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Community College ESL Program Structure: Access, Equity, and Trade-Offs

Mon, April 25, 2:30 to 4:00pm PDT (2:30 to 4:00pm PDT), Manchester Grand Hyatt, Floor: 2nd Level, Harbor Tower, Harbor Ballroom H

Abstract

Community college ESL program organization has been the focus of statewide legislation in California (Assembly Bill 705, 2017) and Texas (House Bill 2223, 2017), and college consolidation efforts in Georgia (Harklau & Baston, 2019) and Connecticut (Key, 2020). While research is ongoing on how to create equitable academic ESL programs (e.g., Bunch et al., 2011; Raufmann et al., 2019), little is known about how community college ESL programs are already structured, especially across states. Drawing from a study of 272 community college catalogs from nine states (Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington), this paper proposes four common programmatic orientations of community college ESL programs discovered through this analysis. Here I discuss how these orientations impact college equity and student outcomes. While community colleges vary in the level and type of support they offer for CCELs (Raufman et al., 2019; Rodriguez et al., 2019), programmatic support for CCELs falls into one or more of four approaches: minimalist, skill-building, comprehensive, and fusion.
The first orientation, minimalist, provides little to no structured support for CCELs; ESL-specific coursework may or may not exist. A benefit of this approach is it avoids overly-long ESL programs that can slow down CCELs’ progress towards college (Hodara, 2015). However, minimal to no ESL support may make community colleges inaccessible to lower English proficiency CCELs, running counter to the larger, open-access mission of community colleges (Dougherty, 1994).
The second, skill-building, focuses on providing CCELs language skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking; courses are thus often oriented around one or more skills areas. TESOL graduate programs often train future ESL teachers in separate skill areas (Crandall & Sheppard, 2004). However, concerns remain about whether separate language skill training is transferable to future college coursework, and whether an integrated, content-focused approach is preferable (Bunch & Kibler, 2015).
The third orientation, comprehensive, seeks to balance vocational and academic program foci. Thus, vocation-specific coursework and training is offered, often as part of multiple tracks of ESL programs: academic ESL programs provide access to the wider college, and community ESL courses for greater English proficiency. One benefit of this approach is it recognizes that a degree-focused mentality may not ultimately benefit all students (Deil-Amen & Rosenbaum, 2002). However, problems arise when vocational training does not match demand for these job skills (Dougherty, 1994).
The final orientation, fusion, seeks to integrate students from the ESL program into the wider college. This can be done through corequisite coursework, learning communities, equitable credit policies, and other efforts. This approach is reflected in recent legislative efforts in both California (2017) and Texas (2017), and may lead to better student outcomes for CCELs, but a loss of independence for ESL programs.
In conclusion, designing equitable community college ESL programs requires recognizing inherent tradeoffs in orientations and structuring programs and balancing programmatic approaches with equitable policies related to cost, the awarding of credit, program sequence length, and the transparency and validity of the placement process.

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