Beyond ELLs: Reconceptualizing T-Sections and Consequences for Teaching

by Constantin Schreiber

When I came to Baruch College’s First-Year Writing (FYW) program as an adjunct instructor, I was told that the program, in addition to its “regular” classes, offered T-sections for English Language Learners (ELLs; see Lacelle Peterson & Rivera, 1994). I didn’t immediately grasp the conceptual and pedagogical complexity of these courses. With a background in English as a Second Language (ESL), language teaching, and (applied) linguistics, I mistook them to be more or less FYW courses for ESL or ELL students, a type of course I had encountered early on in my training and practice as a graduate student and then lecturer at Ball State University, a Midwestern university where at the time an influx in international students had caused the English Department to develop such classes. Because the six-credit course load is challenging to fit into a schedule for adjuncts, it was not until I became a full-time lecturer at Baruch that I taught a T-section, and that is when I realized that these were not classes filled with traditional ESL students, leaving me with questions and challenges and a desire to develop my teaching to this day.

The T in T-section stands for “Tutorial”. It seldom gets spelled out, but is convenient not only because of its brevity, but perhaps also because it is less likely for a single letter to be scrutinized and questioned with the same fervor as full words or phrases. It’s fitting nonetheless as students in the T-sections take 175-minute classes instead of the 100-minute standard or non-T-sections of ENG 2100 & 2150, the two required FYW classes at Baruch. In essence, a 75-minutes tutorial is added to the T-sections. The classes are also smaller than the non-T-sections, with maximum enrollment for T-section at 20 students and 25-27 students for non-T-sections.

As Baruch and CUNY’s student bodies are arguably more diverse than ever, as multilingualism appears to be the norm rather than the exception in our student body which features speakers of 100+ languages, and as the college regularly gets recognized for and touts its diversity (e.g., Baruch College, 2021), it is helpful to consider two questions: How can we conceptualize T-sections today? And what are resulting pedagogical implications?

Reconceptualizing T-Sections

The course description of T-sections differs slightly from that of their non-T counterparts: According to the Baruch undergraduate catalog, 2100T is “intended for multilingual/multidialectal speakers of English who have met the University requirements for freshman composition but are in need of additional support in language development … Students enrolled in the course complete the writing and composition work required in English 2100 as well as intensive instruction in language features such as sentence structure, usage, and vocabulary” (Baruch College, n. d.). The learning outcomes for ENG 2100 and ENG 2100T are the same, however (Baruch College First-Year Writing Program, n. d.). While the word “remedial” is not mentioned, the course description provides clear evidence that the courses are remedial by definition. More evidence comes from the placement procedure: Students are assigned to T sections based on an essay-format placement test, which they take before their first semester. As a placement test reader, I know that mistakes, errors, and non-standard linguistic features – common examples of which are found in the areas of syntax/sentence structure, verb tense, article usage, or vocabulary/word choice – are the main determinants for T-section placement.

As an instructor of T-sections, I find that they tend to be composed of students for whom the ESL or ELL labels are oversimplifications: College students taking ESL classes, in my experience, are international students, learn English as a second (or third, etc.) language, and have usually come to the United States after having spent the majority of their life in one or more other countries. Moreover, many of these students leave the US again after completing their program of study, often after working in the US for a while. Baruch reports about 2,000 international students (Baruch College, n. d.), about ten percent of the almost 20,000 students that were enrolled at Baruch in the 2021 Fall semester and who represent 153 countries and speak 100 languages (Baruch College, 2022). While some students in Baruch’s T-sections today might match ESL student definition above, I never find that I am teaching conventional ESL classes or sections full of international students. ESL students are today typically labeled ELLs, and often have been labeled ELL/in need of English language support before by the US education system, which generally also operates on a deficit-driven definition, as the example of NYC shows: “An ELL is a student whose primary home language is not English and has scored below a cut score on the New York State Identification Test for ELLs (NYSITELL)” (New York City Department of Education, 2021). So, there are students in the T-sections that you would perhaps expect to see when you look at the course description.

However, in every T-section I have taught, there was at least one student who could be labeled as a native speaker, at least in terms of verbal skills, and/or whose primary (home) language is English. Some of these students identify as native speakers of English, some see their proficiency in English as equally strong as the other language(s) they speak, some use English at home, some use it mostly or only outside of their home, etc. Some present verbally like they should not be in the T-section and only when they start writing do the limitations of their skills in English show themselves. For many of them, one or more of these characteristics applies. Most importantly perhaps, many do not identify as ELLs and see themselves as proficient in English across all skills, even though they often state themselves that their writing (and/or other areas like vocabulary) is limited.

Even these observations from my teaching of T-sections only scratch the surface of the multitude of life experiences of the students placed in these courses. Most students in T-sections that I have taught have spent at least some years in the US education system. Some lived in the United States for some time, perhaps they were born here, and then moved to another country, returning again later in their life. Many speak multiple languages. Some state that they are really only fluent in English. Etc.

What are these T-sections then? First of all, I think, they are dynamic, similar to how multilingualism has been theorized as dynamic (Herdina & Jessner, 2002; Sánchez & García, 2022): They are ever-changing and will continue to do so as the world changes. As an instructor of T-sections, I think the current population of T-sections tends to be more linguistically diverse than that in the non-T-sections, though the majority of Baruch students in the non-T-sections are multilingual/multidialectal as well. Most T-section students have more limited writing skills in English, a more limited vocabulary in English, and struggle more to follow grammatical conventions of American English than their non-T-section peers. Many are simultaneously stronger in one or more languages other than English, but not all of them. Many are not simply ELLs, and some who would rather identify as native speakers of English, being stronger in English than any other language they grew up with.

Consequences for Teaching

How do you teach such a group of students with such diverse identities and linguistic backgrounds then, a group that may collectively need additional support with their writing in English in particular, but in which individual students have such diverse needs? For example, if you’ve ever taught students with different first or heritage languages you know that the type of issues that students might encounter when learning English tends to depend on the languages they have a command of. For example, at Baruch the population of (East) Asian students is strong and languages like Chinese do not mark tense (or time, to simplify here), via the verb as English and many other languages do. Moreover, students who started learning English through EFL (English as a Foreign Language, i.e. learning English in a non-English-speaking country) or ESL often have the linguistic metalanguage that one acquires when studying a language that those with English as a first language or a close second do not have. The latter group often relies on their intuition and may not know what, for example, verb tense is, while the former often has experienced a prescriptive language education full of do’s and don’ts that do not always reflect the reality of language use.

So, how can you spend a significant amount of class time on, for example, teaching verb tense, when half or more of the class does not struggle with this grammatical feature? How do you know what students know and don’t know? When teaching ESL, the answer was easier to find for me: Students were placed into classes based on their test-obtained skill level, and all were fairly new to the United States, which made for greater overlap in needs, situations, and interests. Similarly, I find the non-T -section students have writing skill level within a narrower range. It is in many ways easier to teach a more homogenous group and while homogeneous is a word that is seldom used to describe Baruch classes, the non-T-sections are, at least from a writing skill level and background, more homogeneous than the T-sections.

Talking to colleagues who teach T-section, I hear them working hard to solve this puzzle as well. The answer is not that we need to change who gets placed into the T-sections, I think, but instead to approach the T-section students as being in need of help with developing their writing in English, for a multitude of possible reasons. What I suggest below is based on a mix of effective teaching practices supported by research and my experiences teaching T-sections. It is a work in progress, but hopefully helpful to those teaching T-sections and thus ultimately our students:

• Promoting multilingualism while teaching conventions of English: This is perhaps the most difficult task of them all in T-sections given that they ultimately are remedial English language classes. Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge, value, and ideally continue to promote the existing language skills of our students (e.g., Schreiber et al., 2021), many of whom are native speakers of or have high levels of proficiency in one or more languages other than in English or dialects of English. The literacy narrative in ENG 2100(T) is an example of an assignment/activity that gives students and instructors the space to focus on students’ skills in other languages, and to bring those languages into their writing in ENG 2100T. It doesn’t have to end there though.
• Increased individual/one-on-one attention: With the additional amount of instruction time and reduced class sizes, individual attention for students should be increased, such as through individual or small group conferences – a strategy that has widely been accepted to be effective (Lerner, 2005) even though strong evidence from research is still missing.
• Increased feedback on student writing: While this suggestion can be challenging, especially for adjunct faculty, as it is time-consuming, students value it. However, it should be kept in mind that while there is evidence for the effectiveness of feedback in general, including electronic feedback, such as via MS Word comments (Ene & Upton, 2019), the value of corrective feedback, in particular, is still under debate in the language learning research literature (Ferris & Kurzer, 2019).
• Working with corpora to help students develop their vocabulary: A practice from the fields of(Applied) Linguistics and ESL/ELL pedagogy (Ädel, 2012), taking a descriptive approach to language in use can help students see the difference between their language use and more conventional/common language use. Of course, this needs to be carefully embedded in conversations about language conventions/standards (Who creates them, who enforces them, whether they matter, etc.) and possible ways of approaching them while protecting students’ right to their own language (Conference on College Composition & Communication, n. d.).

References

Ädel, A. (2012). Using corpora to teach academic writing: Challenges for the direct approach. In M. C. Campoy, B. Belles-Fortuno, & M. L. Gea-Valor (Eds.), Corpus-based approaches to English language teaching (pp. 39-55). Bloomsbury Publishing.

Baruch College. (2022). Fact sheet. https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/28/2022/04/Factsheet.Fall_2021_Rev-4_18_22.pdf?_gl=1*1l2o7ov*_ga*MTAyODQ0OTQxOS4xNjUyODIwMjkz*_ga_V5770K8YFN*MTY2NTg4Mjk2OC4zNy4xLjE2NjU4ODMxMjguMC4wLjA.

Baruch College. (2021, August 9). Baruch College named to “Top 20 University” list by Equal Opportunity magazine. https://newscenter.baruch.cuny.edu/news/baruch-college-top-20-university-diversity-equity-inclusion-equal-opportunity-magazine/

Baruch College. (n. d.). ENG 2100T – Writing I. https://baruch-undergraduate.catalog.cuny.edu/courses/0912731

Baruch College First-Year Writing Program. (n. d.). ENG 2100 and ENG 2100T course descriptions and learning outcomes. https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/writingteachersguide/?page_id=188

Conference on College Composition & Communication. (n. d.). Students’ Right to Their Own Language (with bibliography). https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/srtolsummary

Ene, E., & Upton, T. A. (2019). Synchronous and asynchronous teacher electronic feedback and learner uptake in ESL composition. Journal of Second Language Writing, 41(), 1-13.

Ferris, D., & Kurzer, K. (2019). Does error feedback help L2 writers? Latest evidence on the efficacy of written corrective feedback. In K. Hyland & F. Hyland (Eds.), Feedback in second language writing: Contexts and issues (pp. 106-124). Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108635547.008

Herdina, P., & Jessner, U. (2002). A dynamic model of multilingualism: Perspectives of change in psycholinguistics. Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781853595547

LaCelle-Peterson, M., & Rivera, C. (1994). “Is it real for all kids? A framework for equitable assessment policies for English language learners”. Harvard Educational Review, 64, 55–76.

Lerner, N. (2005). The teacher-student writing conference and the desire for intimacy. College English, 68, 186-208.

New York City Department of Education. (2021). 2019-2020 ELL demographics: At-a-glance. https://infohub.nyced.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/sy-2019-20-ell-demographics-at-a-glance.pdf

Sánchez, M. T., & García, O. (2022). Transformative translanguaging espacios: Latinx students and their teachers rompiendo fronteras sin miedo. Multilingual Matters.

Schreiber, B., Lee, E., Johnson, J. T., & Fahim, N. (Eds.) (2021). Linguistic justice on campus: Pedagogy and advocacy for multilingual students. Multilingual Matters.

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