Strangers in Academia: The Experiences of Faculty and ESL Students across the Curriculum

Author(s): Vivian Zamel

Reviewed work(s):
Source: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Dec., 1995), pp. 506-521
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
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 VivianZamel
Strangers in Academia:
The Experiences of Faculty
and ESL Students Across
the Curriculum

When I go into a classroom these days, I look around and

feel like I'm in a different country.
-Professor of Management

A few weeks ago a professor came by the reading, writing

and study skills center where I tutor. He was with a young
Asian woman, obviously one of his students. He "deposited"
her in the center, claiming that she desperately needed help
with her English. The woman stared into the distance with
a frightened, nervous look on her face and tried to force a
smile. She handed me a paper she had written on the labor
union and asked if I could help her make corrections.After
a short introductorydiscussion,we looked at the paper that
we were about to revise-it was filled with red marks
indicating spelling, punctuation, and grammarerrors;the
only written response was something along the lines of
"Youneed serious help with your English. Please see a
tutor."
-From a tutor'sjournal

Studefits in the lab speak to one another in their own

language so that they make sure they know what they are
doing. So they may look like they are not listening to the
lab teacher. He feels so isolated from them. He feels he has
no control, no power. So he may get angry.
-An ESLstudent

T hesecommentsshowevidenceof tensions
and conflicts that are becoming prevalent
in institutions of higher education as stu-
dent populations become more diverse. One clear indication that faculty
across the disciplines are concerned about the extent to which diverse
student populations, particularly students whose native language is not
English, constrain their work is the number of workshops and seminars

506 CCC46.4/December 1995

 Zamel/Strangers in Academia 507

that have been organized, and at which I have participated, in order to

address what these faculty view as the "ESLProblem."' In the course of
preparing to work with faculty, and in order to get a sense of their issues
and concerns, I surveyed instructorsabout their experiences working with
non-native speakers of English. As Patricia Laurence has pointed out,
though we acknowledge and discuss the diversity of students, "we neglect
the 'polyphony' " that represents faculty voices (24). While I did not
receive many responses to my request for feedback, those responses that
were returned did indeed reflect this polyphony.
Some faculty saw this invitation to provide feedback as an opportunity
to discuss the strengths and resources these students brought with them,
indicated that ESL students, because of their experience and motivation,
were a positive presence in their classes, and noted the contributions ESL
students made in discussions that invited cross-cultural perspectives. One
professor took issue with the very idea of making generalizations about
ESL students. But this pattern of response did not represent the attitudes
and perspectives revealed by other faculty responses. One professor, for
example, referred to both silent students, on the one hand, and "vocal but
incomprehensible students" on the other. But, by far, the greatest concern
had to do with students' writing and language, which faculty saw as
deficient and inadequate for undertaking the work in their courses. I got
the clear sense from these responses that language use was confounded
with intellectual ability-that, as Victor Villanueva, recounting his own
schooling experiences, puts it, "bad language" and "insufficient cognitive
development" were being conflated (11).
In order to demonstrate the range of faculty commentary, I've selected
two faculty responses, not because they are necessarily representative,
but because they reveal such divergent views on language, language de-
velopment, and the role that faculty see themselves as playing in this
development. I've also chosen these responses because they may serve as
mirrors for our own perspectives and belief systems, and thus help us
examine more critically what we ourselves think and do, both within
our own classrooms and with respect to the larger institutional contexts
in which we teach. In other words, although these responses came from
two different disciplines, it is critical for each of us to examine the extent
to which we catch glimpses of our own practices and assumptions in

VivianZamelis a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where she

directs the English as a Second Language Program and teaches composition courses for ESL
students as well as graduate courses on ESLtheory and pedagogy. She has written extensively
on ESLwriting and has co-authored, with Eleanor Kutz and Suzie Q. Groden, TheDiscoveryof
Competence:Teaching and Learning with Diverse Student Writers (Boynton/Cook, 1993).
508 CCC46/December 1995

these texts. The first response was written by an English Department

instructor:

One of my graduate school professors once told me that he knew within the
first two weeks of the semester what his students' final grades would be.
Recently I had a Burmese-born Chinese student who proved my professor
wrong. After the first two essays, there was certainly no reason to be optimis-
tic about this student's performance. The essays were very short, filled with
second language errors, thesaurus words, and sweeping generalizations. In
the first essay, it was obvious he had been taught to make outlines because
that's all the paper was, really-a list. In the second essay, instead of dealing
directlywith the assigned text, the student directedmost of his energy to form
and structure. He had an introduction even though he had nothing to
introduce. In his conclusion, he was making wild assertions (even though he
had nothing to base them on) because he knew conclusions were supposed to
make a point. By the fourth essay, he started to catch on to the fact that my
comments were directed toward the content of his essays, not the form. Once
he stopped worrying about thesis sentences, vocabulary, and the like, he
became a differentwriter. His papers were long, thoughtful, and engaging. He
was able to interpretand respond to texts and to make connections that I term
"double face" as a way to comment on the ways in which different cultures
define such terms as "respect."Instead of 1 1/4 pages, this essay was seven
pages, and it made several referencesto the text while synthesizing it with his
experience as someone who is a product of three cultures. This change not
only affectedthe content of his writing, but also his mechanics. Though there
were still errors,there were far fewer of them, and he was writing well enough
where I felt it was safe to raise questions about structureand correctness.

This response begins with the recognition that we need to be wary of

self-fulfilling prophecies about the potential of students, and indeed this
instructor's narrative demonstrates compellingly the dangers of such
prophecies. This instructor goes on to cite problems with the student's
performance, but he speculates that these problems may have to do with
previous instruction, thus reflecting a stance that counteracts the tendency
to blame students. Despite the student's ongoing difficulties, the instructor
does not despair over the presence of second language errors, over the
short essays, the "sweeping generalizations," the empty introduction, the
"wild assertions." Instead, this instructor seems to persist in his attempts to
focus the student on content issues, to respond to the student seriously, to
push him to consider the connections between what he was saying and the
assigned reading, to take greater risks, which he succeeds in doing "by the
fourth essay." In this, I believe, we see the instructor's understanding that
 Zamel/Strangers in Academia 509

it takes multiple opportunities for students to trust that he is inviting them

into serious engagement with the course material, that it takes time to
acquire new approaches to written work. What seems to be revealed in this
response is the instructor'sbelief in the student's potential, his appreciation
for how language and learning are promoted, his refusal to draw conclu-
sions about intellectual ability on the basis of surface features of lan-
guage-all of which, in turn, helped the student become a "different
writer," a change that affected the content of his writing, that had an
impact on the very errors that filled his first papers, that even illuminated
the instructor'sreading of the assigned texts. This response suggests a rich
and complicated notion of language, one that recognizes that language
evolves in and responds to the context of saying something meaningful,
that language and meaning are reciprocal and give rise to one another.
This response, especially the final section about surface level errors,
foreshadows the other faculty response, which was written by an art
history instructor and which reveals a very different set of assumptions and
expectations:
My experience with teaching ESL students is that they have often not
received adequate English instruction to complete the required essay texts
and papers in my classes. I have been particularlydismayed when I find that
they have already completed 2 ESL courses and have no knowledge of the
parts of speech or the terminology that is used in correctingEnglish grammar
on papers. I am certainly not in a position to teach English in my classes. (The
problem has been particularly acute with Chinese/S. E. Asian students.)
These students may have adequate intelligence to do well in the courses, but
their language skills result in low grades. (I cannot give a good grade to a
student who can only generate one or two broken sentences during a ten-
minute slide comparison.)
The first assumption I see in this response is the belief that language and
knowledge are separate entities, that language must be in place and fixed
in order to do the work in the course. This static notion of language is
further revealed by the instructor'sassumption that language use is deter-
mined by a knowledge of parts of speech or grammatical terminology.
Given this belief, it is understandable why she is dismayed by what she
characterizesas students' lack of knowledge of grammar,a conclusion she
has seemingly reached because her corrective feedback, presumably mak-
ing use of grammatical terms, has not proven successful. This practice itself
is not questioned, however; students or their inadequate English language
instruction are held accountable instead. If students had been prepared
appropriately,if the gatekeeping efforts had kept students out of her course
until they were more like their native language counterparts, her com-
510 CCC46/December1995

mentary suggests, students would be able to do the required work. There

is little sense of how the unfamiliar terms, concepts, and ways of seeing
that are particularto this course can be acquired. Nor is there an apprecia-
tion for how this very unfamiliarity with the course content may be
constraining students' linguistic processes. She does not see, focusing as
she does on difference, how she can contribute to students' language and
written development, how she can build on what they know. Despite
indicating that students may have "adequate intelligence to do well in the
course," she doesn't seem to be able to get past their language problems
when it comes to evaluating their work, thus missing the irony of grading
on the basis of that which she acknowledges she is not "in a position to
teach." The final parenthetical statement reveals further expectations
about student work, raising questions about the extent to which her very
expectations, rather than linguistic difficulties alone, contribute to the
"broken sentences" to which she refers.
What we see at work here is in marked contrast to the model of
possibility revealed in the first response. What seems to inform this second
response is a deficit model of language and learning whereby students'
deficiencies are foregrounded. This response is shaped by an essentialist
view of language in which language is understood to be a decontextualized
skill that can be taught in isolation from the production of meaning and
that must be in place in order to undertake intellectual work. What we see
here is an illustration of "the myth of transience," a belief that permeates
institutions of higher education and perpetuates the notion that these
students' problems are temporary and can be remediated-so long as some
isolated set of courses or program of instruction, but not the real courses
in the academy, takes on the responsibility of doing so (see Rose, "Lan-
guage"). Such a belief supports the illusion that permanent solutions are
possible, which releases faculty from the ongoing struggle and questioning
that the teaching-learning process inevitably involves.
In these two faculty responses, we see the ways in which different sets
of expectations and attitudes get played out. In the one classroom, we get
some sense of what can happen when opportunities for learning are
created, when students are invited into a thoughtful process of engaging
texts, when students' writing is read and responded to in meaningful and
supportive ways. In the other classroom, although we have little informa-
tion about the conditions for learning, we are told that one way that
learning is measured is by technically correct writing done during a 10-
minute slide presentation, and this, I believe, is telling. For students who
are not adequately prepared to do this work, there is little, the instructor
tells us, she can do. Given this deterministic stance, students are closed off
from participatingin intellectual work.
 Zamel/Strangers in Academia 511

At the same time that I was soliciting faculty responses to get a sense of
their perceptions and assumptions, I began to survey ESL students about
what they wanted faculty to know about their experiences and needs in
classrooms across the curriculum. I wanted, in other words, to capture the
polyphony of students' voices as well. I felt that the work I was engaging
in with faculty could not take place without an exploration of students'
views, especially since, although faculty have little reservation discussing
what they want and expect from students, informing us about their frus-
trations and disappointments, the students' perspective is one that faculty
often hear little about. And since I have become convinced that our role in
our institutions ought not to be defined solely by the service we perform
for other faculty (either by making our students' English native-like or
keeping the gates closed until this is accomplished) but in helping faculty
understand the role they need to begin to play in working with all stu-
dents, the students' perspective was critical.
Within the last two years, I have collected more than 325 responses
from first and second year ESL students enrolled in courses across a range
of disciplines.2I discovered from looking at these responses a number of
predominant and recurring themes. Students spoke of patience, tolerance,
and encouragement as key factors that affected their learning:
Teachersneed to be moresensitiveto ESLstudentsneedsof education.Since
ESLstudentsare face with the demandsof cultureajustment,especiallyin
the classroom,teachesmust be patientsand give flexibleconsideration....
For example-if a teacherget a paperthat isn't clearor didn'tfollow the
assignmentcorrectly,teachermusttalkand communicatewith the students.
Students articulated the kinds of assistance they needed, pointing, for
example, to clearer and more explicitly detailed assignments and more
accessible classroom talk:

In the classes,most teachersgo over materialwithoutexplainingany words

that seems hard to understand for us . . . I want college teachers should
describemore clearlyon questionsin the exams, so we can understand
clearly.Also,I thinkthe teachersshouldwriteany importantinformationor
announcementon the board ratherthan just speakingin front of class,
becausesometimeswe understandin differentway when we hear it than
when we readit.

Students spoke with pride about how much they knew and how much
they had accomplished through working, they felt, harder than their
native English-speaking counterpartsdid, and they wanted faculty to credit
and acknowledge them for this.
512 CCC46/December 1995

I would like them to know that we are very responsibleand we know why
we cometo college:to learn.WearelearningEnglishas well as the majorof
our choice. It is very hard sometimesand we don't need professorswho
claimedthat they don't understandus. The effort is double.We are very
intelligentpeople.We deservebetterconsideration... ESLstudentsarevery
competentand deserveto be in college.We madethe step to college.Please
makethe otherstep to meet us.

At the same time, an overwhelming number of students wanted faculty to

know that they were well aware they were having language difficulties
and appreciated responses that would help them. But they also expressed
their wish that their work not be discounted and viewed as limited. They
seemed to have a very strong sense that because of difficulties that were
reflected in their attempts at classroom participation and in their written
work, their struggles with learning were misperceived and underesti-
mated:
Theacademicskillsof studentswho arenot nativespeakersof Englisharenot
worse than academicskillsof Americanstudents,in some areasit can be
much better.Just becausewe have problemswith language.. . that some
professorshatebecausethey don'twantto spenda minuteto listena student,
doesn'tmeanthat we don'tunderstandat all.

Students referred to professorswho showed concern and seemed to appre-

ciate students' contributions. But the majority of students' responses de-
scribed classrooms that silenced them, that made them feel fearful and
inadequate, that limited possibilities for engagement, involvement, inclu-
sion.
While these students acknowledged that they continue to experience
difficulties, they also voiced their concern that these struggles not be
viewed as deficiencies, that their efforts be understood as seri6us attempts
to grapple with these difficulties. While faculty may feel overwhelmed by
and even resentful of working with such students, these students indicated
that they expect and need their instructors to assist them in this undertak-
ing, even making suggestions as to how this can be done. Indeed, the very
kind of clarity, accessible language, careful explanation, and effort that
faculty want students to demonstrate are the kinds of assistance students
were asking of faculty. Without dismissing the concerns of the art instruc-
tor, these students nevertheless believed, as does the English instructor,
that teaching ought to be responsive to their concerns.
Yet another source of information about students' classroom experi-
ences comes from my ongoing case-study of two students who attended a
composition course I taught two years ago and who have met with me
regularly since that time to discuss the work they are assigned, their
 Zamel/Strangers in Academia 513

teachers' responses to and evaluation of their work, the classroom dynam-

ics of their courses, the roles they and their teachers play, and the kinds of
learning that are expected in their classes.
One of the students who has been participating in this longitudinal
investigation is Motoko, a student from Japan who has taken a range of
courses and is majoring in sociology. She described courses in which lively
interaction was generated, in which students were expected to participate,
to write frequent reaction papers and to undertake projects based on
first-hand research, to challenge textbook material and to connect this
material to their own lived experiences. But in most of her courses the
picture was quite different. Lectures were pervasive, classes were so large
that attendance wasn't even taken, and short answer tests were often the
predominant means of evaluating student work. With respect to one class,
for example, Motoko discussed the problematic nature of multiple-choice
exams which, she believes, distort the information being tested and delib-
erately mislead students. In regard to another course, she described what
she viewed as boring, even confusing lectures, but she persevered: "Be-
cause I don't like the professor, I work even harder. I don't want him to
laugh at me. I don't want to be dehumanized. I came here to learn
something, to gain something." In yet another course in which only the
professor talked, she indicated that she was "drowningin his words."Even
a class which assigned frequent written work, which Motoko completed
successfully, disappointed her because she had such difficulty under-
standing the assignments and because her writing was not responded to in
what she perceived as a thoughtful, respectful way. Motoko confided that
despite her success in this course, she had lost interest in working on her
papers.
The other student whose classroom experiences I've been following is
Martha, a student from Colombia who, like Motoko, has taken a range of
courses, and whose major is biology. Unlike Motoko, who had managed to
negotiate "drowning words" and problematic assignments, Martha's sense
of discouragement about the purposelessness of much of her work is far
more pervasive. With respect to many of her courses, she complained
about the absence of writing (which she views as essential for learning),
the passive nature of class discussions, contrived assignments that "don't
help her think about anything," and the lifeless comments she received. It
was in her science courses, however, that she felt the greatest dissatisfac-
tion and frustration.About one chemistry course, she spoke of "justtrying
to follow the lectures and get a grade in a huge class"that she characterized
as a "disaster."She talked of the sense of superiority her professors project,
of her inability to learn anything meaningful from assignments which
require everyone "to come up with the same information." Her experi-
ences have provoked her to write numerous pieces which reflect her
514 CCC46/December 1995

growing sense of despair and which provide a rich commentary on her

perspective and experiences. In one of these pieces she has labeled the way
professors behave as "academicharassment."In yet another, she questions
the purpose of schooling, assignments, and written work: "Each teacher
should ask her or himself the next question: Why do I assign a writing
paper on this class? Do you want to see creativity and reflection of students
or do or want a reproduction of the same book concept?" She is frustrated
by the "lack of connections with the material we listen on lectures," the
"monotony of the teaching method," the "limited style of questions," the
"stressfulprocess of learning." She concludes:
I have no new wordsin my lexicon.And how do I know that? Frommy
writing.No fluency.Why?I don'twrite.I was movingforwardandnow I'm
stagnant..... Frustrationandlackof interestarethe presentfeelingswith my
classesbecausethereis not any planned"agenda" to encouragethe students
to improve ourselvesby writing. There is no rich opportunityto break
barriersand answer questionsto others and also to myself. There is no
REACTION and INTERACTION. . .It does not really matter how many
coursesthe studentstake in orderto improveskillsof writingbecausewhat
it countsis the responsibilityencouragedby the teacher'smethod!the kind
of responsibility developedaroundus is firstwith ourselves!
It is an incentive
for us to be listenedand respectedby our writingwork! You get into it.
Readingprovidesyou grammar.Readingand writingare not separatein the
process.It is a combinedone. Dobleteam.Reactingand interacting.
This account, like others Martha has written, reveals her commitment
to learning, her insightful understanding of how learning is both promoted
and undermined, how writing in particular plays an essential role in this
learning, how critical it is for teachers to contribute to and encourage
learning. She, like Motoko and the other students surveyed, has much to
tell us about the barriersthat prevent learning and how these barrierscan
be broken. And lest we conclude that what these students perceive about
their experiences is specific to ESL learners, recent studies of teaching and
learning in higher education indicate that this is not the case. For example,
Chiseri-Strater'sethnography of university classrooms reveals the authori-
tarian and limited ways that subject matter is often approached, the ways
in which students, even those who are successful, are left silent and empty
by the contrived and inconsequential work of many classrooms.
This ongoing exploration of the expectations, perceptions and experi-
ences of both faculty and students has clarified much for me about the
academic life of ESL students and what we ought to be doing both within
our classrooms and beyond. Given the hierarchicalarrangement of course-
work within post-secondary schools, given the primacy accorded to tradi-
 Zamel/Strangers in Academia 515

tional discipline-specific courses, it is not surprising that ESL and other

writing-based courses have a marginalized position, that these courses are
thought to have no authentic content, that the work that goes on in these
courses is not considered to be the "real"work of the academy.
This view typically gets played out through coursework that is deter-
mined by what students are assumed to need in courses across the curricu-
lum, coursework whose function it is to "guard the tower," to use
Shaughnessy's term, and keep the gates closed in the case of students who
are not deemed ready to enter ("Diving").This often implies instruction
that focuses on grammar, decontextualized language skills, and surface
features of language. And we know from what faculty continue to say
about these issues that this is precisely what is expected of English and ESL
instruction-and, unfortunately, many of us have been all too ready to
comply. Mike Rose speaks to the profoundly exclusionary nature of such
a pedagogy and argues that a focus on mechanical skills and grammatical
features reduces the complexity of language to simple and discrete prob-
lems, keeps teachers from exploring students' knowledge and potential,
and contributes to the "second-classintellectual status"to which the teach-
ing of writing has been assigned ("Language" 348). Furthermore, the
problematic assumption that writing or ESLprograms are in place to serve
the academy, that their function is to benefit other academic studies,
prevents us from questioning our situation within the larger institution.
"Servicecourse ideology," Tom Fox points out, "often leaves the curricular
decisions in the hands of those who are not especially knowledgeable
about writing instruction," which ultimately means that "political ques-
tions-in fact, any questions that challenge existing definitions of basic
writing-become irrelevant to the bureaucratic task of reproducing the
program" ("Basic"67).
While skills-based and deficit models of instruction bring these kinds of
pressures to bear on our work with students, our teaching has further been
constrained by composition specialistswho make claims about the need for
students to adopt the language and discourse conventions of the academy
if they are to succeed. David Bartholomae's article, "Inventing the Univer-
sity,"is often cited and called upon to argue that students need to approxi-
mate and adopt the "specialized discourse of the university" (17). In the
ESL literature, a reductive version of this position has been embraced by
professionals who maintain that the role that ESL coursework ought to
play is one of preparing students for the expectations and demands of
discipline-specific communities across the curriculum. Such an approach,
however, misrepresents and oversimplifies academic discourse and reduces
it to some stable and autonomous phenomenon that does not reflect
reality. Such instruction, like coursework shaped by limited conceptualiza-
516 CCC46/December 1995

tions of language, undermines our expertise and position. And because

such instruction privileges and perpetuates the status quo, because it
exaggerates the "distinctivenessof academic discourse [and] its separation
from student literacy" (Fox, "Basic"70), such a pedagogy has been char-
acterized in terms of assimilation, colonization, domination, and deracina-
tion (Clark;Fox; Gay; Horner;Trimbur).
While there is growing debate about this instructional approach in the
field of composition, there have been fewer attempts to problematize this
model of teaching in ESL composition, where the norms and conventions
of the English language and its discourses have particularly powerful
political implications.3 Hence the need to raise questions about such an
instructional focus when it is applied to our work with non-native speakers
of English. As I have argued elsewhere, we need to critique approaches
that are reductive and formulaic, examine the notion that the language of
the academy is a monolithic discourse that can be packaged and transmit-
ted to students, and argue that this attempt to serve the institution in these
ways contributes to our marginal status and that of our students.
Those of us who have tried to accommodate institutional demands
have, no doubt, found this to be a troubling and tension-filled undertaking,
since even when we focus on standards of language use or conventions of
academicdiscourse,students, especiallythose who are still acquiringEnglish,
are not necessarily more successful in meeting the expectations of other
faculty. There seems to be little carry-over from such instructional efforts
to subsequent work since it is the very nature of such narrowly conceptu-
alized instruction that undercuts genuine learning. As Fox argues, writing
teachers who uphold a mythical and fixed set of institutional standardsand
skills are enacting a pedagogy that, however well-intentioned, is an "un-
qualifiable failure" ("Standards"42). Those of us who have resisted and
questioned such a pedagogy, embracing a richer and more complicated
understandingof how language, discourse,and context are intertwined, may
be able to trace the strides students make and to appreciate the intelligence
their language and writing reveal, and yet find that this is not extended by
other faculty who cannot imagine taking on this kind of responsibility.
We need to recognize that in the same way that faculty establish what
Martha calls "barriers"between themselves and students, in the same way
that faculty "exoticize" ESL students, we too, especially if our primary
work is with ESL students, are perceived as "outsiders."4And as long as
these boundaries continue to delineate and separate what we and other
faculty do, as long as we are expected to "fix" students' problems, then
misunderstandings, unfulfilled expectations, frustration, and even resent-
ment will continue to mark our experiences. But this need not be the case.
We are beginning to see changes in institutions in response to the growing
 Zamel/Strangers in Academia 517

recognition that faculty across the disciplines must take responsibility for
working with all students. Studies, such as the ethnography undertaken by
Walvoord and McCarthy,have documented the transformation of faculty
from a range of disciplines who became more responsive to the needs of
their students as they undertook their own classroom research and exam-
ined their own assumptions and expectations.
In my own work with faculty at a number of different institutions,
including my own, what first begins as a concern about "underprepared"
or "deficient"ESLstudents often leads to a consideration of the same kinds
of pedagogical issues that are at the heart of writing across the curriculum
initiatives. But these issues are reconsidered with specific reference to
working with ESL students. Together, we have explored our instructional
goals, the purposes for assigned work, the means for reading and evaluat-
ing this work, the roles that engagement, context, and classroom dynamics
play in promoting learning. Through this collaboration faculty have begun
to understand that it is unrealistic and ultimately counterproductive to
expect writing and ESL programs to be responsible for providing students
with the language, discourse, and multiple ways of seeing required across
courses. They are recognizing that the process of acquisition is slow-paced
and continues to evolve with exposure, immersion, and involvement, that
learning is responsive to situations in which students are invited to partici-
pate in the construction of meaning and knowledge. They have come to
realize that every discipline, indeed every classroom, may represent a
distinct culture and thus needs to make it possible for those new to the
context to practice and approximate its "ways with words." Along with
acknowledging the implications of an essentialist view of language and of
the myth of transience, we have considered the myth of coverage, the
belief that covering course content necessarily means that it has been
learned. Hull and Rose, in their study of the logic underlying a student's
unconventional reading of a text, critique "the desire of efficiency and
coverage" for the ways it "limit[s] rather than enhance [s] [students']
participationin intellectual work" (296), for the ways it undermines stu-
dents' entry into the academy. With this in mind, we have raised questions
about what we do in order to cover material, why we do what we do, what
we expect from students, and how coverage is evaluated. And if the
"cover-the-material"model doesn't seem to be working in the ways we
expected, we ask, what alternatives are there?
We have also examined the ways in which deficit thinking, a focus on
difference, blinds us to the logic, intelligence and richness of students'
processes and knowledge. In Liveson theBoundary,Mike Rose cites numer-
ous cases of learners (including himself) whose success was undercut
because of the tendency to emphasize difference. Studies undertaken by
518 CCC46/December 1995

Glynda Hull and her colleagues further attest to how such belief systems
about students can lead to inaccurate judgments about learners' abilities,
and how practices based on such beliefs perpetuate and "virtually assure
failure" (325). The excerpt from the tutor'sjournal quoted at the beginning
of this article, along with many of the faculty and student responses that I
have elicited, are yet other indications of what happens when our reading
of student work is derailed by a focus on what is presumed to be students'
deficiencies. Thus we try to read students' texts to see what is there rather
than what isn't, resisting generalizations about literacy and intelligence
that are made on the basis of judgments about standardsof correctness and
form, and suspending our judgments about the alternative rhetorical ap-
proaches our students adopt.
In addition to working with faculty to shape the curriculum so that it is
responsive to students' needs and to generate instructional approaches that
build on students' competence, we address other institutional practices
that affect our students. At the University of Massachusetts, for example,
the Writing Proficiency Exam, which all students must pass by the time
they are juniors, continues to evolve as faculty across the curriculum work
together, implementing and modifying it over time. While the exam is
impressive, immersing students in rich, thematically-integrated material to
read, think about, and respond to, it nevertheless continues to be recon-
sidered and questioned as we study the ways in which the exam impinges
on students' academic lives. And so, for instance, in order to address the
finding that ESLstudents were failing the exam at higher rates than native
speakers of English-a situation that is occurring at other institutions as
well (see Ray)-we have tried to ensure that faculty understand how to
look below the surface of student texts for evidence of proficiency,promot-
ing a kind of reading that benefits not just ESL students but all students.
The portfolio option, which requires students to submit papers written in
courses as well as to write an essay in response to a set of readings, has
proven a better alternative for ESL students to demonstrate writing profi-
ciency. This is not surprising, given that the portfolio allows students to
demonstrate what they are capable of when writing is imbedded within
and an outgrowth of their courses.
Throughout this work, one of the most criticalnotions that I try to bring
home is the idea that what faculty ought to be doing to enhance the
learning of ESL students is not a concession, a capitulation, a giving up of
standards-since the unrevised approaches that some faculty want to
retain may never have been beneficial for any students. As John Mayher
has pointed out, teaching and learning across college courses are by and
large dysfunctional for all students, even those that succeed. What ESL
students need-multiple opportunities to use language and write-to-learn,
course work which draws on and values what students already know,
 Zamel/Strangers in Academia 519

classroom exchanges and assignments that promote the acquisition of

unfamiliar language, concepts, and approaches to inquiry, evaluation that
allows students to demonstrate genuine understanding-is good pedagogy
for everyone. Learning how to better address the needs of ESL students,
because it involves becoming more reflective about teaching, because it
involves carefully thinking through the expectations, values, and assump-
tions underlying the work we assign, helps faculty teach everyone better.
In other words, rather than seeing the implications of inclusion and diver-
sity in opposition to excellence and academic standards (as they often are
at meetings convened to discuss these issues), learning to teach ESL stu-
dents, because this challenges us to reconceptualize teaching, contributes
to and enhances learning, and for all students. As Gerald Graffhas argued
in response to those who voice their concerns about the presence of new
student populations in their institutions and the negative consequences
that this change brings,
Conservativeswho accuseaffirmativeactionprogramsof loweringacademic
standardsnever mentionthe notoriousstandardfor ignorancethat was set
by white malecollegestudentsbeforewomenandminoritieswerepermitted
in largenumberson campus.It has been the steadypressurefor reformfrom
below that has raisedacademicstandards.(88)
Needless to say, given the complexity of this enterprise, these efforts
have not transformed classrooms on an institution-wide basis. As is obvi-
ous from the surveys and case studies I have undertaken, change is slow,
much like the process of learning itself. Shaughnessy referred to the
students who entered the CUNY system through open admissions as
"strangersin academia" to give us a sense of the cultural and linguistic
alienation they were experiencing (Errors).In listening to the comments of
faculty (note, for example, the comment of the professor of management),
it occurs to me that they too are feeling like strangers in academia, that
they no longer understand the world in which they work. Janice Neulieb
similarlypoints out that although it is common to view students as "other,"
as alienated from the academic community, our differing cultural perspec-
tives result in our own confusion and alienation as well.
As we grapple with the kinds of issues and concerns raised by the clash
of cultures in academia, we continue to make adjustments which, in turn,
generate new questions about our practices. This ongoing dialogue is both
necessary and beneficial. Like other prominent debates in higher education
on reforming the canon and the implications of diversity, this attempt to
explore and interrogate what we do is slowly reconfiguring the landscape
and blurring the borders within what was once a fairly well-defined and
stable academic community. According to Graff, this is all to the good
because this kind of transformation can revitalize higher education and its
520 CCC46/December 1995

isolated departments and fragmentary curricula. Within composition, the

conflicts and struggles that inevitably mark the teaching of writing are
viewed as instructive because they allow students and teachers to "reposi-
tion" themselves, raising questions about conventional thinking about
instruction and challenging us to imagine alternative pedagogies (Lu;
Horner). What Pratt calls the "contactzone," because it represents a site of
contestation, is embraced because it enables us to redraw disciplinary
boundaries, to reexamine composition instruction, and to revise our as-
sumptions about language and difference.
When faculty see this kind of redefinition as a crisis, I invite them to
reconsider their work in light of the way the word "crisis"is translated into
Chinese. In Chinese, the word is symbolized by two ideographs-one
meaning danger, the other meaning opportunity. Because the challenges
that students bring with them may make us feel confused, uncertain, like
strangers in our own community, there will be dissonance, jarring ques-
tions, ongoing dilemmas, unfulfilled expectations. We can see this reflected
in the second faculty response, a response which insists that there are
students who don't belong in the academy, that its doors be kept closed.
But, as we saw in the first response, perplexities and tensions can also be
generative, creating possibilities for new insights, alternative interpreta-
tions, and an appreciation for the ways in which these enrich our under-
standing. Seen from the fresh perspective that another language can
provide, the Chinese translation of crisis captures the very nature of
learning, a process involving both risk and opportunity, the very process
that ideally students ought to engage in, but which we ourselves may resist
when it comes to looking at our own practices. But as Giroux urges,
teachers must "cross over borders that are culturally strange and alien to
them" so that they can "analyze their own values and voices as viewed
from different ideological and cultural spaces" (254-55). It is when we take
risks of this sort, when we take this step into the unknown, by looking for
evidence of students' intelligence, by rereading their attempts as coherent
efforts, by valuing, not just evaluating, their work, and by reflecting on the
critical relationship between our work and theirs, that opportunities are
created not only for students but for teachers to learn in new ways.

Notes
1. The acronym ESL (English as a Sec- versity of Massachusettsat Boston, most of
ond Language) is used here because it is the these students are residents of the United
commonly used term to refer to students States. Furthermore,in the case of a num-
whose native language is not English. Given ber of these students, English may be a
the inherently political nature of working third or fourth language.
with ESLlearners, it is important to note 2. Thisinvestigationof student responses
that at urban institutions, such as the Uni- was firstinitiatedby Spack,whose findings
 Zamel/Strangers in Academia 521

were published in BlairResourcesfor Teaching assumptions underlying much ESLwriting

Writing:Englishas a SecondLanguage.My ongo- instruction.
ing surveybuildson her work. 4. I am indebted here to PatriciaBizzell,
3. See, however, the work of Benesch, whom I first heard use the term exoticizeto
McKay,Raimes, and Zamel-all of whom characterizehow faculty often react towards
have raised questions about the ideological ESLstudents.

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