Linguistically Diverse Immigrant and Resident Writers

Transitions from High School to College

Christina Ortmeier-Hooper, Todd Ruecker, Christina Ortmeier-Hooper, Todd Ruecker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317298021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: English Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Spotlighting the challenges and realities faced by linguistically diverse immigrant and resident students in U.S. secondary schools and in their transitions from high school to community colleges and universities, this book looks at programs, interventions, and other factors that help or hinder them as they make this move. Chapters from teachers and scholars working in a variety of contexts build rich understandings of how high school literacy contexts, policies such as the proposed DREAM Act and the Common Core State Standards, bridge programs like Upward Bound, and curricula redesign in first-year college composition courses designed to recognize increasing linguistic diversity of student populations, affect the success of this growing population of students as they move from high school into higher education.

1 Introduction Paying Attention to Resident Multilingual Students

Todd Ruecker and Christina Ortmeier-Hooper

DOI: 10.4324/9781315647449-1

“How do writing experiences influence the postsecondary pathways of resident multilingual students?” This is the question that guides this collection. In the past two decades, the scholarship on second language writing and multilingual writers has grown exponentially. Yet, the emphasis in much of this work still remains on international students studying English writing in postsecondary colleges and universities. In contrast, then, this edited volume is concerned with the high school experiences and postsecondary transitions of resident bilingual or immigrant youth. To date, there are over 5.1 million students in U.S. schools who are identified as English language learners or limited English proficient (ELL or LEP, i.e., considered eligible for English language support services). In addition, Latino students, who are often bilingual and writing across languages, represent almost 50% of the K–12 student population (Razfar & Simon, 2011). Yet despite these statistics, resident immigrant and multilingual writers are significantly underrepresented in higher education (Kanno & Harklau, 2012; Ornelas & Solorzano, 2004; Razfar & Simon, 2011).

Over the past 30 years, L2 writing scholars like Tony Silva, Ilona Leki, and Paul Kei Matsuda have drawn our attention to growing populations of multilingual writers and led the development of the field of L2 writing, one that has explored a variety of ways to serve these students in both ESL and mainstream writing classrooms while critiquing existing structures. While interested in the needs of all students, we are especially concerned about perhaps one of the most marginalized populations in contemporary U.S. society and schooling systems, resident ML writers. We are continually struck by how many of the resident ML student writers, ages 18 to 21—those not in college, those enrolled in GED programs—remain off the radar screen of writing scholars and researchers. Both L1 and L2 college writing teachers and researchers seldom discuss the fate of resident ML writers who do not make it onto college campuses. However, it is the ethical responsibility of college writing teachers and scholars to understand this population and how to facilitate their success in postsecondary education, one of the surest ways to a better life for them and their families.

In previous work (e.g., Ortmeier-Hooper & Enright, 2011; Ruecker, 2014), we have argued for the need for L1 and L2 college writing specialists to pay attention to what happens before college, basing this argument in the ethical responsibility to facilitate student success as well as more pragmatic concerns such as knowing the skills students bring to writing classrooms and answering the concerns of external bodies like legislatures and accreditation agencies. With the rise of the Common Core State Standards, U.S. secondary schools are undergoing a rapid change in their curriculum, premised on the idea of “college-readiness.” It is vital that postsecondary educators know what changes are taking place, so that they can be prepared to address the needs of differently prepared populations. In knowing more about what happens in secondary schools, college writing specialists might be better prepared to partake in discussions around initiatives like the CCSS among others, potentially having more influence in these conversations. Bilingual resident, immigrant, and refugee students live in towns and cities that often border our college campuses; they attend local high schools and work part-time in local businesses, participate in community events, and play on school sport teams. Yet so many of these young people remain unseen by those in positions of power within higher education and those conducting research in L1 and L2 writing studies. We acknowledge that there are reasons for some of this invisibility—in part, the separation between K–12 and college writing teacher preparation perpetuates a false sense of division between the students and our interests in them. In higher education, resident ML students can remain anonymous, unmarked by the TOEFL exam scores that identify international multilingual students. Resident ML students do not generate the tuition dollars or publicity that are often associated with the growing numbers of international students studying in U.S. higher education. We see a great irony in the fact that as more and more universities and colleges become invested in the linguistic needs of newly recruited international students, the situations and conditions of resident ML student writers are often lost in these growing conversations on multilingualism, transnationalism, internationalization, and second language writing. At the same time, we see more instances of higher education institutions being called upon to raise retention and graduation rate. Resident ML writers reside in these discussions and data, and L1 and L2 writing researchers should be prepared to be called upon and respond as these conversations unfold.

In 2012, Kanno and Harklau published a landmark collection, Linguistic Minority Students Go to College: Preparation, Access, and Persistence, in which they illustrated the various obstacles—from poverty to testing to financial aid literacy—that impeded U.S. linguistic minority students as they strove to enter higher education. In many ways, our collection follows the pathway forged by Kanno and Harklau (2012) and others (e.g., Blanton, 2005; Hirano, 2014). Yet, here we consider the role of writing, writing instruction, writing assessment, and college composition programs in the education trajectories of these young adults. It is hardly radical to claim that writing well is a threshold skill that serves a gate-closing and gate-opening function for academic achievement and opportunity. What may, however, prove surprising to readers is how often writing serves as one of the conditions that can impede or facilitate school-age multilingual writers’ advancement into college-level academic tracks, guidance, and assistance (Blanton, 2005; Enright, 2006; Fu, 1995; Ortmeier-Hooper, 2013).

Writing instruction, teacher preparation, writing standards, and writing assessments play a significant role in whether immigrant and resident bilingual students are deemed “good enough” and moved toward the pipeline for college and university degrees. The numbers of English language learners and linguistic minority students moving into postsecondary degree programs remains low, despite the fact that the numbers of U.S. high school students attending college continues to grow (U.S. Bureau of Labor, 2014). Only about 18% of English language learners make it to four-year colleges, and “roughly half of English learners never participate in any type of post-secondary education” (Kanno & Harklau, 2012). As Kanno and Cromley (2013) noted, “higher education, especially 4-year college education, is the pinnacle of [a] system of unequal power distribution” (p. 93). We have brought together the authors in this volume to disrupt that “unequal power distribution” and lay open the factors and conditions that surround resident multilingual writers as they strive to “make it” to college and through college composition coursework.

This collection strives to reinvigorate discussion on resident ML students and to bring awareness to the population of ML students as part of our institutional trends and interests in globalization. As L1 and L2 writing teachers, administrators, and researchers, we have a stake in this conversation. From a social justice standpoint, we hope to ignite further research and work that opens doors for the resident students that make it to our campuses and an interest in bettering the educational trajectories of those who do not. The essays in this collection, therefore, provide a careful and rigorous consideration of culturally and linguistically diverse student writers in U.S. high schools and their transitions into college. In this introduction, we begin to map this complex terrain for readers in order to provide a context for the chapters that follow.

Discussing Transitions and Terms

While working on this volume, we noted the intricate juxtaposition between transition and disruption when it came to the educational trajectories of these students. In short, one cannot be considered without the other. Transition reminded us of pathways and movement forward, while disruption suggested drastic change or destruction of a process. These two conditions are often intricately linked and intertwined in students’ experiences and writing opportunities. A student takes a few steps forward followed by a few steps backward—for example, a disruptive situation that derails a student’s course but then also fuels a student’s drive and tenacity to push forward. As the chapters in this book suggest, changes interrupt and sometimes suspend student writers’ agency, motivation, and impetus for continuing their education. Disruptions for resident ML writers have personal and academic consequences, but they also have economic ones. For example, a recent comparative study of college and non-college graduates found that “on virtually every measure of economic well-being and career attainment—from personal earnings to job satisfaction to the share employed full time—young college graduates are outperforming their peers with less education” (Pew, 2014). Clearly, there are economic and social costs for individuals, employers, and communities when large numbers of U.S. resident and immigrant multilingual students do not reach higher education.

In L1 and L2 writing studies, scholars and teachers often consider transition and disruption in dialogue with the concept of transfer, which considers how students develop skills in one context and apply those skills in new contexts (e.g., Yancey, Robertson, & Taczak, 2014). Here, we are concerned about the transfer of writing skills for resident ML writers, but we are also deeply interested in the ecological and social factors that influence the kinds of writing instruction, mentoring, and writing histories that resident immigrants and bilinguals carry with them as they move across social space and time in pursuit of their educational aims. It seems necessary, even crucial, to consider the ways in which ML student writers attempt to navigate their pathways into postsecondary institutions, for the simple reason that so much evidence suggests that these students’ experiences are not always transitional—leading successfully across one institutional boundary into the next—but instead, they often are tenuous and disruptive.

Finally, a word about the terms we use to discuss students. Spack (1997), one of the early researchers in second language writing, once wrote: “[Second language] writers are remarkably diverse, and thus no one label can accurately capture their heterogeneity” (p. 765). Like Spack, we recognize that labeling students can be a “hazardous enterprise” and that such labels place us as teachers and authors “in the powerful position of rhetorically constructing their identities” (Spack, 1997, p. 765). As Cox, Jordan, Schwartz, and Ortmeier-Hooper (2010) have argued, in secondary schools, as well as in higher education, the labels and categories used to describe multilingual students can quickly “fall in and out of favor based on a number of factors from political correctness to educational policy” (p. xv). The past two decades have been filled with the comings and goings of various terms (e.g., Generation 1.5, ESOL student) used to describe the students in this book, terms that we have engaged with in other works (Ortmeier-Hooper, 2008; Ruecker, 2011). Recently, many changes in labels have reflected a broader understanding of the gifts and resources that linguistically and culturally diverse students bring to our classrooms. For example, although L2 writing is often used to define a field of study, many scholars in this area now discuss students as bilingual or multilingual (ML) writers, acknowledging that they may have literacy experiences in two or more languages. In research studies situated in higher education and applied linguistics, these students can also be discussed as “linguistic minorities,” which Kanno and Harklau (2012) defined as those students who speak a language other than English at home. In K–12 contexts, we often read about these students as “English language learners (ELLs)” and “limited English proficient (LEP).” When we and authors in this volume have drawn upon sources using these terms, we have kept the original language used by authors and provided definitions for readers.

Readers will find that authors in this collection writing from K–12 perspectives and from the disciplinary perspective of education/literacy studies may use the term English language learner (ELL) when considering students’ experiences in U.S. K–12 schools. Authors writing from the perspectives of college composition and examining these students’ experiences at the postsecondary level tend to refer to these students as resident multilingual (ML) writers or linguistic minority students.

We recognize that all terms “mask the complexity” of these students, their language backgrounds, and their identities (Cox, Jordan, Schwartz, & Ortmeier-Hooper, 2010). Similarly, labels inherently obscure and obfuscate the different experiences and circumstances that define and impact U.S. resident multilingual writers. One of the goals of this collection is to move beyond the labels and bring a stronger sense of focus to the inherent com...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction Paying Attention to Resident Multilingual Students
• Part I Multilingual Writers in High Schools
• Part II Transition and Disruption Sponsors, Programs, Politics, and Policies
• Part III Resident Multilinguals in First-Year Composition Reimagining Faculty Development, Curriculum, and Administration
• List of Contributors
• Index