Decisions, Agency, and Advising

Key Issues in the Placement of Multilingual Writers into First-Year Composition Courses

Tanita Saenkhum

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781607325482
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

Decisions, Agency, and Advising considers the role of students' own agency in the placement of multilingual writers—including international students and US residents or citizens who are nonnative users of English—in US college composition programs. Grounded in qualitative research and concerned equally with theory and practice, the book explores how multilingual students exerciseagencyin their placement decisions and howstudent agencycan inform the overall programmatic placement of multilingual students into first-year composition courses.Tanita Saenkhum follows eleven multilingual students who made their decisions about placement into first-year composition courses during one academic year at a large public university. She identifies the need for the process of making placement decisions to be understood more clearly, describes how to use that knowledge to improve placement practices for these students—particularly in advising—and offers hands-on recommendations for writing programs. Decisions, Agency, and Advising is a significant contribution to the field and particularly valuableto writing program administrators, academic advisors, writing teachers, researchers investigating second language writing and writing program administration, composition and second language writing scholars, and graduate students.

1
Introduction

This Is Where It Begins

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Juan: Teacher, I wanted to let you know that I took English 101 last semester.

Tanita: Hmm . . . Why are you in my class, instead of English 102?

Juan: My English 101 teacher told me that English 108 would be better for me.

Tanita: Sounds good to me.

It was a brief conversation between my student and me after our first class meeting ended; it was also the first time I learned about placement. Juan was originally from Puerto Rico, and he took my English 108 (a second-semester first-year writing course designed for students whose first or strongest language is not English) in Fall 2009 at Arizona State University (ASU).¹

To be honest, as a graduate teaching assistant, I did not know how to respond to the student at that moment, so I just said, “sounds good to me,” as a way to acknowledge his reply to my question. After Juan left, I asked myself many questions: how did Juan end up in a mainstream composition course in the first place? Why did he decide to take English 101? What went into his placement decision process? Juan’s (mis?) placement case, together with a quest for answers to my own questions, was the jumping-off point for my research into the placement of multilingual writers² into college composition courses and also the origin of this book. Multilingual writers mentioned in this book include international visa students and US residents or citizens who are non-native English speaking students. In the remainder of this book, when I refer to the two groups of these multilingual writers, I will use “international multilingual” and “resident multilingual.”

Five years later, I have experienced similar placement cases. As the director of English as a second language (ESL) at my current institution, I have always received email inquiries from students like the one below:

My name is Vincent Prezer. I am currently a sophomore. I need assistance with my writing since English is my second language. I spoke with the English Department and I was told to speak to you to see what courses I should take to improve my writing.

I met with Vincent, a US citizen student, to discuss his placement, and I learned that he previously took English 101. I informed the student what options he had for a second-semester first-year writing course, explaining to him differences and similarities between English 102 and English 132, an equivalent of 102 specifically designed for multilingual students. I did not tell the student what course he should take but let him decide based on information he received from me. Two weeks later, the student emailed me, letting me know that he decided to take English 132.

The anecdotal accounts of Juan and Vincent are not new to writing program administrators (WPAs). Their placement experiences are a single pattern, or at least two overlapping ones: a student takes mainstream composition but is then steered by a teacher away from English 102 because it has been discovered that the student is a multilingual writer. It seems that the students were sort of aimless and passive, being moved around by various authority figures at their universities, when questions we should really be asking are what the students themselves want, how they can make well-informed placement decisions, and exercise their own agency in their placement decisions instead of just doing what others tell them. As yet, we have lacked empirical evidence to explain such placement experiences as well as the placement of multilingual students into college composition courses in particular.

Second language (L2) writing research and writing studies discussion on first-year composition placement has informed us about and allowed us to understand multilingual writers’ placement perceptions and their preferences for enrolling in multilingual composition over mainstream composition or vice versa (e.g., Braine 1996; Chiang and Schmida 1999; Harklau 2000; Costino and Hyon 2007; Ortmeier-Hooper 2008; Ruecker 2011). Yet, as WPAs continue to determine appropriate placement for multilingual students in order to meet their differing needs, what is learned from research into placement preferences and perceptions may not be sufficient. One main reason is that we have neglected to understand how multilingual students make decisions about placement into mainstream or multilingual composition courses. As illustrated by the cases of Juan and Vincent, we do not know how they ended up being in English 101 and what went into their placement decision process, among others. Students’ placement decisions, I argue, are fundamental and need to be fully examined, mainly because those decisions can determine students’ “success or failure” (Braine 1996, 91) in first-year college writing courses.

This book demonstrates why looking at students’ placement decisions is an important element for developing and improving placement practices for multilingual writers in college composition programs. It primarily explores how multilingual students exercise agency in their placement decisions and how student agency can inform the overall programmatic placement of multilingual students in college composition programs. Specifically, the book follows 11 multilingual students who made their decisions about placement into mainstream or multilingual first-year composition courses over the course of one academic year at ASU, a large public university located in the Southwest of the United States. It argues why we need to understand multilingual students’ placement decision-making process more clearly and describes how we should use what we have learned about that process to improve placement practices for multilingual students, particularly how we advise students about placement.

I focus on the placement decisions of multilingual writers because these writers are regularly presenting in institutions of US higher education. According to the Institute of International Education (IIE)’s “2015 Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange” released on November 16, 2015, “the number of international students at U.S. colleges and universities had the highest rate of growth in 35 years, increasing by ten percent to a record high of 974, 926 students in the 2014/2015 academic year” (“2015 Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange” 2015). With this sharply increasing number of international multilingual students, plus a regular presence of resident multilingual students³ in college composition programs, it is essential that WPAs and writing teachers take “responsibility for the regular presence of second language writers in writing classes, to understand their characteristics, and to develop instructional and administrative practices that are sensitive to their linguistic and cultural needs” (CCCC Statement on Second Language Writing and Writers 2009, para. 4; emphasis mine). My research is conducted with ...