Education: Challenges & Perspectives – Workshop 2A: Teaching of English to Immigrants

Dr. Dorothy Kehl:

Welcome to this panel, Teaching of English to Immigrants. I am Dorothy Kehl of Brooklyn College. Well, in New York City, one of the major ports of entry for immigrants, teaching English is, what we might say, a massive undertaking. Teaching English as the second language, from now on I will refer that as ESL. Today, we focus on ESL in the City University of New York (CUNY) examining some of the strategies, which could be used in our classes, and many other types of settings.

This morning and also during lunch, I think we heard a lot of statistics. Well, I am going to just focus on one or two of them. Asian American students make up 14% of the full-time student population in CUNY. Chancellor just said 19. Next to me was a gentleman who worked in the financial aid office. He said “No, 14 is more accurate.”All of these statistics, you can get from the AAARI website, from a talk by Bean Cook in December 06, 2002. A lot of statistics. So out of this 14%, the major groups are from China 23%, 10 % from Hong Kong, 11% from India and 10% from South Korea.

How many of these students need ESL? Among the Asian American students in CUNY, 10% of them are enrolled in ESL classes and many of them are first time freshmen. In 1970, with the Open Admissions Policy in CUNY, there was an influx of major students as well as ESL students. Many faculties did not know how to or want to address the language needs of ESL students. Often ESL students were confused with remedial students, and were not allowed to enroll in regular college courses. The faculty of these courses wanted the ESL faculty to prepare the students, before they could take these courses. Well, that obviously was not a good policy. Additionally, there were other faculties who took a sympathetic or liberal approach. They gave ESL students a barely passing grade, out of their appreciation for these unusually diligent, polite and nice people. But that meant the students’ language needs were not properly dealt with.

Today, much of that confusion and attitude has changed or are beginning to change. We recognize ESL instruction is not remedial but rather compensatory. In other words, ESL student problems are not cognitive problems, but rather they need to upgrade and acquire English skills, so that they can function adequately in college, using English as a medium of learning. Many CUNY campuses have begun seriously to arrange innovative programs, such as the Block Programs between ESL and Content Courses, where students get integrated help from both faculty members who plan their materials jointly and evaluate students jointly.

Many non-ESL faculties are getting involved in some aspect of language instruction. For example, there is a movement called “Writing across the curriculum,” because writing skill is woefully inadequate. This is a feedback from business organizations in New York City that hire CUNY graduates. The feedback is that among CUNY graduates, writing skill has to be strengthened. But such Block Programing that I mentioned work very well during the spring and the four semesters.

In the summer and winter, short term Immersion Program has been offered to provide intensive experience that often is what students need, to make a breakthrough in mastering some amount of academic fluency. It is accepted among ESL professionals that it requires seven years for an average ESL student to acquire academic fluency. If we accept this premise, we need to reexamine some aspects of the CUNY policy towards ESL. First, some students need more time. At present CUNY allows two years for an ESL student to pass the basic skills test. But after passing these tests, many students still need help. So other faculties would need to get involved. Support services such as learning and tutoring centers with tutors trained in ESL methodology are needed.

So, today we have on our panel four specialists, who will shed light on this massive undertaking of teaching English as a second language. After each speaker speaks, we will take a few minutes for questions and then at the end of the entire presentation, we will have another question period. First Professor Diana Berkowitz of Queens borough Community College will introduce the “CUNY Language Immersion Program,” short is “CLIP”. Professor Berkowitz.

The CUNY Language Immersion Program

Professor Diana Berkowitz:

Thank you. That was one of the first things I wanted to do with the acronym CLIP.
You may have heard it as CLIP or you may have heard of it in the long form. I am just curious to know how many people here have heard of CLIP or CUNY Language Immersion Program. Okay, not a majority, but there are some people who have heard of it. OK. What I would like to do is give you a fairly comprehensive description of the program. I have only 12 minutes, so forgive me if I start going a little fast; and I wanted to present a little bit of data at the end of that too.

So what is the CUNY Language Immersion Program? It is a full time intensive program in English as a second language for CUNY students. We consider it a pre-college program. Most students come into it before they start any college classes. They must be CUNY students. They must go through the regular admission process, become accepted by one of the colleges, and then they take the ACT placement test. And depending on their scores, there are certain cut-off scores in different campuses as to who goes into CLIP and who may go into basic skills. That’s basically who the students are; they would be the students at the lowest level of English proficiency that you would find at the university.

What do they study? Well, we deal with all the language skills—listening, speaking, reading and writing and we do it in, I don’t say in an unique way but it is considered Public School innovated even though it has been done at CLIP. CLIP has been around for about 8 years now and this has been the approach we have used and I am thinking innovative nevertheless because it seems to be that other segments of university are picking up on this type of particular approach.

The approach we take is the sustained content-based approach to English language instruction. That means students are in it for 25 hours a week with the same teacher for the whole week. The teacher develops the curriculum for that class each semester and it is theme-based. The teacher will choose a theme based upon an academic subject, it may be history of immigration in New York City or it could be the American family or it could be New York City writers, many different possibilities depending upon the teacher’s interest and expertise and what the teacher thinks might be of interest and relevance to the students. And all the language skills revolve around that content, that particular content though you can say that they are almost learning English through the content or they have a chance to practice the language through real material so they feel a lot of authentic language.

They are exposed to a lot more authentic reading material and it seems to be a little bit of a naturalistic way of acquiring the language because this is what is going to happen when they go into the college. They are going to be ace with this academic English in terms of different subjects and different disciplines. In addition to those basic language skills, we also give them an orientation to college so that we have, we call it, the “quick college hours” on our campus and we have someone to come and speak to the students, may be two or three times in a month. Someone who is in financial aid will come or career services or the tutoring center or maybe some of the departments like basic skills where they will be headed to after our program. To give them an orientation to what the Campus provides to them, where to turn for help, things of that sort.

We also evolved them in internal activities; there are a lot of wonderful club hour activities. We try to take them to the better ones among those so that they can really have a good experience and already become part of the college campus. In addition to that, we work a little bit on test taking strategies and that is a little bit. Some people have the impression that that is the big part of what we do. We really try to keep that in perspective. Our purpose is to teach them English, to able to use English in an academic setting, to be able to go through college, but they do take ACT again when they finish our program. The idea is to see improvement in scores so that they can make some progress and do better when they go into the college. So yes, we do a little prepping for that is well, so they don’t go in there cold.

We also have a computer lab and our students make use of the computer lab everyday. Every class goes for an hour to an hour and a half and we do everything. So we teach them typing if they don’t know to type. We of course do word processing. They do a lot of revising and editing of their essays. We have taught them, for the most of it we teach them PowerPoint has become a pretty common thing in most classes, most semesters are learning Power Point. We try to have them do a formal oral presentation at some point in the semester and they learn how to accompany themselves with a Power Point slide.

We have done some home pages, where they can put some of their essays upon them internal home pages that we have in our lab but we have other programs ready to practice their vocabulary or grammar skills on the computer and we do Internet Research. So, they do get a mini research paper, and they are shown some good ways of going through the internet to find good sites, how to narrow it down and so and so forth.

In addition, we give them a tour of the library that’s part of the orientation and part of training them to do research. We have to have them take out a book and tie it into the mini search papers that they’re doing. So we do a lot of things with the students. Obviously it is an English program but we do all these other things with them as well.

Now who may attend the program? I think I mentioned a little of that, basically it is mostly incoming freshmen whose grade is below a certain point on the ACT test. They definitely have to be CUNY students. We cannot take anyone from outside the university. We sometimes will get students who have been in the college already and have taken some ESL but they have not passed for one or two times, and they get recommended to go back into CLIP because they may need to go back down to basics and that might help them to have more successful later on. Also from the senior colleges, we get students who have been accepted but they are not yet ready. English or even math might be what’s holding them back as well. So they come into our program. Or they may have been academically dismissed from the senior colleges because they haven’t passed the English part of the requirements. So they come back, that’s how they get out of that probation period.

What are the benefits of attending? Well, I think, may be just tell you all the things that they learn is that that’s the benefit right there. They are getting English intensively, as I told the students “You should be learning a lot more English a lot more quickly when you are here 25 hours a week.” In addition, they are getting to be oriented to college. They are getting more individualized attention and help because they have the same teacher for 25 hours a week for 15 weeks. Teachers get to know the students and find out any problem they have and direct them to this one or that one, depending upon the nature of their problem, personal problem or academic problem. They have the chance to retake the placement test and have a chance to try to get better on it.

Oh yes, I know I wanted to say this. Another benefit we are able to offer at our site. Not all the sites can do this but they are trying or they are all trying to do more of this. It has offered them some help in math. Obviously, we are not prepared to teach them math but on our campus we have arranged some generous people on our campus, who have offered to help us with it. Our College Recovery Program is offering free tutoring to some other students in math. We also have the math department conducting a four-hour review workshop in preparation for the CMAT when they finish our program. So, we are able to give a little bit of math help as well, which gives us an another benefit for attending the program.

Who are the teachers? Basically the teachers are all trained in T-ESL methods that generally have Masters in T-ESL or related field. But also, I think, we really need to look for people who are familiar with the content-based approach to ESL instructions because you can’t just throw someone in who does not know that. We really need know that when they come. So we have very, very high quality teachers.

How long do the student stay in the program? The maximum time is one year, and if you think about what Dorothy just said about seven years being the average time someone needs to learn the language to be fluent academically. Obviously they do go on to basic skill, but even basic skills if they start at the lowest level, just another year and half. Many of the students when they finish that year they are ready to go to college. We have a few who really could use another semesters or two. And we just can’t do it. That is the policy that we have to stick to, a maximum of one year. I suppose part of the reasoning is that if students didn’t have a limit, they might just stay almost forever. Some students really need more and more time or may be they don’t have the confidence to go back in, so they stayed. We had some Level 3 students who had stayed at level 3 two or even three times because really weren’t confident even though they could have handled college work at that point but they just were not confident. So once they reach the year, that’s it. They have to go back.

The transition from the program to college is very, very smooth. Once they have been accepted to the college, it’s automatic. You finish CLIP, you go right back into the college. We try to oversee that so that the students don’t have to pay unnecessary fees. In my case I am able to advise each and every one of them and register them before they go back in. I can be sure that they are thinking courses that are appropriate in them beginning. Some of them are still considered ESL students.

How much would the program cost? And can students receive financial aid. This is another benefit of the program. It is very, very low cost for most students. It really depends upon residency requirements, visas and documentation, public assistance and things of that sort. But most students end up paying $ 150 for a 15-week cycle. So we always say that it is the best bargain here in CUNY. It’s a very, very nominal fee and they don’t need to use any of their financial aid. We don’t take financial aid for this. What I explained to the student is that if they were to start in basic skills to take regular basic skills classes, yes, they would be in a college, they might take a math or computer science course at the same time as the English classes. But they will be using up financial aid on basic skill classes which do not carry any college credit. The concern is that when they finish whether they still have financial aid left to pay for the credit-bearing courses.

Financial aid at the Community Colleges is only given for six semesters. If they are taking remedial courses in English and in math, and in our case we also have some evening classes that some of our students need to take that will require it. They may attend more than six semesters. So that was really the reason for instituting CLIP in the first place. I might also add just very quickly that there is a CLIP site at every community collage at CUNY in addition to New York City Tech and York College Tech Program. Yes, every community collage including Kings Borough. So we are pretty widespread there.

Let me just quickly go over some of the data that I handed out to you. In terms of nationalities and native language at our site at Queens Borough, initially when we started this program, just three to three and a half years ago, we had a fairly equal number of Chinese and Spanish speakers in the program and smattering of other backgrounds. But those seem to be the two major groups that we had. Now in the past year because there is a increase in Spanish speaking students, Chinese speaking students have formed the second largest group and that’s 16 to 19% of our program. In addition we have students speaking Bengali, Dari, Punjabi, Tamil, Gujarati, Vietnamese, Korean, and I think we eve had a Thai student once. In terms of country of origin, it is interesting that among the Chinese students the majority of them come from mainland China as opposed to Hong Kong or Taiwan, which to me is not so surprising because they are the lowest level in English proficiency, and I think we are getting more of that from mainland China than from Taiwan and Hong Kong. In addition they come from Korea, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and the subcontinent of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh.

I did took a look at the statistics of this semester. We have a fairly low enrollment overall this particular semester but I took a look at the Asian students to see what their high school data was. We always try to find out where did they go to high school. The majority of our students are across the board in terms of native language or country. Most of them have gone to high school abroad, again which is why everybody is expecting them to be at the lowest level of proficiency and that is in fact the case among the Asian students. One in 9 only have studied in this country and had some high school in this country.

In terms of retention, we had about an average of 13.8% dropout rate across the semesters, which I think is really good because if you look at the CUNY rate, if I am not mistaken, I think it is about 30 something percent. We have always been required to document the reason and it is always job related, caring for family, illness, pregnancy, things of that sort. And then among the ones who stay in, about half of them continue CLIP the next semester when they go from level 1 to 2 or 2 to 3 and the other half generally go back to college

Now one of the things we have been able to achieve is the bonding with the college, through orientation to the collage and also thru friendship that students make while in our program. Then they want to try and stay together and they try to register in the same basic skill classes when they go on to the college. There is also a study recently done at Bronx Community College on Dominican students, but I am sure that is true with students country of origin or native language. They determined that those Dominican students who are most successful in the college among that group they decided CLIP attendance is one of the reasons for their success. So I was very pleased to hear that and I am sure its true with students of other backgrounds.

Now I probably have about a minute left so let me just go over the handouts there. This is just to show you some of the advances that we have been able to help our students achieve in the language. The first two boxes… we give the Michigan test and we have a CLIP essay which is based on the ACT type of prompt, and we have a pre and a post — when they come into the program and when they leave the program. So you can see that in terms of Michigan test, both the pre and post times in the middle is the highest, however look at the first and the last. You have many more that are achieving at the highest level you know by the end… the white bar is what shows you… Same thing with the CLIP essay you know you have them pretty much going from 2 and 3 and 4 are the most amounts that you have in Time 1 but at Time 2 its mostly 4 and 5. You know we give them a score from 1 to 6 on CLIP essay, so they are definitely making that achievement. On the ACT: again if you look at it ACT score in the essay first, you start ranging from 2 to 6 when they come into our program, most of them are 2s in our college but we get some people a little bit higher particularly in the senior colleges. When they leave they tend to be 4 to 8 so there is a real increase there. Seven is passing; in fact, some of them even surpass that.

In terms of the reading courses we are not a spectacular achievement but they are definitely still achieving. We got some of them to actually pass the reading test, where as when they come in they generally don’t get higher than the 34 to 49 range. So we’ve had some success with that. Very quickly if you look at the bottom of the page we look at how many levels they have gained as a result of being in our program. In other words, what level would they have been placed into basic skills when they first came to the college versus what level are they ending up being placed into when they finish our program. And this is based on this past fall semester. One student with no gain; seven students gain of one level; ten students gain of two levels and three students gain of three levels, which means those are the ones who are placed into English 101 directly.

In the second page, in terms of reading — that was the essay the first one–reading again is not as spectacular, unfortunately that semester was not great for that level. We had 11 with no gains but we did have seven who gained one level and one who gain three levels. I don’t know what happen to the in-between categories, there are two levels there. In terms of end-of-term placement, we have three students that ended up placing into 201, which is the course they would have had taken any case before they came into our program. That is also the lowest basic skills writing course at our college. However, they might not have been ready for that level, they may have struggled going in before. Seven of them went into 205, the highest level and 15 of them were exempt from writing all together, and we were very proud of them. In terms of the reading, 21 went into the lowest level and again three were exempt from reading. We have a little gap here in terms of the way the statistics go, but they are definitely making progress in the program.

Dr. Dorothy Kehl:

The CLIP program obviously is very, very advantageous is and very inexpensive, a $150 for 15 weeks. You pay out of your own pockets so that you don’t use up your financial aid. You save that until you take regular college courses. The intensity of it, 25 hours a week. When I teach immersion at Brooklyn College, I say to my students, “You listen to English, you read English, you speak English, you write English and you dream English.” That’s the nature of an immersed experience; the breakthrough is very possible. Thank you Diana.

Next we have Michael Jianguo Ji, of Baruch College, who will talk about removing the psycholinguistic barriers and cultural shock that immigrant students face. And he will introduce some innovative curriculum to pedagogy to deal with the problems.

Michael Jianguo Ji:

Thank you. When I realized that I only going to have 10 to 15 minutes to talk, I decided to reduce it to the most important issues that I want to touch, so that might mean the reduction of what I am going to present. Hopefully we will have more to say during the question phase. I just want to touch on one thing: how many people have ever noticed that—I am not only talking about college-bound ESL learners; I am talking about English learners in general, so it covers both. This interest started from my teaching in Chinatown, in the Chinese communities, teaching English as a second language in the career development programs, occupational development programs. I have noticed one thing which is less covered in the literary. The first striking thing I noticed was the low confidence and the reduced enthusiasm of the learners when they came to the classroom. Most of them have had some previous learning experience in various programs. So what gets in the way? That becomes my interest and curiosity.

Let me use this overhead projector… Actually, most of the learners that come into the program have had some amount of ESL training in the past. What we alluded to is this low level of proficiency and the slow development in many of the programs. This low level of proficiency and slow progress is measured against the length of time they have been studying. It is not just low proficiency, but the length of time. Just now, it was mentioned that generally takes about seven years for an ESL learner to be ready to advance into a regular academic program. In the classes that I have been teaching, I have noticed that there are some factors that get in the way of their development. In other words, their slow development, their low proficiency, their low confidence, the reduced enthusiasm are caused by some factors, which I would classify as the psycholinguistic barriers.

Then, what cause these barriers? My findings are that the major causes are related to the text materials, to the instructional operations. The most important thing is the disjuncture between what they learn from the textbook and what they experience in real-life settings. That creates some kind of pressure, or anxiety, or depression, which gives rise to some kind of barrier, what we called the filters. If you think about it in terms of input not yet becoming intaken, then something must gotten in the way. And that is the filter. So what is the filter in this case? It is not just linguistic, it’s a cultural-linguistic filter.

Let’s look at some examples. Here we see the learning outcomes. Whenever we do the screening, the diagnostic tests, we see a low proficiency and reduced enthusiasm. Here are some causes that my colleague and I have agreed upon. Look at the first one, the low confidence and reduced enthusiasm for ESL learners. We have some qualitative data here. Some of the students just came into the program because of downsizing; they were laid off and finally had some time to improve on something. Yet, what they brought to the class is this low confidence. Here’s a direct quote: “No need to work hard, good opportunities don’t exist for me.” Another quote from some student who has learned some English before—of course, this is from one end of the continuum. It says, “You can never learn English well.” For some other learners, they were actually affected by this “getting rich quick” thing. After not being able to get rich quickly, they say, “It is hard, it’s really hard.” These reflect the mental states of many of the immigrants, especially Asian immigrants as a minority group. These things all came from their past learning experience.

For their low level of proficiency, it is also related to their past learning experience. In terms of quantity we see there must have been insufficient input. In case they did have sufficient input, we wanted to question whether the input became intake. If they have not been intaken, that it becomes a question of the learning process. Is it completed, or is it partially completed. The slow process and low proficiency would in some way indicate that there might be some degree of fossilization. When we look at the immigrants, especially the Asian immigrants as a whole, when we go to various Asian immigrant communities, we discover that immigrants who have been living here for years or even decades still cannot speak good English. That is strange for many people. This is America, this is an English-speaking environment. For most of the Asian immigrants, they came from a home country where English was not even a language. Most of the Asian countries don’t have English as even a second language; some the countries do, but for most of them the best is they have it as a foreign language. Yet many of the learners who had some previous ESL education may be able to speak better English than the people who have been living here for years and decades. So there is some kind of fossilization. As we will see, fossilization is not something that is just a theory on paper, it is in real life. So what gets in the way?

Those three direct quotes indicate that in some way their life experience gets in the way. The disjuncture between their real life experience and what they learn; these things usually do not match so well. We have some successful programs. But generally speaking, we still have a lot of work to do. Some of the programs are so wonderful, like the CUNY Immersion Program, but most of the programs are not the immersion type. In the CUNY system, I have been teaching in various community colleges for some time, we often have students who are veteran repeats, we have students who repeat many times from one level to the next level. What gets in the way? One thing is maybe we set unrealistic goals for them. Seven years versus two years. Demand, that might be one thing. Another thing might be that what they learn is not what they want. I am speaking about immigrant learners in general, not just college-bound learners.

My colleagues and I agreed on some of the features that learners need. ESL learners come into various programs, community-oriented or college-bound. Many of the immigrant learners have special needs. For instance, they have basic needs. Here we have basic, immediate, survival needs. Under this category, we have daily maintenance needs, that what we call daily survival needs, from purchasing, travel directions, housing, telecommunications to employment efforts. You have to learn how to do a job search, how to fill out an application, how to prepare for that, how to write a resume and cover letter, how to rehearse for interview. Then you have the legal matters, immigration document handling, citizenship application, sometimes you have to go to the court. Also, very often we have police contacts, we have to deal with these issue. We have to react in a certain way to a stop-and-search experience. Then we have, for many immigrants, they have to deal with insurance matters—medical insurance, life insurance, accidental injury, and all those insurance. For quite a number of immigrants, they have to rely on other people, but that is not the way to do it in the long run. They have to learn it. So these are the survival needs.

Then we have the career development needs. Once you can survive then you need to do something. Here some people want to relive what they did in the past, their previous profession or occupation. What you need is targeted ESL preparation. Some people want to prepare for a new occupation, a new undertaking. You want to start a new business. If you want to operate, you need targeted ESL preparation. Then immigrants often will have to go through on-job or in-service trainings. You need ESL preparation too. This is the college-bound people. Actually going to college is not the end, but a means to the end, so I put it in this category under Career Development. You get a degree first, then you get a job. Then you still have to be prepared for how to get a degree. All those academic subjects which the CUNY Immersion Program helps a lot because they are campus-based. This is one of the places we can go for help. But a lot of other programs don’t provide this kind of assistance. Anyway, this is part of the need.

Actually the largest the need is in-depth cultural learning. When Immigrants decide to live permanently here or become a citizen, they need to have an in-depth understanding of the cultural mechanisms. These are not just academic learning; they have a direct bearing on the well-being of the immigrants. These things will have to be learned through some channels. Usually ESL programs are in a position to provide that help, or to deny that help.

Also the need to know what resources are available for dealing with situation in this new cultural setting. This lists a few concrete questions: what socioeconomic factors underline the cultural phenomenon? When you observe a phenomenon you have to understand what is the underlying factor. Then, why things are what they are? Why does unemployment occur so often? Many of the immigrants come in from a quite, traditional social setting. For instance, I have friends who have come from a Chinese setting where, once you get some kind of training, you can depend on that for the rest of our life. We know that in China, this concept is getting outdated. But people are still influenced by that, once you get some training, you can use that for the rest of your life. Then, once you have that special training, you can depend on that to get a job, and the job will be stable. These questions are concrete question, which fall into the category of cultural training and learning. These are all the learning needs.

Then the question is: How much are these needs reflected by the commercial textbooks available on the market? We don’t really have many, but there are efforts in some of the ESL textbook. But they are not skills-based. They do provide some kind of information, but then for a rather holistic training, like listening, reading, speaking and writing with some kind of orientation or target, we don’t see a lot of good textbooks. If we don’t have enough people we can input from the formal channel, which is the textbooks we are using, we can see a disjuncture, what the students have to learn the classroom and what they have to cope with in real life. They often have this notion that they are disheartened. I would say that the low progress and low confidence, apart from the possible fossilization, is that students didn’t get enough information input.

Textbooks affect the instructional process a lot because most of the teachers depend on the textbook heavily. Another thing is that most of the ESL teachers are part time teachers, if you look at the statistics, so they are not paid for any extra work outside of the classroom. We know that we shouldn’t depend on commercial textbooks; we should create things, which we have been doing. The question is to what extent can we do that to satisfy the students who are in need. Generally speaking, the problems we have in the learning outcome are mostly affected by insufficiency in the text materials, which affect information input, and also the lack of cultural information affects the in-depth learning. As we understand, second language learning is basically cultural learning, they interact with each other and affect the learning psychology. This is why we have some barriers there.

The recommendation is that we have to work on that in order to improve… My time is up?

Dr. Dorothy Kehl:

Yes, thank you. Obviously it is not just psychological or cultural. Socioeconomic and so many other issues. Teachers, ESL teachers included, very often find ourselves not just being teachers but have to be social workers also. Thank you. I wanted to ask if anyone has questions for Diana and for Michael? Yes…

Audience:

I was curious about the cost, not the cost for students, but the actual cost of operating the Immersion Program per head?

Professor Diana Berkowitz:

If I remember correctly, they have a formula to calculate that per class. I have the number $550 in my head, but that doesn’t seem quite right to me, I must have it way off. But there is a formula that gives us money per class, which covers teacher’s salary and the other administrative costs. We have to pay for lab tech and so forth. We also have tutors, which I forgot to mention; we provide free tutoring. We also don’t charge them for the book; so we have to buy the books and distribute them, and they return them. I am sorry I don’t have the figure, but there is a formula that they use to figure it out.

Audience:

Did I understand you when you say that only one out of nine had graduated from an U.S. high school?

Professor Diana Berkowitz:

Within the Asian segment of my enrollment from this particular semester. That is the particular statistic I have come up with.

Audience:

Just quickly, what is the age range and the enrollment?

Professor Diana Berkowitz:

The age ranges from around 18 or 19. And we have had some grandparents in the program. The average age is about 20 to 25. The enrollment… you mean size? This semester was very low. I won’t get into the specific things that all happened at the same time. Generally we have 60 to 70 students. The other programs at the other campus tend to have one to two hundred students. I think there are one or two that have over two hundred.

Audience:

What is the average class size?

Professor Diana Berkowitz:

We are set up to have 24 per class, based on our computer lab where we have 24 workstations. So we really try not to go over that. This semester we would have no trouble keeping well within that. Usually we try to maintain 20.

Audience:

A couple of questions. What is your retention rate? How many of the people that start actually finish at least one course, one 15-week course?

Professor Diana Berkowitz:

The rates I gave you before were really the retention rates. Per semester the average retention rate was 13% percent… yes, dropout rate. The dropout rate actually has ranged between 1% to 23%.

Audience:

So the retention rate would be 99% to …

Professor Diana Berkowitz:

Yes, if you do the math… to about 77%.

Audience:

My other question is, I teach nursing to student and we get many English as a second language students, not just Asian students, but from all over the world. I was just wondering, I encourage them to speak in English, even though they have a tendency to form their own little group because that is where their comfort level is. I do encourage them to speak in English, read in English, write in English, except when you go home and you have a family member who doesn’t understand the English language. But I was wondering if there is something else that they can do besides just immersing themselves?

Professor Diana Berkowitz:

You asked a really good question that I am personally interested in, and I hoping when I have more time I can institute something on campus, where we have a nursing program also. What I think the nursing students need, maybe the ESL speakers, and maybe even the native speakers to some extent, is communication strategies, communication skills. What I get out of the medical literature on medical communication is that the nurse serves as the interpreters between the doctor who speaks “doctorese” and the patient who speaks everyday English. Then in Queens in particular and throughout most of New York City, where you have the doctor speaking one language, the patient speaking another, and the nurse speaking a third. That is where I would like to start something along those lines. I would say take a speech class to help them with that. That would be important. They really need to work on those communications skills. It is crucial in their job.

Dr. Dorothy Kehl:

I suggest we hold the other questions until the other two presenters are done. I tell my students to go to their library and go to the children’s section, don’t be ashamed. Flip books, pick the ones that look interesting, the ones that you don’t have to look up the dictionary every five minutes, because you want to enjoy reading. Read a book a week, and it is free of charge. And turn on public radio, Channel 13 whenever possible and just enjoy movies and enjoy programs. Those are some of the things you can do without paying money. Of course, having something to read like Newsweek magazine and Time magazine, when you’re on the subway, read it, when you’re waiting for the train, read it. So there are all kinds of tricks. We have more questions later.

Now, Professor Keming Liu of Medgar Evers College is going to present. She wants to talk about how to maximize the strength of Asian student’s learning style to guide them into critical thinking skills.

Professor Keming Liu:

Good Afternoon. First I would like to share this with you, please pass them out. Those of you who were here in the morning may have heard Diana Lam, who was the Assistant Chancellor of Education. I think she brought some very important issues which are very much pertinent to what I would like to discuss with you today, namely learning entails not only academic issues, but it involves more. I would like to first share with you this essay—it is an excerpt from a chapter written by Fan Shen about his experience in a composition class and what writing is a about. “Starting with the first English paper I wrote, I found that learning to compose in English is not an isolated classroom activity, but a social and cultural experience. The rules of English composition encapsulate values that are absent in, or sometimes contradictory to, the values of other societies. Therefore, learning the rules of English composition is, to a certain extent, learning the values of Anglo-American society.” If you got a chance, finish reading it, the issue of writing as a way of also learning in a different culture, learning the different values, naming in the American or Western system we emphasizes the “I” rather than the collective “we”, which is the norm in most Asian cultures.

Here first I would like to share with you is, I would like you to read this sentence. What were those “yorfs” doing? “Sambilating,” okay, everybody agree. Where the yorfs “norty” or “glotty”? “Glotty,” very good. Do we have one yorf or more than one? More than one. Very good, you passed grammar. What else were they doing beside sambilating? “Flarbing,” you got it. My point here is, does this sentence mean anything? Not really. That is my point, that many students believe learning English is learning grammar. Grammatically this sentence is perfect, no problem, but meaning wise, it doesn’t make sense. The point here is how do we teach students to think and reflect, rather than just focusing on what is the correct sentence structure. Of course, the audience that I am addressing here, namely the students, are fundamentally proficient already, in a sense, not high proficiency, but at least have gone through the CLIP program, or what we called developmental courses, or have enrolled in college English first year or second year. And also to answer your question about nursing majors. Many of my students in English classes are also different majors.

This project came out of my participation in the Writing Across the Curriculum, the WAC program throughout CUNY. Writing is a major element in student testing now. Not only do they have to take the ACT, to pass the exam to enter college, to be able to take college course. Two is after 45 credits they must take the proficiency exam, the CPE. If they fail that exam twice, they will be out of the college, they will be kicked out. Given that, we have to help our students to be able to write and use writing as a tool for thinking and learning. So that’s given, and now you see where I am from. Grammatically speaking there is that innate sense of grammar. By looking at this, although the sentence doesn’t make sense, it is English. But if I flip-flop these words around and scramble the sentence, it may not become an English sentence. So if you try this with you student, you will be amazed that probably 100% of your students get the same, correct answer. But does it mean that they know English grammar? Yes, they do, to a certain extent. But the next step is what do we do to help them use writing as a thinking and learning tool.

I would like to share this with you. I just saw this; last night I came home very late, so I picked up a bag of frozen dumpling, and looked at the label. This is the instruction given to the person who was about to cook the dumpling and eat. “Throw in the dumplings after the water is boiled; let the water be boiled once again. Fill half bowl of water and boil again. Take off lid, continue boiling, then ready for serving.” Grammar? Perfect, I would say, no problem in sentence structure. But in terms of the instruction, every little chunk is okay in terms of the English. But I found it very difficult to follow, even as a person who came from the same culture, this is a Chinese package with Chinese characters and the English. Evidently the English is a literal translation of what the Chinese is. Those who are Chinese may have sensed what it means, but to an English speaker this certainly doesn’t make sense. And I would like to point out one thing here, this “half bowl” of water. This is my point. In the American or western way of cooking, the measurement is what? Cup, teaspoons, so on and so forth. But in the Chinese or other Asian countries, it is the bowl. We say a bowl of something because there is no such a thing as a measured cup. So strictly speaking there is no such a thing, and culturally, as it is a culture concept.

So when students write, they think from what they are familiar with, and they then present it, but the teacher say “What are you talking about?” This is where I come from. What we need to pay attention to is to teach students the cultural sense, than just the grammar. What I did with my students in the pass year in the WAC program or Writing Across Curriculum is that I devised some techniques, strategies. I think these strategies are not new, they are not invented by me, but I use them to improve my teaching of writing to students. I found that annotation is great tool to move students from learning to read to learning to write. Annotation as an index to cognitive process. When students read, doesn’t matter what subject it is, it can be nursing, it can be match, or biology or any other subject. What I do is first I demonstrate to the students how to annotate a page. Student read after one or two pages, you close your text and tell me what you have just read. Most of the time it was blank. They seemed to have read, understood every word, every sentence, but it didn’t register.

How do we help students to register? By annotation. What is annotation? Basically a thing in the ancient text, in the bible, you also see marginal remarks or explanations, that’s the basic, fundamental way of explaining what annotation is. You read a text and you either put a question mark or question the content, or say “yes, I agree.” Basically it is the reader’s response to the text. You yield a response and write it down on the margins, which we called annotation. It is not new, it is practiced by many different disciplines. I found that you do need to give the definition of annotation to the students. Research studies indicate that students who know what it is and know how to do it seem to perform much better in their learning outcome. So what I do is, I don’t have the definition, but it will be on AAARI’s site, and I will provide that information and some samples.

Definition of annotation followed by repeated modeling of annotation. I give them a text with annotation, and then we go through the steps. What I do is I usually ask the students three questions: first is “What is the argument made? Or what is the point made in this essay?” Everything you read, there is a point that the writer or the author is trying to make. So what is the point? “How does the author support that point? What evidence?” Three is “what is the author’s concluding remarks?” We ask those three questions. Those three as the guideline for any piece of reading you assign. I do that in class.

Going back to the presentation slides. Definition, repeated modeling, group discussion. When you do the three questions: what is the point, what is the evidence and what is the conclusion, I guide students through a group discussion, so that they can get some support from fellow classmates. If this is the beginning of a semester, I find group assignments very, very helpful and beneficial. What you do is assign two, not more than three students. They go out of the classroom, to the library. Through that time, they work together, they are really negotiating and learning. Otherwise, it would be you are here, you are trying to get a degree, it is your job to learn. It doesn’t always happen that way. What I called that system is “scaffolding.” I help the students a support system, I guide them through. This is the very first four to six weeks, I go through that with the student, then I have five step of modeling and scaffolding throughout the semester. And I repeatedly go through the five steps with every reading I assign.

Each reading leads to an essay, from low-stakes writing, if you are familiar with that term, includes journal, annotation and so on and so forth; high-stakes writing is the essays that you are going to grade. Once they get to the essay stage, they have done so much discussions and thinking. Last semester, most of my students, except three students who were very weak when they entered the class, everybody passed the departmental exam, against half of the students from other classes that passed the English final exam. Now I am going to end this. This will also be provided on the website. Just want to very quickly show you what I mean by the five steps. I know time is up. These are descriptions of the five steps and what each step does. I recorded this and it works really well.

Those who are interested in getting a copy, of course I will provide you. I can also send you. Actually I will give you my email; if you are interested, email me and I will make an attachment: keming@mec.cuny.edu. By the way, Medgar Evers College is also a senior college within CUNY. Email me and tell me that is what you want, and I will attach. Then we can also develop a dialog if you want to. The result of my research with the Writing Across the Curriculum Program is that, I would say 97% of the students performed well on the final exam. They passed the exams. The students I taught are in English Composition I and II. Usually after that they take the CPE. Those who took my class performed very well. Of course there are many details we can discuss at a later time. Any questions we can hold for later during the discussion time. Sorry I am wading through. Thank you.

Dr. Dorothy Kehl:

Keming, you said the descriptions will be on the AAARI web?

Professor Keming Liu:

All of this information will be emailed… to www.aaar.info.

Dr. Dorothy Kehl:

Let’s hold the questions until the last presenter is done. The timing has been changed a little bit. We have fifteen minutes and then we will finish; it has been expanded to quarter to three. The last person to present is Professor Ganzhi Di of Hostos Community College. She will talk about the difficulty for Chinese students who are used to a language which uses ideograms. When they learn English, which is the language that is based on the alphabet system, is very difficult. She will illustrate the listening and speaking problems encountered by these students, and suggest possible methods for remedy. Professor Di.

Professor Ganzhi Di:

Due to time limitation, I changed some of the topic. I will just focus on this one: Phonemic and [inaudible] in second language acquisition for Chinese learners. Years ago I taught a class with most of the students are Hispanic ones and some Chinese. Sometimes I gave them some tests with sample spelling. Their response was totally different. For the Spanish students, no matter how difficult or how long the words is or whether they were familiar with the word or not, most of them did very well and could write down the word correctly. For the Chinese, no matter how easy or how short, or maybe the word was very familiar for them, their minds were blank.

That developed my interest to do some research in this field. I found from phonemic awareness studies, that kind of phonemic manipulation skills developed as a result of only alphabetic literacy. For the Hispanic student whose first language is also alphabetic, they don’t have much problem. But for the Chinese, it is a big program, since Chinese is ideographic, totally different from English, from the alphabetic languages. [inaudible] Phonemic and [inaudiable] awareness of Chinese learner is underdeveloped, and handicapped, especially in the early stages of learning English. The ideographic nature of the Chinese language allows the Chinese characters to evoke visual association. Even today, our language is somewhat abstract. But in our minds, we still look at the characters sometimes as images.

This is one important feature of the Chinese language. Another one is that most Chinese characters can combine form, sound and meaning together. Sorry I left my transparencies at home in a great hurry. Let me show you this word… I think at least 80% of Chinese characters are phonetic compounds. That means usually the word has two components, one is a semantic signifier to give you some clue about the semantic functions of the word. For example, we have the word “river”, “wine”, “lake”, even “tear”, all of these dealing with liquid. So on the left hand side of the word we have three dots to tell us that. All words that deal with liquid and water belong to that category. This will be the river, this will be the lake, this will be the tears. It is all consistent, water and liquid. So you can guess the meaning.

This is one thing. Another thing is, on the other side, look at this word, we separate it into two parts. This is what we call the radical. This part gives us the information of how to read it. For this word the pronunciation is “hu.” So these two together tells us that it has something to do with the river, this is the lake. We read it like “hu.” This is what I want to show you, this word is “flesh”, “fat”, or “heavy”. Look at this part. This is call “rou”, this is flesh. We have the flesh here and everywhere, dealing with the organ, the heart, stomach, arm, leg, we have this radical. This part original is half of the bull, the cow, the front part where you see the horn, the head, and the leg, but you cannot see the rear part, only the front part. The meaning is half of the bull, this word is half of the bull. So this word shows the size. Even half of the bull is a very big one, so that’s why this word has the meaning of joined together. Half the size of a bull is very fat, very heavy. The pronunciation is “bang”, this is the phonetic one, this word is “bang”. So they same the vow with the English. In any way, you can guess, maybe you cannot be able to pronounce the word very correctly, but you know the word has something to do with the “bang”, so the pronunciation is “pan”.

This is one way, one of the Chinese strategies to learn Chinese. By looking at the parts to guess the meaning and guess the pronunciation. But for the English 26 alphabet letters, for the Chinese they are abstract and they are meaningless. Psychologically in our mind, we need this kind of information to give us some idea about the word. Now, suddenly the Chinese students who know nothing about English are confronted with this kind of A, B, C, D, E, they are lost. Even if you spell it, no way, they cannot understand it. Sometimes it even happens to me also. What is the word? Oh, what are the letters? One student tells me, “Professor, where are all the Chinese signs?” Because in Chinese we say “???????????” [translation: read the side if there is a side; read the middle if there is no side]. That means what?

Look at this word, how do we look at this word? We look at this side, then we know how to read it. This is the “duck”, this side is not the radical, it tells us the pronunciation information. This is “jia”, duck is “ya”, we know how to read it, we have the “ya” here, almost the same. This one is the semantic signifier, this is the radical. You see, it’s an early bird. Duck belongs to the category, that is why it has “bird”. So this is the duck, the Chinese students guess first from the left side, and also from the right side. That is why we say, “guess from either side”.

If we don’t have either side, we guess from the middle. Look at this word, we don’t have the left side, we don’t have the right side. It is just a box. This word means country. In this country, there are many things. Look at the inside. This pronunciation is “huo”, this pronunciation is “guo”. So almost the same. We read in the middle. Look here in this word. This part originally is an Asian weapon, like this. Later we straightened out this one, then we have a dot here. This goes like this, that is the weapon now. Look at here, this is the mouth. In Chinese if we have the people and the mouth together it is called “rin kou,” the population. That means in this boundary we have the weapon, we have the people, we have the land. People in this land have the weapons, they will defend the country, there is a boundary here.

So you see, for the English word, can you have some information? No. But for the Chinese word, we have a lot of information. You can facilitate your understanding of the word…

Dr. Dorothy Kehl:

Okay, we have to end with that…. Maybe we can entertain one question. Or we can move out to the lobby in the hallway, you can catch the speakers to ask your questions.

---

Copyright © Asian American / Asian Research Institute (AAARI), 2002.
All rights reserved. No part of this transcript may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means without explicit permission of the Asian American / Asian Research Institute.
Recording and transcription services provided by
Transcendent International, LLC.
www.tiTranslation.com