Workshop Report: 2005 Symposium on Multilingual Student Writers, by Ana Wu (Alemany Campus) and Lia Smith (Ocean Campus)

            On February 26, the UC Berkeley College Writing Program held its 2005 Symposium on Multilingual Student Writers, "Working with the Generation 1.5 Student Writers in Our College Classrooms," presented by Mark Roberge, Assistant Professor of English at San Francisco State University and co-editor of CATESOL Journal. The 2005 symposium explored how to best meet the needs of generation 1.5 students in college composition classrooms.

            The 1.5 generation population was described by Roberge as foreign-born immigrants who have received instruction both at home and here in the U.S. (30% of all new immigrants are under 18 years old) and who are L1 or English dominant. In terms of language practices, non-salient grammatical structures are missing from their linguistic repertoire (they write what they hear), and they present well-developed communicative strategies to compensate for the holes in their academic training. These immigrants stay in communities where interlocutors are ESL or community dialect speakers and, as a result, are influenced from multiple ethnic/regional dialects and have premature "fossilization." They have been labeled “non-learners who exhibit learner-like features.”

            To expand on Roberge’s term, ‘1.5’ does not refer to a time period at all but rather to individuals who have not assimilated nor do they particularly wish and/or have the means to do so. They are straddling two cultures. 1.5 refers both to language proficiency and socio-economic and cultural identification. In 1967, Martin Joos wrote “The Five Clocks,” in which he describes teenage slang as a form of a teen’s resistance to the established status quo. Teens decide for themselves whether or not there is anything worthwhile for them in the “adult world” and groups of teens mask their activities in their own secret languages. If a teen decides to assimilate, he learns “academic/standard” language. If she rejects the “adult world,” she also rejects “academic/standard” language. Whether to accept or reject is, in part, based on the teen’s socio-economic status and what he/she sees as his/her chances to achieve upward mobility. A number of our students face similar doors. Some 1.5 students arrive here at a very early age because of choices their parents have made but they do not “buy in” to American mainstream culture and may bond with an “outsider group,” the most extreme form being a gang. Milder forms of this “outsider group” bonding might be the student who, despite being here in the U.S. for any number of years, tends to stay within an L1 community for a variety of reasons, crossing into English speaking communities only for schooling. These students are very different from the enthusiastic immigrants who have come here by choice.

            According to Roberge, students who fall into the 1.5 population receive inconsistent ESL instruction. One of the reasons is they are given numerous placement tests and are quite often misdiagnosed. For the most part, they receive inadequate and low level linguistic input as they are placed in remedial, low-track classes. These remedial classes are the worst place for language learning because students are praised by their behavior rather than linguistic competencies (see figure 1).

Fig 1: Linguistic input and output in two environments 

**Initiate/Respond/Evaluate manifests itself as follows:

            Instructor: What's the theme of The Parrot in the Oven? 

            Students: The difficulty of being an immigrant; alienation 

            Instructor:  Very good. (Instructor goes on to expound on the answer.)  

These sorts of exchanges are anathema to academic excellence. Although we instructors often use IRE, we should refrain. Instead, we should engage students in college level discussions and push 1.5 students to write rather than engage in extemporaneous oral production.  
 

            Instructor: What do you suppose is the theme of "The Parrot in the Oven?" Please write your response on a piece of paper. Use complete sentences and write using a formal, academic style. (Provides 2-5 minutes).  

            Students: (encouraged to read what they have written; if their eyes wander off the paper and they begin to converse, instructor reminds them that they may only state what they have already written) 

            Instructor: That's an intriguing idea. Can you please elaborate? Please direct us to several examples in the text that you feel illustrate this theme. Did you say page 17? 

            Students: (encouraged to mark books) 

            Instructor: What other texts have you all read that have similar themes? 

            Students: (encouraged to make text-to-text connections) 

            Instructor: Hmm. I haven't read those books. Please tell us a little about them.  

            Besides carrying complex political identities and passing through complex identity processes, Roberge claims that this population is pushed to go to college regardless of any academic interest or language proficiency because of a change in the US labor market (high-paying industrial jobs have disappeared, cutting the traditional route of upward mobility), and also, because they believe that without a higher education, there is a threat of "downward assimilation" (see figure 2).

Fig 2: Traditional path of upward mobility

            We believe figure 2 is very important for ESL instructors at CCSF. To elaborate on Roberge’s model, in the past, it was the 3^rd generation that typically went into the professions. That is, an immigrant arrived, her son became a plumber, and his daughter became an M.D. In contrast, in 2005, because of recent changes in U.S. immigration laws and the economy, a thirteen-year-old from the Philippines whose parents have little or no formal education and who has no academic interests herself is expected to enter middle school in the United States and go on to UC Berkeley. This young girl is the hope of her family but there is no one to guide or mentor her, nor does she have access to a community that can model standard/academic English. This young girl attends U.S. high school and acquires high-level oral/aural skills, but her academic reading and writing skills lag far behind.

            Roberge offers 18 descriptors of generation 1.5, with specific issues, problems and questions. The models are very rich in observations and, if one reads the whole table, one is left with quite a bit to digest. To summarize the table would be futile. As a sample illustration, we’ve chosen to highlight a few points made in the "low tracked/remedial students" model because they may help us to be creative in how we respond to some of our most challenging students. What instructors see are a lack of academic self-management skills and general academic preparation (familiarity with texts, roles, tasks and context), and a sense from the students that "doing seat time" is enough to get by. When facing these students, instructors should ask themselves how they can provide cognitively demanding tasks that are scaffolded rather than "dumbed down" and how they can explain the "rules of the game" in the academic discourse community without being patronizing.  

Our Conclusions and Recommendations 

            Roberge doesn't give easy answers but offer many questions to guide us when dealing with this population: How can we help them connect academic literacy to their own lives? How can we help them explore and critically examine their multiple cultures, roles and identities? How can teachers fill in gaps of knowledge, discourses and experiences related to the new culture without treating them as deficient?  

            Drawing from the workshop, the students' oral/literacy proficiency, their cultural knowledge, and from what we observe in their language profile, in any attempt to develop new pedagogic methods, we think that instructors need to step outside of what they feel they know about ESL students and understand that the generation 1.5 students have different characteristics, identity and language needs than US-born bilinguals or foreign-born educated students, and that they have not been successful at learning in traditional settings.   Below are a few recommendations:

1.         Question our own assumptions about what an ESL student is.

            If there ever were boxes we could put our ESL students into, those boxes no longer apply across the board. When dealing with 1.5 generation students, we need to acknowledge their strengths as oral communicators and their self-identity. As Roberge said, we should help these students develop a positive relationship to L2, a positive L2 identity, and a positive attitude towards their status as bilinguals. Quite often in schools, these students are hypercorrected, or receive instruction where they are demoralized or patronized. Instead of devaluing their interlanguage, teachers can help them develop academic English as a secondary dialect proficiency and promote language learning by drawing on their backgrounds.

            These students need to understand their new roles as creators of academic writing by raising their awareness of the writer-reader relationship and the different styles in rhetoric. They also need to prioritize grammar issues (non-salient grammatical features) and lexicon sophistication, develop self-editing strategies, and become active proofreaders.  

2.         Reinforce formal, well-structured, and organized writing structures.

            Roberge states that these students have premature "fossilization" and that they carry misconceptions and assumptions of what academic writing is from practicing school-based writing tasks (usually personal and narrative writings), and/or from not receiving appropriate basic writing instruction. 

            For example, we should minimize free writing activities, such as journals. Or, in writing samples, we should praise them less on the content and give them more feedback in their organization, proofreading strategies and word choices. Students must know how to produce a post-reading reflection and not just a diary entry. They need direct instruction to recognize differences and similarities between oral and written texts and practice in producing the same.  

3. Have students write outlines or draw maps/clusters as a means to organize paragraphs/ideas, and improve their critical thinking skills.

            These students, who are fluent oral communicators, have a lack of general academic writing organization and structure. These activities will help students become effective communicators in the written form. Brainstorming should be de-emphasized and vocabulary building and outlining focused on.

4. Expand students' lexicon usage

            Roberge says that 1.5 students have shallow lexicon input. Students should be encouraged to read intensively and in multiple contexts so that they can be exposed to words in their different forms. Teachers could also request that students do post-reading essays, recycling a minimum number of words and using them in different forms.  

5.                  Give explicit instructions regarding “the rules of academia.”

            In the workshop, we looked at samples of written entrance tests. One began with a telling “Yes.” Students who directly answer prompts generally use paper to converse. (This is a characteristic of worksheet assignments for which the fragment <Because the U.S. entered the war.> is accepted as a correct answer.) To paraphrase Roberge, “Notice how the student has a superficial understanding of the essay form. She believes we actually care what she thinks. If it were spoken language, this writing sample would successfully fulfill the student’s social obligation to engage in casual conversation at a somewhat sophisticated level. However, in terms of a high-stakes writing task, the student is tragically uninformed. She believes she has answered the question with intelligent thought, detail and persuasion. What we see is a student who produces faulty, truncated reasoning and lacks training in basic academic writing conventions, written argument, syntactical form and morphology.”

            We need to invite our students into our academic world and find ways to make this invitation welcoming and inclusive. Explicit instruction of things we take for granted (e.g., western ‘logic,’ the college/university system, etc.) is one way of achieving this.

6.         Our Suggested Readings:

• Martin Joos. The Five Clocks (1967)

• Staffroom Interchange – “The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English Composition,” by Fan Shen, Marquette University, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 40, No. 4, December 1989

• Gee, James (1990). Introduction, Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses. New York: The Falmer Press, xv-xxi.

• Mother Tongue, essay by Amy Tan

·  Yo! (Youth Outlook is a San Francisco monthly that can help you keep abreast of the new multicultural generation.)

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