Understanding Success and Failure in Adult ESL

Superación vs Dropout of Adult English Learners in the US

Taewoong Kim

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781800412392
• eBook ISBN:
  9781800412422
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Adult Education
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the reasons why adult ESL learners drop out of their language classes and suggests explicit strategies for keeping students engaged. The most effective strategies may be personal rather than technical or curricular. Based on a study of a group of Mexican immigrants to the US, the author proposes that superación or 'self-actualization' is crucial to understanding the relative success of adult ESL learners. Learners' decisions to drop out were not hasty or superficial but were based on a commonsense assessment concerning how the class might improve the quality of their lives. Those involved in delivering ESL to adult learners should stress the tangible, practical advantages that accrue with learning English, and at the same time strive to make instruction relevant.

1 Voices Unheard from the Margins

Thousands of adults come to English as a second language (ESL) classes with great hopes of mastering English. Many of them come in the evening after a long day of work, despite having families at home and untold chores to do (e.g. babysitting duties for friends and preparing cultural events such as the quinceañera [a Mexican cultural celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday]). When an ESL student decides to leave, some administrators might think that the students ‘were just too busy’ or that ‘they were not proficient enough to follow instructions’ or even that ‘they are not smart enough, they don’t have a high school diploma’. However, adult learners, especially immigrants, are, by nature, problem-solvers (Vinogradov & Liden, 2009). Often, they work at several different jobs while living in a foreign country. They learn to adapt to the environment by learning how to support their family, raise their children and get along in their communities. They build up their own networks and establish intimate relationships to solve problems.

In the US, 17.4% of the labor force is foreign born. Most of these individuals have a mother tongue other than English (US Census Bureau, 2020). A fundamental challenge for immigrants living in the US is overcoming the barriers of limited English proficiency (Comings, 2007; Greenberg et al., 2001; Kim et al., 2011). For immigrants, learning English is paramount; a problem that must be solved to ensure survival. When an adult ESL student knocks on the door of a classroom, they are usually motivated and determined to succeed. Norton-Peirce (1995) called the learning of adult ESL students a way of investing in the future (Darvin & Norton, 2015; Norton-Peirce, 1995; Peirce, 2000). Most would do whatever it takes, regarding time, adjusting work schedules and negotiating family responsibilities so that they can learn English. According to Darvin and Norton’s (2015) model of investment, taking ESL classes, investing for learning and staying in or dropping out are all human actions related to the sociocultural and historically situated meaning/identity construction processes.

On the first day of my teaching ESL at the Center for English Literacy (pseudonym) in fall 2016, only one student showed up. By Thanksgiving, enrollment had increased to 20 students. Most of the students were from Latin America, with Spanish as their mother tongue. The students worked as restaurant servers, factory workers, construction laborers and hotel housekeeping staff.

This book explores why adult ESL students drop out and why they stay. In order to explore reasons based on participants’ real stories, I delved into the students’ lives, not only inside the classroom, but also outside the classroom, because students, by nature, bring their learning interests from home to school and vice versa (Auerbach, 1993; Barth, 1972; Dewey, 1903; Krapp, 1999). Learning is an organic and dynamic activity, formed socioculturally in complex ways, predicated upon the adult students’ motivation, which is both complex and multifaceted (Canagarajah, 2006; Norton-Peirce, 1995).

Adult ESL students who come to ESL classes expend significant time, energy and money. In 2016, the US Department of Labor reported that 51.9% of Latinx immigrants’ jobs were hard labor, working mostly in the construction, housekeeping and manufacturing fields (US Department of Labor, 2017). Hard labor jobs are at the margins of our society and thus are the immigrant workers’ lives. One of the core reasons that adult ESL learners learn English is that they view English as enabling them to move from the margins where they live to the central circle of society (Norton-Peirce, 1995; Wang, 2006). For example, immigrant adult ESL learners want to improve their English to work in better conditions such as working in an office, instead of working in the fields day and night (Kim, 2018). When the connection between what a student wants to learn and what is offered in terms of instruction is not apparent, the students’ learning motivation may decrease (Comings, 2007; Han, 2009; Hidi et al., 1992; Krapp, 1999). While retention is a hot topic for undergraduates in college and high school students (Jimerson et al., 2002), it is also a critical factor when working with adult immigrant ESL students.

Adult English Learner Dropouts

What makes adult English learners (ELs) drop out despite the increasing numbers of ELs? The adult EL enrollment rate for adult English literacy classes has decreased over the last decade from 1.1 million (2005–2006) to 0.7 million (2015–2016) (Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education, 2010, 2019). Research has investigated adult EL characteristics (Buttaro, 2002, 2004; Ellis, 2004; Gault, 2003; Gordon, 2004; McVay, 2004; Skilton-Sylvester, 2002), and some researchers have focused on adult learner’s persistence (Comings, 2007; Kerka, 2005; New England Literacy Resource Center, 2009). However, the adult EL dropout phenomenon has gained relatively less scholarly attention nationwide compared to other populations such as high school or college students. The lack of English proficiency or fewer opportunities to improve their English proficiency among the adult immigrant EL population leads to unstable, fatalistic and hopeless attitudes toward English learning (Freire, 1996; Macedo, 2000). Therefore, it is necessary to understand the reasons for dropping out to more effectively and meaningfully support adult immigrant learners of English.

2 Theoretical Frameworks

In this chapter, I first review social justice through English language teaching (ELT) as the overarching framework of this study. Then, I review the spectrum of second language acquisition (SLA) studies and where this study’s dominant theoretical framework, investment (Darvin & Norton, 2015), is located on the continuum. Following a detailed review of investment constructs, the dropout factors of push, pull and fall out (Doll et al., 2013) are reviewed, as it is the second framework adapted in investigating what made the adult learners quit their investment. Lastly, I review the consideration of adult English learners’ (ELs) situatedness (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and the holistic and ecological nature of SLA (Douglas Fir Group, 2016) to advocate for the necessity of a paradigm shift in second language (L2) teaching.

Social Justice through English Language Teaching

In the field of ELT, the topic of social justice emerged with the consideration of critical pedagogy and social transformation through education (Akbari, 2008; Hall, 2016; Hastings & Jacob, 2016). Social justice is defined as socially made conceptualizations, norms and practices toward what is right and what is wrong over time. The specific definition and intricacies of social justice are ever-evolving, dynamic and fluid, as reflected in the characteristics of its counterpart, social injustice, which has no end as it is culturally defined and perceived (Hall, 2016; McLaren, 2016).

Social justice: The conceptualization

The notion of social ‘injustice’ is a good starting point to consider what social justice refers to. Historically, it would be thought-provoking to note that missionary teachers in the 19th-century US actively saw themselves as ‘helping’ Native American students and taught them under the notion of ‘social justice’ at that time, in which they believed that ‘Indians would ultimately confront a fateful choice: civilization or extinction’ (Adams, 1995: 6). The concept of social justice for the missionary teachers during this time period was to ‘civilize the Indians’ from their ‘savage lifestyle’ by educating them through boarding school systems; in other words, by isolating and excluding the Native American students from what they viewed as ‘uncivilized’ life. In fact, this justification helped hide the brutal colonization of Native Americans behind the term ‘civilizing’. A French writer of the era, Jules Ferry, even argued that ‘the superior nations must civilize the inferior races’ (Ennis, 1945: 326). Educators in the 21st century might argue that the 19th-century missionary teachers’ beliefs and actions were too radical because they denigrated or subtracted the heritage of native peoples and violated their human rights to achieve their goals. However, the consensus in the 19th century was that civilizing supposedly ‘savage people’ was a form of social justice. The belief of equating ‘civilization’ and ‘social justice’ was destructive for the people who suffered from such ‘justice’. In retrospect, perhaps it was most harmful for the identities of students (Norton-Peirce, 1995; Peirce, 2000). ‘Taking out’ an individual from his/her cultural heritage space is based on the rationale of an inferior–superior cultural dichotomy such as racism or neocolonialism, which is unjust (Patel, 2015). Being removed from one’s heritage through subtractive schooling (Valenzuela, 2005) can dehumanize and harm one’s identity. For this reason, considerations about ‘humanity and identity’ typically are at the center of discussions of social justice (Canagarajah, 2006; Hall, 2016; Nieto, 1994; Peirce, 2000).

Influences from biases to mind

Scholars have found that aspects of ‘humanity and identity’ can be influenced, either positively or negatively, by social justice issues:

• social/racial/gender/economic differences (Hall, 2016: 4);
• unequal power dynamics between social groups – oppressors vs. the oppressed (Freire, 1996, 1998);
• underlying and imposing mindsets through holistic socially made classes and structures (Bernstein, 1971; Macedo, 1994; Macedo & Bartolomé, 2014).

Exclusion from social resources, which include not only materialistic resources such as money, cars, houses or food, but also literacy and numeracy knowledge and skills, harms the people who are implicitly and explicitly oppressed (Freire, 1996; Peirce, 2000). Particularly for adult ELs, learning English is a fundamental resource.

Another example of social injustice would be the racism-based notions, norms and terminology in our society. Such terminologies implicitly convey racism in our daily lives toward certain groups of people, although the concept of ‘race’ is a social construct. For example, ‘border-rats’ was used to refer to Mexican-Americans living on the border (Macedo, 2000), sending a negative message and image of the ‘race’ to the public.

The hierarchical mentality provided through terms, social norms and unearned privileges schematizes a binary conceptualization about what is right or standard and what is not standard, thus wrong. In English as a second language (ESL) classrooms, the use of ‘standard English’ implies that it is the only ‘legitimate’ English to teach. Usually ‘standard English’ refers to White English speakers’ English use, their pronunciation, ways of composing phrases and idioms (Chantrain, 2016). It seems clear that the well-known ‘English-only policy’ adopted by ESL institutions since the 1980s is based on the binary mindset of English as right and whole variant forms of English are wrong. Yet, research has found that encouraging ESL students to use their first language (L1) can bring positive effects to L2 learning (Auerbach, 1993; Storch & Wigglesworth, 2003). However, ESL teachers often seem to forbid their students from using their L1 for the sake of improving their L2 (Storch & Wigglesworth, 2003).

In the 21st-century ESL classroom, antagonism toward L1 use and variant forms of English still lingers. The term ‘nativism’ in ESL refers to biased racism in teaching. Nieto (1994) advocates for an awareness of nativism in language teaching. It is not uncommon to find that EL students are sometimes regarded as ‘less intelligent’ based on their lower English proficiency (Norton, 2012; Webster & Lu, 2012). This oversimplified categorization of immigrated students can be detrimental in many ways, including damaging to a student’s self-concept (Norton, 2012).

Oppression on a mental level might make or force the oppressed to ‘think’ in the following ways that reflect internalized biases such as gender bias, racial bias, social bias and so forth: ‘I can’t do this, I am inferior to the rich/intelligent people in power (social bias). I, as a non-White person, am born with this unintelligent brain (racial bias). I can’t master science because I am a girl (gender bias). I can’t go to college, I’d better to go to a factory, as I am from a poor family and nobody in my family went to college (economic bias)’. This type of fatalism (Freire, 1996) or internalized oppression (Fanon, 2008) is at the core of self-doubt. The fatalistic mindset is imposed, forced and indoctrinated implicitly and explicitly as illustrated in the examples above, and it is reinforced through multifaceted ways in our society. In education, these fatalistic viewpoints can be reinforced through interactions between a teacher and students and between students and their peers. Research found that students even indirectly internalize an ‘oppressed mindset’ from the power dynamics illustrated among school administrations and field teachers (Anyon, 1980; Bernstein, 1971).

Oppression in the form of gaps or unequal access to materialistic/tangible/superficial resources and the effects of this on one’s mind is dynamically alive, subtly but closely intertwined with social injustice because it harms the students. An L2 teacher would do well to have an awareness of these notions of social justice, injustice and oppression, because ‘language’ is at the center of both tangible and mental resources in human rights and identity (Canagarajah, 2006).

The concept of social justice, by nature, is dynamically interrelated with the notions and considerations of race, privilege, socioeconomic status (gaps), equity, diversity, culture and identity (...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: A Broken Car
• 1 Voices Unheard from the Margins
• 2 Theoretical Frameworks
• 3 Adult English Literacy Learners in America and Research Context
• 4 The Six Persistent Learners
• 5 Who They Are: Thematic Identity of the Six Adult English Learners
• 6 What Drives Investment
• 7 What Makes Adult ELs Drop Out
• 8 What Makes Adult ELs Stay
• 9 Discussion
• 10 Implications and Conclusion
• References
• About the Author
• Index