ABSTRACT
In the opening chapter of their volume, Generation 1.5 meets college composition, Harklau, Siegal, and Losey (1999) point to some of the “political and ethical dilemmas” that accompany college writing requirements for multilingual and bilingual students. These issues include: (1) how to appropriately and fairly assess generation 1.5 ESL students for placement; (2) which courses to place them in: ESL writing courses, developmental writing courses or freshman composition courses; (3) what instructional paradigms to use; (4) how to acknowledge students’ prior academic successes while letting students know that they have weaknesses in academic writing; and (5) whether this group of students should be held to exactly the same writing and language standards as their monolingual English-speaking counterparts.
