Second language writing & the culture of American education

Exploring second language writing and the culture of American education


Here are names common to my role sheets in English 1A: Rodriquez, Nguyen, Darawish, Do, Huang, Puzar, Devera, Torres, Hernandez, and so on. Each is a student who has experienced an American high school, graduated, and has entered community college for all the right reasons—to be successful, to gain an education, to make something of themselves. And each is plagued by a level of reading comprehension and written expression that is below college level. Each has language that is a mixture of a first language that represents their heritage and the as-yet-charted “interlanguage”—what they learn as a result of immersion in the culture of American education.

Students in English 1A typically are not readers, not writers, and view English class for the most part as a hoop to jump through on the way to their real purpose—attaining a degree in business, computers, nursing, social work, real estate, some profession that popular lore and parental pressure has deemed the quick way to a middle class lifestyle. Reading and writing are not skills to master in order to do well in college work, in their view. Rather, it is a quantity of units that go on the transcript.

The fact that each has graduated from high school, has a number of relatives who are successful in their fields, and are able to succeed in their other classes without the sorts of literacy skills we English teachers would like them to have further reinforces the idea that English class is an ordeal to be endured, the less pain the better. But we English teachers think we know better. We tell our students that writing well is important in the workplace, that the skills learned in English 1A will help students succeed in their other classes, that there’s a writing skills test they must pass in their junior year in order to take classes in their majors. And most play along with those ideas, knowing in the back of their minds that writing well is an asset, one which they want to master if only somebody will take the time to actually teach them how to master it. And because those who can write well will do better than those for whom writing produces a mishmash, it’s still worthwhile to teach English composition.

But when the plurality of community college students are not native speakers of English, and are actually functioning in their lives in two or more languages, then how do they learn the higher academic and cognitive skills taught in English composition? To try to answer this question, I enrolled in the Teaching English As A Second Language Program at a university near to my home.