Costino and Hyon’s article pertaining to ESL students’ feelings regarding identity labels and their choice to enroll in mainstream versus multilingual composition courses was an appropriate article for my next blog entry as last week’s class briefly mentioned this topic. As I read through the introduction, I recalled how we had discussed that some ESL students may take offense to certain “labels” regarding their L2 status. In addition, they may even choose to enroll in mainstream composition courses for this very reason. These issues motivated Costino and Hyon’s study in which they analyzed “possible connections or disconnections among students’ responses to identity labels, their residency statuses, and their composition course preferences” (65). The study centered around two main questions:
1. “How do [students] understand and affiliate with various linguistic identity labels that are often institutionally ascribed to them?”
2. “Why do students prefer one type of composition course (mainstream or multilingual) over another? (65)
As I have chosen to direct my focus toward the effects of language policy within the ESL composition classroom, I was especially interested in the findings pertaining to question #2.
For their study, the authors interviewed nine ESL students taken from both mainstream and multilingual composition courses. They asked the students questions regarding their “experiences in basic writing and [first year composition],” as well as questions in which the students described the preparation, patterns, and methods used in the courses. In addition, the authors also included questions inquiring about the identity labels students encountered while enrolled in their courses and their reasoning for preferring either mainstream or multilingual composition courses (66-67). Their findings concluded that the students who were interviewed “defined the labels in terms of English language ability, though they did not always agree on which labels signified strong or weak ability” (69). More interestingly, most students expressed the desire to enroll in a course with other students with whom they could relate to in terms of “current language ability” (74). These students explained that mainstream courses had an “American context” which would be more difficult for them and that they “felt less comfortable speaking in the mainstream environment” (75). However, the students who preferred mainstream composition courses justified their choice not based on linguistic assistance, but that the courses “spoke to the strong language abilities they already had” (74).
When viewed separately, the two questions presented interesting findings that seemed to be well-justified. However, the authors were unable to find a relationship between “writing course preferences and label affiliations” (76). As my focus for this course will not be specifically analyzing ESL students and identity labels, I was more interested in the results for the second question regarding ESL students and their preference for mainstream or multilingual writing courses. For this purpose I found this article to be very informative and extremely relevant and useful for my focus.
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