19 research outputs found
ESL programs at U.S. community colleges: a multistate analysis of placement tests, course offerings, and course content
When U.S. English learners (ELs) attend college, they are more likely to enroll in 2âyear community colleges than in 4âyear colleges. Prior research points to the tension between English as a second language (ESL) programs providing support to ELs and lengthy ESL programs acting as barriers to ELs seeking access to mainstream college coursework. Nevertheless, community college ELs and ESL programs remain understudied. The researchers investigated community college ESL placement, course sequence length, and types of ESL courses offered across the United States by examining the 2017â2018 catalogs of community colleges in nine states. Two hundred seventyâtwo community college catalogs were analyzed. Findings include that 81% of colleges reported offering some ESLâspecific coursework and that ESL course sequences varied on average from 2.3 to 4.7 semesters in length across states. For most states studied, ESL courses were solely structured around skillsâbased instruction. Furthermore, although general English placement information was accessible and often standardized within states, ESL placement information was rarely available and sometimes out of date. Based on these findings, the authors recommend that community college ESL programs implement valid placement procedures, award college credit for ESL coursework, and streamline student access to disciplineâspecific academic and vocational content.Accepted manuscrip
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Locating Assisted Performance: A Study of Instructional Activity Settings and their Effects on the Discourse of Teaching
In an effort to locate instances of Tharp and Gallimore's assisted performance in educational settings, teacher-student interactions in typical teacher-fronted classrooms are contrasted with the organization of talk across a variety of alternate educational participant structuresâa teacher-student conference, small group work, the making of a class video, and a problem-solving interaction in a computer labâthat deviate from the traditional "default script" (Cazden, 1988, p. 53) of classroom interactions. We consider how each learning arrangement affects the extent to which students are able to initiate, control, and maintain interaction, and the extent to which their agendas are articulated. We further consider the influence exerted by the multiple facets of each encounter's institutional and interpersonal context. This range of influences precludes a monolithic transfer of knowledge, pointing to the obviously agentive role of the novice as well as to ways in which historical and institutional expectations are represented (or altered) in interactional encounters. Hence, locating assisted performance uncovers a web of relationships among participants, tasks, and talk that both facilitate and constrain learning in a given novice-expert episode
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Creating a Community of Scholarship with Instructional Conversations in a Transitional Bilingual Classroom
This report explores the ways in which instructional conversations between a teacher and her students contributed to building an academic community in a transitional bilingual fourth-grade classroom. Through an analysis of reading lesson transcripts, classroom events, and student essays and journal assignments, this report shows how classroom experiences fostered the development of students' understanding of the concepts of sacrifice and responsibility. This report describes how, at both the individual and classroom community level, instructional conversations deepened student understandings of the texts they read in class by encouraging students to make connections between particular textual concepts and their own experiences. In addition to tracking student gains in understanding, this report shows how the conversations helped build a classroom community that incorporated the cultural beliefs and concerns of the students