Report of Sara Baldwin's Sabbatical Leave from South Seattle Community College

My sabbatical leave from September, 2008 - March, 2009 was a very valuable experience for me. I learned a lot from the many activities I participated in, the research I conducted and from the chance to reflect on all of it. I came back to teaching in spring quarter with a new perspective and goals as well as the renewed energy to pursue them.

During the summer and fall quarters, I presented at four conferences related to transition: the State ABE/ESL Rendezvous Conference at Seattle University, The Student Success Conference in Anaheim, CA, Pathways from Community to Community College at SSCC sponsored by Seattle Jobs Initiative, and the Effective Transitions in Adult Education Conference in Providence, Rhode Island. Each of these helped to further the objectives I set forth in my application.

The biannual State ABE/ESL Rendezvous Conference in July, which was focused on Transition, brought together community college ABE/ESL faculty and staff from across the state. I presented with Bob Hughes, my former dean, and Sy Ear, SSCC Transition Services advisor. It was very well received and in the final session where state ABE/ESL programs reported out on the transition strategies they planned to implement, many of them borrowed from ones we had initiated, including Transition Day, a dedicated ESL advisor, a healthcare pathway, faculty learning communities etc. I attended one session about I-BEST Phebotomy at Highline CC and at this small session, the participants were all from different healthcare and ESL fields around the state. We had a great information exchange and later set up a kind of listserv of the group. This conference was a great place to discuss and share transition strategies with colleagues from other colleges, and I learned a lot and established some valuable contacts especially in terms of models combining ESL and healthcare. A group of ESL faculty from North and South came up with a plan. See: Rendevous Conference Program Improvement Project Plan in addendum. However, we have not had any further meetings.

The Pathways from Community to Community College at SSCC sponsored by Seattle Jobs Initiative in fall quarter was very interesting for me. I participated on a panel discussing healthcare bridging programs. The other panelists represented programs from around the country. South’s Healthcare Pathway program showed up well in comparison to the others in its ability to transition students from CNA through the pre-requisites into LPN with a high completion and success rate. The conference was also useful to me because, in preparation for it, I had to interact with our Worksource Center to complete a survey of our services. This helped me get to know people in the Center that I hadn’t met before and to find out more about what kinds of services the Center provides. I was woefully unaware of the processes and people there and learning about them and attending the conference was helpful to me in being able to better counsel my students, design orientation programs for our SSCC Transition Days and in my inquiries into Australian programs.

The Effective Transitions in Adult Education Conference in Providence, Rhode Island is the only national conference whose focus is transition. It was a three day conference of participants from around the country and it proved to be a very interesting resource. The Dean of Basic and Transitional Studies at South, Donna Miller-Parker and I presented a very well attended session called, “Our Mission is Transition,” In preparing for it, I found an appealing way to categorize transition efforts. “Approaches to ABE Transition to Postsecondary Education” by Judith Alamprese in Focus on Basics, Volume 6, Issue D, “The approaches… can be categorized into three types: awareness and orientation activities, counseling and referral activities, and comprehensive transition programs. Keeping these in mind can be helpful in program planning so that activities are planned in all of these areas. This conference was a great opportunity for me to work with our dean and to fully appreciate her expertise and commitment to the area of transition. Our presentation got later recognition when it received very favorable comments on the national listserv. Many of the sessions were worthwhile and relevant, especially the ones focusing on healthcare bridging programs. It was important for me to see how well our Healthcare Pathway compared to other efforts to bridge NNES and first generation college students into LPN and RN nursing programs. It and our I-BEST CNA program stand up remarkably well in comparison. In addition, one session from the National Center for Developmental Education, “Making Connections: Promising Practices in Adult and Developmental Education Collaboration” was particularly interesting and effective in that it advocated the combining of ABE/ESL and Developmental English and math classes so that students (and teachers) would have the benefit of the two separate approaches combined in one classroom instead of having to go through each separately. This would be a promising approach to implement at South. It brought the two, usually divergent, faculties together to collaborate on best practices in instruction. Finally, I was shocked to learn that the majority of transition programs, especially on the East Coast, focus on transition from ESL programs into ABE/GED programs; whereas, we are focusing primarily on transition into college programs. This calls for significantly different approaches, and I think our approach is more helpful to NNES students because we can focus our programs more on their language needs which allows them to make the transition to college more quickly and successfully.

The Student Success Conference in Anaheim, at which I presented with our Transition Services advisor, Sy Ear, was a statewide California conference of basic skills practitioners, but which included expertise from around the country. Our presentation was paired with The Career Ladders Project. We collaborated with them on the presentation and in doing so, learned about their efforts. They are new and very well funded and are using a modified I-BEST model to recruit people who had never been on a community college campus. They have multiple sites in California and are reporting success in their efforts to deliver initial training to students whom they hope will continue on a career pathway into college. They don’t seem to have figured out how to manage the next steps in the pathway, though, and followed up by consulting with us about our Healthcare Pathway and the successful faculty learning communities project we sponsored at South for three years

In planning their programs, they visited Keith Marler at SSCC to learn about the model for I-BEST training. What I found most interesting about what they were doing is their outreach into a community which is traditionally underserved: high school drop outs. They represent such a high proportion of the population and very few programs are reaching out to them. Although we currently have to turn away students, I think that creating programs appealing to this population makes long-term sense for our community.

This conference also put me in touch with some very exciting projects, Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC) is a partnership of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation. These projects helped to shape my sabbatical research. From their website, http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/programs/sub.asp?key=26&subkey=2662&topkey=26,
“A central feature of the SPECC initiative is an emphasis on data-driven innovations and data-driven policy. Participating campuses are collecting data by various methods—class performance, surveys, student and faculty focus groups, etc.—to inform discussion and decision making at their institution. The data will also be shared across campuses to provide a wider view of project impact.” It is “A multi-site action-research project, SPECC (which) focuses on teaching and learning in pre-collegiate mathematics and English language arts courses at 11 California community colleges. These courses, which cover material often termed "developmental" or "basic," serve as prerequisites to transfer-level academic courses. On each campus, faculty members are exploring different approaches to classroom instruction, academic support, and faculty development. Their inquiry into the effects of these approaches engages a wide range of data, including examples of student work, classroom observations, and quantitative campus data. The ultimate goal of their investigations, and of SPECC as a whole, is to support student learning and success through a culture of inquiry and evidence.” This well funded California initiative has been underway for a number of years and is showing impressive results. In all of the research I conducted, I found the multiple initiatives started under this umbrella have been the most exciting and innovative I’ve seen.

The Seattle Community Colleges could use the excellent work they have done as a basis for its own faculty inquiry groups into developmental education. Perhaps this could be the basis for a Gates Foundation Grant proposal. This article, Basic Skills for Complex Lives is especially relevant to our situation. The report calls for a new vision of professional development, “campuses must reinvent professional development as an intellectually engaging, integral element of their ongoing work…Our recommendation, more specifically is for a form of professional development that took shape on SPECC campuses, which we call Faculty Inquiry Groups (FIGs), where educators work together in sustained ways to investigate and improve their students’ learning.” From the website, http://specctoolkit.carnegiefoundation.org/, “The core work of faculty inquiry involves instructors asking questions about the teaching and learning that goes on in their own classrooms; seeking answers by consulting the literature, gathering and analyzing evidence, and engaging students in the process whenever possible; using what they find out to improve the experience of their students; and sharing this work with colleagues so that they and their students can benefit too. Usually, questioning begins with a problem the instructor has perceived—something that’s not going right.” (Mary Huber, The Promise of Faculty Inquiry for Teaching and Learning Basic Skills, 13)
They go on to say that this can’t happen without another crucial element: “institutional research must be expanded to focus more directly on core issues of teaching and learning.” Their comprehensive electronic toolkit, Windows on Learning, Resources for Basic Skills Education, is an amazing source of lessons, multimedia curricular supports, and work done by FIGs created by SPECC faculty, and it is open to anyone.


As the report states, “Most faculty teaching developmental courses have no particular training for the role. They look around and realize that remediation is seen by their colleagues as second-class work, and they rightly understand the potential for frustration and burnout. At the institutional level, developmental programs are often treated as the poor cousin of transfer-level courses. Historically, the transfer function has been the prestige mission for community colleges, and many campuses have not made the commitments or invested the resources required to make pre-collegiate education more than a revolving door. Nor, in fact, do they want to be seen as a place for remediation. In short, basic skills education on most campuses has been shunted off to the margins, staffed by part-timers, and underfunded. Expectations have been way too low.”

The report goes on to say that this trend is beginning to change, at least in California. Some think it should be “job one” of community colleges. “As Alexander Astin has observed, ‘effective ‘remedial’ education would do more to alleviate our most serious social and economic problems than almost any other action we could take.’ “ FIGs would be an excellent means for working to improve developmental education in our colleges, but as stated above, the colleges would have to commit resources in the form of institutional researchers to work with faculty in this vital inquiry.

In addition to SPECC, I learned about the California Basic Skills Initiative, BSI, to better prepare students. From their March, 2008 newsletter, their goals include: research and data collection, professional development, student equity, high school to college transition, and website and electronic sharing. For this latter goal, it has created “ a database of professional development and student programs as a part of the English as a Second Language/Basic Skills Professional Development grant funded by the California Chancellor’s Office. This database contains programs, strategies and practices that colleges submitted using two criteria: demonstrated student success and sufficient quantitative and/or qualitative data to substantiate their effectiveness. However, it is the student equity goal which I find most compelling. “Too often, college efforts to address college success are done in isolation. To assist colleges to do the work they are already doing with the work they are doing under the basic Skills Initiative, BSI will integrate college Student Equity Plans into the processes for addressing student success in ESL/basic skills. With 80% of first time freshmen assessed as needing to take pre-collegiate coursework in English, mathematics, and or ESL, issues of student equity are central to ESL/basic skills efforts and success at every college. The intent of the Student Equity Plans, developed by colleges in 2005, is to ensure that the composition of students who enroll are retained, transfer, or achieve their occupational goals mirrors the diversity of the population of the college’s service area.” This approach, focusing on equity, is very exciting to me, as I have long believed that NNES students are not always treated equitably in our colleges from the standpoint of their special needs. Their approach tries to ensure the success of all the students enrolled.

In terms of developmental education another aspect that I thought we could learn from is the Organizational and Administrative Practices the BSI has set forth. ”Institutional choices concerning program structure, organization, and management have been related to the overall effectiveness of developmental education programs. The following effective practices have been identified in this area:
A.1 Developmental education is a clearly stated institutional priority.
A.2 A clearly articulated mission based on a shared, overarching philosophy drives the developmental education program.
A.3 The developmental education program is centralized or highly coordinated.
A.4 Institutional policies facilitate student completion of necessary developmental coursework as early as possible in the educational sequence.
A.5 A comprehensive system of support services exists, and is characterized by a high degree of integration among academic and student support services.
A.6 Faculty who are both knowledgeable and enthusiastic about developmental education are recruited and hired to teach in the program.
A.7 Institutions manage faculty and student expectations regarding developmental education.”

Perhaps, the most exciting initiative I learned about is the California Benchmarking Project, Enhancing Institutional Effectiveness and Equity. The University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education’s Center for Urban Education CUE has created an Equity-Based Assessment Toolkit. A description of the project is on their website http://www.usc.edu/dept/education/CUE/projects/index.htm. “CUE has launched the California Benchmarking Project to develop an evidence-based model of assessment to improve college effectiveness, and harness untapped practitioner expertise to produce equitable transfer outcomes and increase the number of community college students, particularly African-Americans and Latinos, who successfully complete their first transfer-level course after beginning college in “basic skills” level courses. Teams from the three lead colleges – Long Beach City College, Los Angeles Southwest College and Rio Hondo College – have each convened evidence teams of faculty, administrators, and counselors who will conduct research on their own campuses and provide leadership in the development of practitioner-driven assessment.” Their toolkit, which they are glad to provide, offers a very complete toolkit/road map describing, in detail, the process needed to produce “equitable transfer outcomes.”

In the Fall of 2008, I polled ESL and ABE students about their potential majors and the barriers they have encountered. See addendum. The most popular major that students identified is still nursing, but other popular majors included accounting, business, and computers. In trying to see how we could use this information to assist students, I came up with the idea to enlist ESL/ABE faculty who are interested in transition to identify a program that they could become very familiar with so that they could advise students who are interested in that major and help them make the necessary connections. This would give students another person to discuss their goals with besides their teacher. These days it’s very hard to get appointments with college advisors and counselors, and for this initial work (which doesn’t involve the difficult matters of which courses to take, etc.) it’s appropriate to involve faculty. In my sabbatical research, I have read about programs that incorporate some sort of faculty advising role, but not a model which focuses on faculty specializations in specific program areas. Of course, if the division takes up this proposal, it would need to be vetted with Student Services.

In my research on barriers, the article, “Building the Desire, Building the Ability” by Brenda Dann-Messier & Eva I. Kampits. In Focus on Basics, Volume 6, Issue D, was helpful in categorizing the kinds of barriers students confront. “They include situational, dispositional, and institutional factors that affect and are often beyond the control of adult learners. Situational factors include job, health, financial, and legal issues and family and personal problems. Dispositional factors include expectations, self esteem, level of family support, and past educational experiences. Institutional factors including the educational bureaucracy itself, program fees, scheduling and procedures that serve a traditionally younger and more dependent student population can either help or hinder participation.”

The barriers students identified in my questionnaire and subsequent interviews included all three of these categories: money, perceived level of English proficiency and self confidence, schedules and the length of time it takes to proceed through developmental math and English, saying that the time it takes for them to complete these courses eats up much of the financial aid they are able to obtain. This, in turn, makes them more hesitant to transition out of non-credit ESL and ABE. It is interesting that these students perceive that some of their most significant difficulties are in developmental math and English which is completely in line with the California research and statewide initiatives I discussed earlier.

In summer and fall quarters, I continued to attend meetings of our Nursing Transition Taskforce which includes faculty and administrators from nursing and ESL. We’ve been trying to troubleshoot strategies to ensure that graduating non-native speaking English-speaking LPN’s’ pronunciation is understandable. We determined that our first step would be to find out how to assess students’ speaking proficiency. To that end, I contacted colleagues at the University of Washington’s Intensive English program and Teaching Assistant education program to find out what they do about pronunciation. Although the meeting was very interesting, I didn’t think that the assessments they used for oral proficiency would be practical for our uses. See addendum Interestingly enough, I later learned that one of my colleagues, Allan French, had become a trainer in a new oral proficiency test called the BEST (Center for Applied Linguistics) and would be able and willing to train colleagues to use this relatively easy and cheap oral assessment instrument within the coming year. This was very good news and as soon as some of us get the training, the Nursing department would like to provide the first group of students to be tested.

I had been Transitions Coordinator in the B&TS division since we began focusing on transition some five years ago. The Transition Committee and I created a very innovative program of events. I was able to pass the mantle onto the capable hands of a colleague, Arleen Williams, whose organizational skills are far stronger than mine. She and the transition committee, with the help of our API grant, were able to carry on the tradition we had established of quarterly Transition Days. However, Transition Day program under her capable leadership was far better organized than I had been able to achieve. It was quite a learning experience for me to give this effort up and then see how she helped to make it even better. I will probably be the Transition Coordinator next year, but by being away from it and seeing what another person puts into it, I think I can bring a renewed understanding of it.

In preparation for my research in Australia, we hosted Amanda McKay, senior lecturer in ELL, on her Churchill Travel Fellowship from Adelaide, Australia to look into South’s programs in May, 2008. She was looking into strategies and programs that assist refugees and migrants into employment in a research trip that took her through California, Oregon, Washington, Canada and the UK. It was very helpful to spend an extended amount of time with her because we found that the subjects of our research into immigrant English and (vocational) training had a lot in common. I learned that the way Australia was educating their immigrants provided some differences from the norm in Washington state. In particular, I wanted to look into how they paired their immigrant English with vocational training programs. This was a great help in how I would focus my research efforts in Australia.

My major focus areas included:
* observing programs which prepare people from non English speaking backgrounds for the workplace and beyond
* meeting with practitioners in the field of ESL and workplace training to discuss issues and strategies for making the training relevant and effective
* learning about programs which combine English language development with the development of skills for the workplace

I also created some questions that I wanted to focus my inquiry around. They included:
• What types of employment do migrants and refugees get and what are the barriers to getting work?
• What vocational training programs are available for refugees & migrants? What level of English is required for these training programs?
• In the programs you are involved with, what is the mix of English, vocational training, work experience, workplace culture training used to assist refugees into the workforce?
• Do training programs exist which integrate language development and vocational training? How do they function?
• Are there career ladders or pathways being established to bridge these student/workers into the next level of skills?


I visited SWAN TAFE in Perth, Australia in the first week of February which was their first week of the term. I met with Philip Nichols and Patrick O’Keefe who are the lead teachers in The AMEP (Adult Migrant Education Program). They contract with the government to deliver English only at three levels of English but for my visit, we focused on the Level III certificate which is equivalent to our ESL level 5 and represents up to 510 hours of study and/or attainment of a certificate. Full time study is 15 hours per week with ten-week terms. SWAN TAFE had 1200 AMEP students at their different sites. All the classrooms have Smartboards and LCD projectors. They also have a well-stocked Teacher Resource Center staffed with a librarian. In addition, they have an ILC, Independent Learning Center, staffed full time by a teacher. She sets up independent learning contracts with AMEP students who need a flexible schedule.

Students are assessed and those migrants who score above this level aren’t eligible to study in AMEP; however, there is another TAFE-based program SWE where they can go to get a level four certificate. I was told, however, that after an AMEP certificate 3 is earned, they are considered ready to handle a regular TAFE course. To facilitate this, they have been trying to create some Pathways, with varying success. Finding funding is difficult. The ones they have attempted are First Aid which is a necessary auxiliary qualification needed for mining work, Community Service—(this was a new class that had just started and I wasn’t able to learn much about it), Hospitality-taster in which students get a ‘taste’ of the different jobs in hospitality, and VET-VOC Ed focusing on generic employability skills in this area. In this course, they learned about workplace conventions like channels of authority, speech, behavior, reliability, punctuality, and personal presentation. They also dealt with workplace practices including flexible work arrangements, leave management, industry standards, workplace safety and evaluation. The term is divided into 90 hours of class plus 10 hours of independent practice. They also gain 40 hours of work experience. Mentored and help with job placement for each participant is given. They have run each of these Pathways once and hope to run them again. In each, they employed tandem teaching which is like our I-Best model.

In comparison with what I later learned in my visit to the TAFE SA in Adelaide, the SWAN TAFE programs seemed to be in the initial stages of development. TAFE SA, on the other hand, ran a wide variety of these tandemly taught courses with good success and had been doing so for a number of years. I was able to observe classes at TAFE SA at a number of their facilities. I started out in their downtown branch in the Rundle Mall campus with a Communications class linked to a Financial Services class. The students were enrolled in a one term Financial Services class as well as a Communications class. The latter class was taught by an ESL teacher and combined the outcomes for their standard Communications class with the writing outcomes for the previously mentioned AMEP level III certificate. This teacher had worked enough times with the Communications teacher that she was able to take over and integrate the two subjects into one course and teach it alone. This was not unique; other ESL teachers, teaching in tandem with communications teachers had also been able to integrate the two courses and teach them. On the other hand, the finance (accounting) class was the standard TAFE course but with an instructor who had worked successfully with a purely migrant population previously. The class had a very diverse population and I was able to interact with them through a number of communication activities the teacher had set up. I got a copy of the TAFE-published book she used which combined the two courses. I was impressed with the book because of the highly contextualized writing assignments which helped the students learn the kinds of writing and communication they needed to be successful in their field. I was able to borrow from it when I taught a writing skills class this spring quarter, and found the approach to writing very refreshing in its grounding in real writing tasks.

I also visited an IT class for students also at AMEP Level III. This was interesting for a number of reasons. First, the IT instructor who had taught this class to migrants quite a few times was able to teach it largely without the help of the ESL teacher who was in the class with him, so in this case the content teacher had learned how to make his course understandable and accessible to the ESL population which in this case was all Burmese male migrants. Also interesting was the fact that he was teaching them WORD 2007!

I really enjoyed my visit to a very innovative class in Childcare Services. Level III students were learning the skills to work in childcare facilities or to run a childcare center in their own home. (I was happy to learn that students who graduated from this program could expect to be paid well and have a living wage.) The teacher was unique in that, having taught this population a number of times in a tandem teaching arrangement, she went back to get her ESL endorsement and now has integrated all the outcomes into one course. (One resource which really assists this kind of innovation is that most of the TAFEs publish teachers’ books and materials for them and then sell them to the students. Teachers are able to update the materials easily and so keep materials relevant.) These students do a kind of practicum; they individually visit different childcare sites every week and then discuss what they learned there. The course takes two terms or six months, but the teacher said that they need an additional 3 months to complete all the assessments.

I visited a class in Aged Care at another site which provides similar training to our CNA program, and most of the jobs in Aged Care are in nursing homes. I had seen a number of CNA classes at South and the training was very similar. These were level II students. As with our CNA class, lower level students are able to successfully learn this material. The nurse-educator was very experienced and enthusiastic, and like the IT instructor, didn’t make use of the ESL instructor in the room because she had learned how to teach to this population. One interesting perk that TAFE SA offers its faculty who teach on different campuses is a taxi voucher they can use to go to other campuses.

At a low level of ESL was a Job Pathways class I observed. The students were mostly newly arrived migrants who were learning how get around the city by public transportation using tourist maps, time tables and telephone books. (This was also helpful to me because I was trying to negotiate the public transportation system as well.) They were working in groups and I circulated and participated a little with each group, many of whom were Congolese.

I also met with two job counselors to discuss challenges that migrants faced. They met individually with each student to help them become job-ready. Interestingly enough, they identified the lack of a driver’s license to be the most significant barrier to students being able to find and keep a job. They had very good resources at their disposal and shared them with me.

Also, I visited their Learning Resource Center which was free to students. As at the SWAN TAFE, they provided books, cassettes, videos and kits arranged in the categories: Grammar, Listening, Speaking and Vocabulary. There is staff available to assist students in locating appropriate materials. There are also computers available there.

In addition, I was shown around their educational resource production facilities which were very impressive. Not only do they publish the books used in classes, they also design and produce a myriad of other materials to support education. One can see the breadth of the resources they produce at their TAFE SA site. https://products.tafesa.edu.au

I met with a teacher/curriculum writer who was in the process of creating an online resource through Moodle, a free, open source e-learning platform developed in Australia, that would help foreign doctors and nurses gain the skills they needed to learn to pass the medical qualifying exams to practice in country. The exam is computerized and she was creating a practice test bank of items similar to the state exam, so students could practice. The Moodle tool seemed to serve her purposes very effectively. It is a tool which I would like to experiment with.

Perhaps the most interesting activity I participated in was a norming session with the whole ESL faculty of about 40 teachers. They were assembled to look at student writing samples used to assess writing outcomes at different levels. Our B&TS Division has, for more than two years, been working to establish learning outcomes in Speaking and Listening and Reading and Writing. We have recently finished and voted to accept them. Our next task is to discuss and clarify how they will be taught and then how to assess them. The norming session I participated in at TAFE SA had already reached this latter stage of assessment. Their process, assessment criteria, and conditions and methods of assessment will be very interesting for our division to look at and I brought back materials for us to study. I have agreed to present those materials and their process to the B&TS faculty at our next divisional retreat just before fall quarter.

For migrants, one difference between Australian cities and American cities is that there are pretty good job prospects for them in the fields they are studying. Australian cities weren’t experiencing the kinds of unemployment that we are in the USA. In fact, the Australian government is recruiting qualified migrant applicants who are willing to train and presumably work in identified areas of need.

I was particularly interested in learning about how ‘soft skills’ are dealt with in these programs, and I found a much stronger focus on them than in the US programs I know about. In the booklet, ‘Employability skills and workplace culture in Australia, A guide for new migrants to Western Australia planning to enter the workplace,’ I found a much more spelled-out approach with some intriguing cultural differences. In this Department of Education guide, employability and workforce culture in Australia are dealt with in a very prescriptive way. New employees should do and learn about the following:
o Encouraged to retain own language; however, “a certain level of English proficiency is necessary to perform well in the workplace.”
o Typical colloquialisms the new migrant might not know
o Playing of practical jokes common in the workplace
o Frequent use of swear words
o Level of formality expected (Australian workplaces are relaxed and informal.)
o Asking questions encouraged
o Neat appearance expected in some jobs
o Relaxed management styles
o Accepting different types of people on equal terms
o Taking initiative

It’s clear from this booklet that the ‘Australian workplace’ seems a bit different from the US. Indeed, they are willing to state that there is a behavior norm. I’m not sure that in the more multicultural US, the government would feel comfortable defining one unified workforce culture. Another contrast is that migrants are ‘encouraged to retain own language,’ and that only “a certain level of English proficiency is necessary to perform well in the workplace.” I think the US or state government would encourage full proficiency in English for full participation in work and society. However, I’m glad to see that they officially condone retention of the migrant’s native language.

On April 22, 2009, I presented some of my research to my division at a divisional faculty development meeting. I hope to present in more detail to a wider forum in fall quarter. I would like to help organize such a forum of other faculty reporting on their sabbatical projects. I think this should be part of the annual district faculty development program.

First addendum
Rendevous Conference Program Improvement Project Plan
Challenge: Students may want to transition to programs outside of each of our colleges. How can we do a better job of advising and referral?
We need to:
• Identify transition possibilities on campus
• Identify transition possibilities beyond our campus
• Identify programs which are friendly to non-traditional students and demonstrate success with this population
• Find out who gets the ‘student achievement ‘ momentum points, the sending or receiving institution
• Gather information about students leaving our campus to advocate for program development on our campus
• Make this data available to our faculty and students
• Collaborate with North and Central in this effort.

These ideas were generated by a combined group of ABE/ESL teachers from South, and North.

Second addendum

Summary Results of B&TS Student Transition Questionnaire
Fall, 2008

I surveyed seven classes. They were asked to state a career preference. While there were a lot of different responses, there were certain careers that proved more popular than others. Following is a list of career/majors and the numbers of students who were interested in them:
Nursing 26
Accounting 6
Business 5
Computer 5
Auto Mechanic 3
Aviation 3
Science/engineering 3
Culinary Arts 3
Electronic Technician 3
English 3
English 101 3
Engineering 2
Pharmacy tech 2
Psychology 2
Transitional ESL 2
GED 2

They were also given a list of possible barriers they might be encountering in their pursuit of a career. They were asked to rank them (one out of ten with ten being the hardest)in terms of the how hard they were to overcome.
The categories and average ranking follow:

Amount of money it will cost me 7/10
My level on English proficiency 6/10
My work schedule conflicts with classes 5/10
Family/childcare responsibilities 4/10
I’m not confident in my academic ability 4/10
I’m not sure I can do all the course/homework 4/10
My visa/immigration status 2/10

They listed other barriers as well including: transportation, writing, money, work schedule, single mother, working many hours, English proficiency, my family responsibility, weather in US, work time, I’m not a resident, grammar and word order, health, age, to enter bridge class.
Assessment of Oral Competency

Third addendum

Report of meeting on 10/30/08 with UW personnel, Alex Jones, Coordinator of the UW AEP and Amy Renehan, Coordinator of the UW IEP

Neither the UW AEP nor IEP assesses oral proficiency discretely except with International TAs. With International TAs, the AEP uses the results of the SPEAK test to determine if students need to take ENG 105 which has as its goal, “to improve the student’s ability to communicate in English in a classroom situation…Course activities will be divided into working on pronunciation, and working on teaching skills as a way to compensate for pronunciation errors.” The final assessment for this course involves the student’s performance being assessed by three raters, not including the teacher. This course would be interesting to find out more about as the organization might help to inform the planning of CMN 115. It’s a bit like content-based pronunciation. Besides a pronunciation book, they use a book, Communicate by Janice A Smith, Colleen Meyers, and Amy Burkhalter from the Univ. of Minn. Waveland Publishers, Long Grove, Illinois. I will try to get a copy. I have the syllabus for ENG 105.

The SPEAK test is administered in a lab. Students listen to prompts which vary in difficulty and type. From completing phrases that they hear to telling a story from pictures to reading a passage, to big open ended questions. It is assessed based on grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, fluency, and comprehensibility. It costs apx. $150 to take the test. The IBT TOEFL has a speaking section, but it hasn’t been used much yet by the UW even though all non-citizen UW applicants must take the TOEFL. Their entrance is based on the reading, writing and listening sections. Because the IBT TOEFL is now able to test speaking, the SPEAK is getting much less used. The IBT TOEFL speaking section has some advantages over the SPEAK. It’s cheaper and more widely administered. The speaking tasks are integrated with the reading, and listening. Students are asked to summarize a lecture, voice an opinion and try to persuade. Also, it doesn’t just focus on academic English; it also tests competency in the vernacular.

In the IEP, the program for international students, students are not formally assessed on their spoken proficiency either. However, informal assessment during intake might place a low level student who has pronunciation difficulties in a specific program with a strong oral-aural focus. Besides the mandatory speaking and listening classes which I discuss later, they only offer one pronunciation-conversation class in the IEP which is at level four and focuses on conversation management skills.

The only other test that is accepted by the UWIEP is the IELTS which is used by most countries outside of the US instead of the TOEFL. Because it uses in-person raters, who can ask some follow up questions, it is able to assess interactive spoken English The 11-14 minutes devoted to speaking is not integrated with other skills. There are three tasks which start easy and get harder. The first task is generally about a mundane daily topic. In the next task, the student is given paper and pencil to use to take notes for one minute to prepare to answer a question such as, what do you think makes a good teacher? The last task requires he student to go more in depth about the topic in task 2 calling for more abstract language ability. Raters ask questions and there is give and take. When the test is over, raters have 5 minutes to do their rating, but they can view a videotape of the session if they need to. The IELTS places students’ oral competency into 9 levels. It is less effective/precise at the low levels. The UWIEP accepts students into their program at a 6.0 and the UW accepts them into regular programs at a 7. Raters use a rubric which helps them assess for fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation.

The IEP has at least 3 levels of speaking and listening classes. In the past three quarters, they have been testing a new final assessment system involving raters and rubrics as the IELTS uses. Previous to this, individual teachers had assessed student presentations to determine proficiency at a level. They decided to change because they felt that this method did not assess core conversational competencies like the following: ‘share ideas and opinions’, and .’practice different styles of communication to manage discussions more effectively.’ Faculty felt that in order to assess those kinds of skills, they would need to put 2 or 3 students together with a variety of tasks or activities. They also decided to have two raters evaluating each group. They have been using this system for three quarters, and although there are drawbacks, including the need to train and retrain teachers, they felt that it was the most effective and authentic testing system. I found this system to be a very valid way of assessing oral competency, and aspects of it could serve as a model for us. I’ve collected copies of their rating form competencies and holistic rubric for their level four.

Recommendations for starting to focus on oral proficiency
Make sure the frontline…those the students encounter first (like those working in advising and registration and reception) are aware of the fact that they need to let students know when their pronunciation is interfering with comprehension and that there are pronunciation classes available to them.

Perhaps a flyer describing the class available in registration/counseling? We could create a script which helps with polite language to alert the student of his pronunciation difficulty? Faculty, too, should be aware that they are doing the student no favors by overlooking their incomprehensibility. Perhaps, we need to come up with a campus training/dialog in this area?