Many scholars have
written about the uncertain and shifting boundaries between English as a Second
Language (ESL) programs and composition programs at colleges. When they first
began to proliferate in the United States during the mid-twentieth Century, ESL
programs and main-stream composition programs either viewed their missions of
teaching language and teaching writing as respective, separate and apart, or at
least perceived the necessity for a divided house in differences of
methodology. Since then, perspectives on this relationship have evolved, but
they have evolved in more than one direction. Most of the contention seems to
pivot on the student’s transition from one program to another, the effects this
transition has on the student, and the way that either ESL or college writing
programs respond to those effects.
At one of end the
spectrum is a camp inhabited by many practitioners, albeit few contemporary
theorists, who view the mastering of academic writing for the English Language
Learner (ELL) as a hierarchical process beginning with internalization of
granular structures and terminating with native-like composition practices.
This camp tends to hold a rather specific idea of what constitutes native-like
usage, considers errors to be evidence of insufficient mastery, and equates
errors of language use with errors in writing practice. Within this paradigm,
it is the purpose of an ESL program to prepare ELLs to operate within
composition programs in a fashion indistinguishable from Native English Speakers
(NESs), and then, in turn, it is the mission of the composition program to
instruct and assess ELLs and NESs without differentiation. Here, the transition
from one program to the next is a gateway, one which closes once the student
has traversed it.
Not very many of the
people who hold to the view outlined above are bilingual. Or if they are
bilingual, they have never faced the challenge of using their second language
for rigorous academic or professional purposes. And their first language is
almost invariably English. My first language is English, but I learned German
in college, took classes at a University in Germany, and worked there for three
years of my life. Germans complimented me all the time on how good my German
was, which I noticed was pretty much what they said to anyone who was learning
it as a second language. No one ever said I never made mistakes. No one ever
expected me not to. No one ever corrected my grammar unless I said something
evidently different from what I meant. I wrote papers for my college classes. I
got Bs on them. My professors pointed out that the German in my papers was far
from perfect, but their feedback made it clear that the Bs were for the content
of the papers, which was fair, because the content could have been better.
Perhaps I was fortunate in that case to be attending a university situated
directly on the German-Polish border, where roughly half of the students were
not German, possibly predisposing professors to be open-minded about language.
But that hardly seems like an extreme case in a world where most people are
bilingual.
It’s a simple fact. A
majority of the world population is bilingual or multilingual, and research has
shown that bilingual individuals are more prone to tolerate and accept
differences in the ways that others use language. They look for meaning, not
for errors. So maybe it’s just because I’m one of them, but my sympathies lie
with the camp at an extreme opposite to the one described at the beginning of
this post, whereby I contend that language instruction and writing instruction
both need to change in ways that respect and leverage pluralistic attitudes
towards language and communicative approaches towards writing, changes which
will prepare not only ELLs but all students to live and write in the world
which is actually coming to pass, and prepare them to make it better in the
process. There lost of people who say it better than I could, but one
of the strongest arguments comes from Jay Jordan. The way we look at it,
the transition from ESL to college composition and beyond isn't a gateway, it’s
a shift in orientation where the student begins accumulating new competencies
for communication, and where the learning of language continues unabated.
I expect that the convictions
of many who follow this blog fall somewhere in between the two perspectives
outlined here. Whatever the case, it’s a conversation that ESL programs,
composition programs and writing centers need to have, and which they need to
have with each other, because the students who depend on us need us to be sure
what it is that we are teaching them. Please comment.
Gunnar Jaeck is a writer and teacher. He is a tutor at the PCCC
Writing Center, and has taught English and ESL in public high schools,
universities, community programs and libraries. He holds masters degrees in
TESOL and creative writing. His fiction has appeared recently in Used Gravitrons and Infinity's Kitchen.
