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ENGL 810 – Paper # 1: The History of ESL in the Regular and Developmental Composition Course

Sep16

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The top image is Stanford University’s graduating class in 1895. The bottom is a photo from graduation in 2015. The differences in race and culture represented in these images highlights the changing face of college education in our country and the fears and missteps made in the addressing of this major educational issue. [http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~npmelton/stan95.jpg https://commencement.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/styles/6-col-banner/public/students_6col_0.jpg?itok=Eggs_Tse]

The history of ESL speakers in the composition classroom has a long and fascinating history; as a topic of great debate, it does not start with English learners in the rhetoric/writing classroom, but rather with English speakers learning foreign languages. As Bruce Horner and John Trimbur note in their article “English Only and U.S. Composition,” most students studied Greek and Latin until the late nineteenth century as an integral part of their college education, with foreign language education frequently being a graduation requirement (598). A shift away from language learning in writing began when Harvard created their first year writing course in 1890, which focused on English writing rather than foreign language study (598).  From here, the move away from studying foreign languages intensified, and studying other languages was frequently seen as unnecessary. The push towards monolingualism came even more into vogue in the early twentieth century and “English only” policies in college represented the “era’s patrician fears of race mixing, mongrelization, and a loss of vigor among the better classes” (606-08). In other words, xenophobia, or a fear of foreigners and foreign culture, became common not only in American life but in the academy as well.

Harvard, from which the first year writing course began, also pioneered the writing placement exam, which functioned as a way to judge the use of “correct” English. Though they were one of the first colleges to use such exams, by the second part of the nineteenth century, with an influx of immigrant students coming to study at research universities, many other schools began to require language exams for entry to the university, and they became a site of linguistic containment and discrimination (Kei Matsuda 641-42). Essentially, these exams existed and functioned to make it appear that “language differences could be effectively removed from mainstream composition courses” (642).

Along with these exams came remediation. Second-language speakers, particularly Asian students, from Ivy League schools, to research universities, to historically black colleges and universities, were being sent to remedial language schools until they were deemed ready to return to the college to study (Kei Matsuda 644). As Horner and Trimbur note, the effort to keep these students out of the mainstream courses was due to the fear that foreign students were a “threat to the culture, economy, and physical environment of the academy” (609).

Despite the efforts to contain these students in other schools or classes, after World War II, most schools began to offer English composition courses especially for ESL students (Kei Matsuda 647). The exigencies for the emergence of these ESL composition classes was the huge number of foreign students pouring into the U.S. to study. While the number of international students has grown and then subsequently shrunk since the twentieth century, at a given time, approximately a half million foreign students are in U.S. colleges studying (640). With this number, schools could no longer deny these students an opportunity to be educated both in developmental and mainstream courses alongside native speakers of English.

The relationship of ESL/developmental English to the rest of the university depends upon the school itself. While Kei Matsuda notes that some schools offer fully contained classes with just ESL speakers, others mix classes between native/nonnative to make them more “international” for both native speaking and nonnative speaking students (647).

While these readings have done a good job getting at where, when, and why the university started ESL or developmental English courses, it does not quite articulate how they are related to the rest of the university system. Kei Matsuda and Horner and Trimbur note how closely these courses (which are typically tied to the English department) rely upon placement tests. It is through these tests that the English department is tied heavily to the rest of the college because the placement practices are college-wide and inescapable by any incoming student.  For example, at Northern Virginia Community College, all ESL students are required to take the ACCUPLACER exam. This exam places students either into ESL courses, or, if they “test out” of ESL, into a developmental English class. Because all students run through the testing center, and because NOVA enrolls approximately 2000 international students annually, the role of ESL and composition course are heavily connected to all other parts of the college.  Students must complete developmental English sequences before moving on to other classes (in fact, at NOVA it is not recommended that students take any courses outside of ESL until they have reached the highest level, Level 5), and there is a strong recommendation on the part of the college that students must master English before they will be successful in many other courses outside of the English department.

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One interesting note about the Accuplacer is that ESL students are evaluated in a similar way to the placement test of non-ESL students. If these tests are designed to measure relatively the same thing, why the different tests? Is this test in some way segregating ESL students when they might be served by the general college placement tests?

These placement practices represent possible discriminatory practices on the part of the college or individual teachers; however, there is no simple solution for this problem. As Horner and Trimbur note, they “are not quarreling with the fact that writing instruction in college composition courses takes place in English” (593); in 2015, English in the U.S. college is a certainty and a reality that we must deal with. However, a balance must be made between disenfranchising students from deserved education and making sure they have enough English to be successful in an American composition class.

As I mentioned in my PAB posts – the question I keep asking is “what do we do?” We know that English is a necessity, but we don’t want to inhibit students from success and we certainly don’t want to discriminate against them. The reading by Dell Hymes this week shed some insight on one possible solution.  As Hymes describes a definition of communicative competence, I was struck by the definition of what makes language communicative. Hymes notes that communication is not only about functional competence – being able to use the words in a way that are understandable (57), but also an ability to both know what to say and how to say it (62). If this is the way we might judge language, in a sense, all of our students are ESL students. While those who are not “American” might make some grammatical mistakes and misuse words (a functional meaning), all of my students struggle with a cultural competence of language – saying something the right way that gets the intended message across to the audience. My point, then, is that if I read Hymes in a way that is particularly relevant to me as an English/ESL teacher, as long as these nonnative students are competent to communicate functionally, they exist on a nearly even playing field with their native classmates.

This breakthrough actually fits quite well with what I’ve discovered when I teach a developmental class followed by a “regular” section of writing. All of my students are building their communicative competence, and they often help each other along in the classroom setting. Typically, the “lower-level” students are carried up by the higher-level students and all of the students in the class do a little bit better. When I have a class of all ESL or developmental students, this progress is still there, but slightly more stagnant. While I could digress into a long analysis of the Zone of Proximal Development here, instead I believe that Hymes helped me to realize that a possible solution to these issues is to mix these students into regular classes instead of having them segregated, as all of the students will help each other with their cultural competence issues. Any extra language help that these students truly do need (to improve their functional communication) could be done in a smaller group session with me where I could focus on the students more individually. This would serve not only to desegregate these classes, but would help improve the communication of all of these students.

My next steps are to figure out how within the next several years I might use this information to consider how to make policy changes at NOVA, how to best serve nonnative students, and how to make their experience easier while not losing sight of their unique challenges.

Works Cited

Horner, Bruce and John Trimbur. “English Only and U.S. Composition.” College Composition and Communication 53.4 (2002): 594-630. Print.

Hymes, Dell. “On Communicative Competence.” Research Planning Conference on Language and Development Among Disadvantaged Children. Yeshiva University. Frankfurt Graduate School. 7 June 1966. Address.

Kei Matsuda, Paul. “The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition.” College English 68.6 (2006): 637-651. Print.

Engl 810 – PAB Entry 2

Sep10

Horner, Bruce and John Trimbur. “English Only and U.S. Composition.” College Composition and Communication 53.4 (2002): 594-630. Print.

In this article, Bruce Horner and John Trimbur follow the history of composition and the developmental shifts from seeing second languages as an integral part of rhetoric and composition in the college to the college as a segregated space in which ESL students are seen as lesser in the eyes of the academy.

Horner and Trimbur take us on a historical journey, which starts when Greek and Latin study were an integral part of the rhetoric curriculum until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. At that time, a shift began in which languages such as French, German, and Spanish became reading courses intended to study a national literature or culture, and “English alone was assigned the task of writing instruction” (595-6). By the time of the Civil War, major universities like Harvard and MIT had “dispensed with” language learning as a graduation requirement (598), and languages such as Greek and Latin were seen as a dull and mechanical translation exercise (599). In 1890, Adams Sherman Hill and the Harvard Committee on Composition and Rhetoric created the first year writing course at Harvard, which was entirely focused on the study of English writing (598). While some in the discipline still advocated for language study, such as Theodore W. Hunt (who hoped to divide language and literature curriculum between several major languages), this advice went unheeded in favor of English exceptionalism (602).

By the start of the twentieth century, there was little need seen to acquire multiple languages, as Americans were not forced by geographical location (unlike Europeans) to do so. This monolingualism represented the “era’s patrician fears of race mixing, mongrelization, and a loss of vigor among the better classes” (606-8). Horner and Trimbur note, then, that this movement towards monolingualism, or the accepting of only one language, was a response towards a fear of foreigners and other cultures, also known as xenophobia, which has continued into the 21st century (608). This has spilled into the college and the composition classroom; “Basic writers have commonly been described as immigrants or foreigners to the academy, those whose right to be there is suspect and whose presence is often seen as a threat to the culture, economy, and physical environment of the academy” (609). This xenophobia is further fueled in the academy by students who frequently move back and forth between the U.S. and their home countries and position themselves as “between worlds” (612).

Foreign students also take placement exams and these become “evidence of their language use as a whole, which is assumed to be fixed and uniform,” which means they are further positioned as outsiders in the academy, where their writing is seen as static rather than “shifting” (614). Teachers may also lump foreign students together into categories that may or may not exist, such as “all Chinese students make X mistake” or “all Arabic students write with flowery dialogue.” This is also, the authors state, troubling, “regressive, and limiting” (619). Finally, they note that composition teachers must examine their own pedagogy and assumptions about an English-only curriculum and stop identifying students by their language and language ability, even if it seems natural to do so (622).

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This really resonated for me particularly after reading Matsuda for my first PAB entry. This gave a somewhat older history of the field and showed how English-only became the model of choice based both on remediation, which is what Matsuda suggested, but also xenophobia and a fear of foreigners. I’m inclined to believe that the truth lies in both of these answers. Both pieces come to similar conclusions, however, which is that colleges must be inclusive of all types of students and be open to the variety of language and culture that they can bring into the class.

This piece reminded me of our class discussion on Fulkerson’s 1979 article discussing the four philosophies of composition. Under what Fulkerson outlines, the history of the field might spring from a formalist interpretation of good writing, in which good writing is primarily free of errors in spelling and grammar (344). The English-only movement would be primarily seen as a way to keep out of the academy those who could not meet a formalist model of composing. What is interesting, however, is that rhetorical is now the dominant model. The rhetorical model says “[G]ood writing is writing adapted to achieve the desired effect on the desired audience” (346). However, while this is the dominant model, the English-only movement struggles to allow other forms of argumentation other than the “American” style to dominate. Interestingly, because teachers here generally seem to favor a particular style of argument, it might seem that the rhetorical model might also be a source of exclusion for second-language speakers. Fulkerson might argue that teachers need to be careful how they assign and assess writing for second-language learners, as they must be aware of their biases and how they are judging the work.

This work also brings me back again to questions that I had with Matsuda about what is the best tactic for allowing students into particular composition classrooms. While these authors certainly acknowledge that English is here to stay and will always be the dominant language in the college classroom, what, again, is the solution to the “testing” dilemma that they bring up? Do we test students and pigeonhole them as being at a certain “level” or having a certain “ability,” or do we allow them to do what feels comfortable? As a teacher of developmental English, I often get a range of students (as does any teacher); some students really do not need developmental English and others I am surprised they are in credit-bearing English. I certainly see that their thoughts might be as strong as their higher-level classmates, but at what point do we wipe away the testing system completely and devise a new system to reduce discrimination? This is a conversation NOVA is having and more solutions need to be found.

Because I frequently teach developmental English (and am also a former ESL teacher), this might be a good place for dissertation work for me down the line as I am truly passionate about helping students get up to speed with their English work, as it is frequently the thing that holds them back from completing degree programs. In fact, I have been told by several students that they consider transferring to a for-profit college because they can skip the ESL and developmental sequence all together. This is a great disadvantage to students. I think we must somehow meet in the middle – unburden students yet offer a high-quality education. Below, I have shown two pieces of data from NOVA that highlight how many English classes (developmental, ESL, and otherwise) that the average NOVA student is taking. While good for business, we need to address how many students are in and are staying in our classes repeatedly and how this is affecting their chances for future success.

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[Here is one example – this is often a typical sequence for foreign students to go through – taking many, many non-credit bearing courses before reaching developmental English. Are we helping or hindering this student from success?]

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[Here is a second example – this comes from the 2013 NOVA factbook. Look how many students are taking English, developmental English, and ESL. Each column represents one year. They make the other courses at NOVA look paltry by comparison.]

Works Cited

Fulkerson, Richard. “Four Philosophies of Composition.” College Composition and Communication 30.4 (1979): 343-348. Print.

Horner, Bruce and John Trimbur. “English Only and U.S. Composition.” College Composition and Communication 53.4 (2002): 594-630. Print.

Engl 810 – PAB Entry 1

Sep9

Kei Matsuda, Paul. “The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition.” College English 68.6 (2006): 637-651. Print.

In this article, Paul Kei Matsuda defines the term “linguistic homogeneity,” which is the idea that all students in a given college writing classroom are going to linguistically be the same, and that students by default are native speakers of English. Kei Matsuda, as the title would suggest, notes that this idea is patently inaccurate (639). Instead, he argues that the traditional definition of “good writing” as that which has been “unmarked in the eyes of teachers who are the custodians of privileged varieties of English” has deeply historical roots that are entirely unrealistic in the higher education institutions of today (640).

Kei Matsuda goes into a fairly in-depth history of the nonnative speaker rise and segregation in U.S. colleges. He notes that because most college students were homogenous and truly did have similar upbringings and linguistic backgrounds before the mid-nineteenth century (641). By mid-century, the first international students began to come to the U.S. to study in newly created research universities. Many of these students, particularly Asian students, were sent to remedial language schools with young children while they got their language up to college level (644). Many schools, ranging from Harvard to historically black colleges and universities had language proficiency exams that were the site of linguistic containment and discrimination (641-2). These exams placed students into noncredit or developmental course that made it appear that student “language differences can be effectively removed from mainstream composition courses” (642).

While some schools began offering English courses for international students as early as 1911, this was a full-scale movement following World War II (645, 647). Noncredit courses and classes for nonnative speakers were also required at Tulane, Michigan, Washington, and other major universities (647). Today, despite there being over a half million foreign students in U.S. colleges (640), many of the containment and developmental practices that segregate students exist today.

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Kei Matsuda’s definition of linguistic homogeneity and the lingering historical effects are something I see each day at Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA). This term has helped me to learn about the historical precedent for why such a expectation for our students might be present. When students at colleges were only elite, white, and came from educated backgrounds, there would be a strong assumption that they would fit a non-diverse pattern of language use. However, discovering that this is not a new issue (in fact, Kei Matsuda highlights that it has existed for at least 150 years) makes me wonder what new methods have been developed to deal with international students and what methods are lingering on with little perceived benefit.

This semester I am teaching two sections of developmental English at NOVA, which are comprised of at least 75 percent nonnative speakers or generation 1.5 students. In addition to these predominantly mixed-language classes, statistics show that the general population of the school is made up of only approximately 50 percent students classified as “white,” leaving many international and minority students accounting for approximately half the student body. At NOVA, we continue to have developmental classes that are contained as well as remedial English and noncredit ESL courses which students must pass to get up to regular credit-bearing English. After reading Kei Matsuda’s account of the history of ESL English, I wonder whether or not the school is making the right decisions with the developmental sequence, as he notes that such a sequence is cause for racist containment practices.

In addition to teaching developmental English courses, I am also part of the composition assessment committee, in which we study the class outcomes of developmental versus “regular” composition courses.

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[This data shows classes that were assessed by the Composition Resources Committee of which I am a  member. The data is from Fall 2014 and was assessed in summer 2015. It shows that in some categories, developmental students (many of whom are ESL speakers) eventually make gains that students placed into regular sections of ENG 111 (first semester composition) do not.]

A chart of our recent findings above shows that students who take a developmental track of English eventually have greater success on several of the proscribed course outcomes. Does this then argue for why we should separate them? Do they actually do better in contained courses? While NOVA has fully contained courses, another local university, George Mason, has had success with courses that are partially contained: they are mixed during the three-credit portion of the class, but the developmental students get extra work in a smaller class (perhaps 7 out of 25 students) which gives further one-on-one time with a qualified teacher. Is this the solution?

While this article helps me frame the history and the biases that second language speaking students have faced in the composition classroom, it does not get me closer to an answer about a reasonable solution to the biases or the best practice. One of my research interests, then, lies in finding out how to best teach ESL students in a composition classroom; how they are different and how they can best be reached by the “mainstream” composition instructor needs more investigation. This brings me back to our classroom discussion on Louise Phelps’ “Practical Wisdom and the Geography of Knowledge in Composition.“ There, she highlights the frequent disconnect between theory and practice and the value of the lived experience of practice as helping to inform theory (864-5). I see some good connections to be made between what I see as an educator on the ground and using that lived experience to help me inform my own theories that can be made testable. More research surely needs to be done on this topic, and my own theories as well as the educational community I am situated in make me suitable to consider this issue further.

Works Cited

Kei Matsuda, Paul. “The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition.” College English 68.6 (2006): 637-651. Print.

Phelps, Louise Wetherbee. “Practical Wisdom and the Geography of Knowledge in Composition.“ College English 53.8 (1991): 863­885. Print.