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 2‐year community colleges than in 4‐year 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 2017–2018 catalogs of community colleges in nine states. Two hundred seventy‐two community college catalogs were analyzed. Findings include that 81% of colleges reported offering some ESL‐specific 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 skills‐based 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was accessible and often standardized within states, ESL placement information was rarely available and sometimes out of date.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 discipline‐specific academic and vocational content.Accepted manuscrip

Ethnicity and ethnic group measures in social survey research

This article is a review of issues associated with measuring ethnicity and using ethnicity measures in social science research. The review is oriented towards researchers who undertake secondary analyses of large-scale multipurpose social science datasets. The article begins with an outline of two main approaches used in social surveys to measure ethnicity, the ‘mutually exclusive category’ approach and the ‘multiple characteristics’ approach. We also describe approaches to the use of ethnicity measures in cross-national comparative research. We emphasise the value of sensitivity analyses. We also encourage researchers to carefully consider the possible relationships between ethnicity and other important variables in order to avoid spurious interpretations of the effects of ethnicity