Purpose:
With this in mind, I plan to research best
practices and explore innovations in supporting the literacy and linguistic development needs of multilingual
writers across the curriculum outside of
the classroom—in the writing center, through additional programming, and/or
through materials/resources.
Coming out of a Ph.D. program in Composition
and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), one of the things
that drew me to the College of Lake County was the opportunity to work with a
diverse student population—including a large number of multilingual writers. Indeed, the multilingual student
population at CLC is itself incredibly diverse—everything from just-arrived
international students studying on F-1 visas to immigrant students who came to
the U.S. at a young age and have spent most or all of their academic life in
U.S. schools. These students
differ from each other in so many ways—language, country of origin, socioeconomic
background, years in the U.S., time spent studying English, and levels of
literacy. The term multilingual (versus ESL or ELL)
attempts to represent this complexity and includes students who are bilingual
and/or biliterate.
One thing that connects these students is the
need to further develop their linguistic and literacy skills in
English---especially those needed to successfully negotiate the demands of the
college classroom, something TESOL professionals refer to as CALP (Cognitive
Academic Language Proficiency).
CALP is defined as “the language needed to function successfully in academic or professional settings” and is contrasted to BICS (Basic
Interpersonal Communication Skills) which is “the language needed to function
successfully in everyday situations”
(Ferris 10). This differentiation
between BICS and CALP has many ramifications for students at CLC—even native
speakers of English. The reason
native-speaking students take developmental coursework like English 108 and 109
is because they haven’t had sufficient exposure to and practice with academic
uses of language. As I often tell
students in workshops I give about College Writing, “Academic writing is
everyone’s second language.” While
BICS, even in a second language, can be acquired relatively quickly by exposure
and immersion, CALP takes much longer to develop in one’s first or additional
languages. Research suggests that
it takes at least seven years for students to develop CALP in their second
language and that’s “under ideal learning conditions” (Ferris 11).
The course sequences in both the ELI
Department and in Developmental English are designed to provide multilingual students
with intensive exposure to and practice with the literacy and linguistic skills
they need in college in order to help them develop CALP. As Dana Ferris notes, these skills
include “advanced grammar and vocabulary knowledge as well as strong literacy
and critical thinking skills” (11).
Students leave these programs having advanced significantly in their
ability to do academic work in English. However, most multilingual students are
still developing their CALP when they leave these programs and move into
college coursework. Just as I
believe in the principle behind WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum), that all
CLC students can benefit from continued opportunities to write after they leave
their English classes, so too do I believe that many multilingual students can
benefit from continued opportunities to develop linguistic/literacy skills in
English as they pursue their academic and career goals at the college.
Currently, the CLC Writing Center offers some
programs and materials to supplement multilingual students’ in-class efforts to
develop their academic language and literacy skills. A number of multilingual students enroll in English
104 (Individualized Topics in Reading & Writing), a one-credit course,
where the student is matched with a Specialist Tutor (a tutor with a BA degree
or higher) and they develop a curriculum together to focus on the student’s
needs. A student can use this
course to support their work in a writing or reading-intensive class and/or
focus on literacy issues not being addressed in their current coursework. The
Writing Center also offers some materials, mostly in the form of handouts,
specifically geared for multilingual writers—dealing with everything from
prepositions to verb tenses to paragraphing. Most of these resources were developed in the 1990’s when a
faculty member from Adult Education and the then Faculty Coordinator
collaborated to develop a set of materials specifically for this
population.
The goal of my sabbatical research is to
begin to explore what more the Writing Center and other college departments
could do to support the literacy and linguistic growth of multilingual students
beyond the classroom—to improve their success in individual courses and
programs as well as improve their rate of completion. In addition to the college’s commitment to student success,
there are a number of factors that make this focus even more important now: the
national college completion agenda, the fact that CLC will soon be a recognized
Hispanic-serving Institution (HCI), as well as the move away from CALP-related
curriculum in the upper levels of ESL classes offered through Adult Education. The need for multilingual
students to have ongoing opportunities to develop their skills throughout their
time at the college will only grow as a result of these shifts.
Research Overview:
I plan to research best practices and explore
innovations in supporting the literacy
and linguistic development needs of multilingual writers across the curriculum outside of the classroom—in the writing
center, through additional programming, and/or through materials/resources.
- Conduct a thorough literature review
- Identify and research model institutions/programs through document collection, staff interviews, and if possible or feasible, site visits
Ferris, Dana R. Teaching College Writing to Diverse Student
Populations. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009.
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