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If studying French as a foreign language gets humanities credit, should studying English as a foreign language do the same?
Tuesday’s Inside Higher Ed piece on ESL, by Madeline St. Amour, lists that as one possible option for helping ESL (or ELL, as local usage may have it) students advance toward degrees.
My previous college did that. At Holyoke, for the general-transfer A.A. degree, students who took certain ESL courses could count them toward their humanities requirement. The argument was essentially that designating a language as “foreign” presumes where you’re from and what your native language is. If an English speaker gets credit for taking Spanish, then why shouldn’t a Spanish speaker get credit for taking English?
As a category, credit-bearing ESL falls between the cracks of higher ed policy. It’s sort of like a foreign language, but the students taking it often have very different needs, and some acquisition of the skill is an effective prerequisite to advanced study in other fields. It’s sort of like developmental coursework, except that it usually isn’t a repeat of something they’ve had before.
Making matters more complicated, some students speak fairly fluent colloquial English, especially if they went to high school in the U.S., but they never really learned written or standard English. That’s a different matter from a student arriving fresh off the plane from Russia.
The distinctions matter. For financial aid purposes, for instance, we’re only supposed to give awards to “degree-seeking” students; I’ve heard stories of colleges being found in violation of that when there were patterns of students taking nothing but ESL for years. Financial aid rules around developmental coursework are only relevant if ESL is developmental; again, it sorta is and sorta isn’t. Many colleges (including my own) have chosen to avoid sanctions by moving the most basic level of ESL instruction to noncredit and offering it for free, so financial aid isn’t an issue; by the time the students move to the next level, presumably, they’ve made a choice.
Long ESL sequences have some of the same issues that long developmental sequences do. Life can get in the way, for instance, and lifetime Pell allocations aren’t any longer for ESL students than they are for everyone else. If the lifetime limit is 12 semesters, and you burn five or six in ESL courses before making meaningful progress on a degree, then a bachelor’s is pretty much out of the question.
To the extent that the developmental model can teach us something, I’d guess it involves contextualizing the learning. I’ve seen models in which ESL is embedded in, say, a C.N.A. training class work really well. Having a set context can help prioritize where to start, and establishes relevance. It also sets students up to start making money so they can continue, which can be an issue for many students. Some variation on the ALP model could also work well at the higher levels of ESL, though I suspect it might be more of a struggle at lower levels.
St. Amour’s piece concludes that ESL requires its own dedicated research, which has been largely lacking. I couldn’t agree more. The CCRC has started to look at it, which is terrific; I’m hopeful that we’ll start to make real progress here. It’s a shame that it has taken this long to recognize that ESL doesn’t fit cleanly in the usual categories, but better late than never.
