tests. Instead, Ewert suggests that they simply need to be reconsidered by thinking about how to revise them for greater benefits in the academy – one in which we expect students to perform at a certain level. One big push I’ve seen is to essentially mainstream all students immediately by suggesting that basic courses are essentially a way to weed out those not academically ready for college, discouraging them from ever completing. However, that overlooks the need for basic standards to be considered college competent at a certain point. We can’t keep shifting the standards or a college degree becomes meaningless. However, Ewert and her colleagues smartly struck a balance between acknowledging and “treating” these differences while also embracing them and not asking teachers to make a basic grammar fix. It seems to me this is a good way of thinking about these ESL/composition connections – we have to help students get to a place where they can be successful in college composition, but we also have to expect the teachers to overlook some grammatical inaccuracies. This links clearly back to some of my previous reading, in particular, McKay’s argument from two weeks ago that we accept and meet students where they are while they also work to understand some of the values that we are inviting them to share. Both pieces make this need for reciprocity a key piece of the puzzle in ways that are meaningful to both groups.
So far, what I’ve discovered during these last few weeks essentially to me appears to “place the blame on ESL and make them shift their curriculum.” I’ve seen this now not only in ESL specialized journals but in those that appear to cater to a specialized cross-audience as well. I certainly don’t want that to be the case, but I am still struggling to find articles that talk about the composition side and not only what we should do to best help these students, but as my earliest posts noted, how to help them separately from helping all of our students equally. We must acknowledge the different needs of these learners, but are there specific things we should do in composition that would uniquely help these learners? How do we target these learners when they might make up only 25 percent (or more, or less) of a given class? While answering these questions when students are still in ESL classes is easier – because you’re sitting with a whole population of them (though this doesn’t account for linguistic differences, say, between Asian and romance languages) – it is so much more difficult in a classroom filled with students from even more diverse linguistic backgrounds. I think what I sought to find these past two weeks is how composition is facing these challenges, yet I continued to find articles on how ESL can best help these students, which represents a big disappointment. With that said, I’m not sure where my work will lead me next week. Perhaps I will go back to journals that are not specialized but focus entirely on composition to make a last effort to discover what those journals are saying about these learners and if there is any way to help them uniquely within a composition classroom.
Works Cited
Ewert, Doreen E. “ESL Curriculum Revision: Shifting Paradigms for Success.” Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 30, no. 1, 2011, pp. 5-33.
Shapiro, Shawna. “Stuck in the Remedial Rut: Confronting Resistance to ESL Curriculum Reform.” Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 30, no. 2, 2011, pp. 24-52.