ABSTRACT
Increasingly, secondary schools and colleges are enrolling students spoken of as “generation 1.5,” a group discussed at length in this volume. From immigrant backgrounds but raised principally in the United States, often fluent in spoken English and familiar with American school cultures, these students still tend to be placed in college ESL or “remedial” classes with international or new immigrant students whose needs and backgrounds are quite different from their own (Harklau, 2003). The “drill and practice” and grammar-dependent approaches in many of these literacy classes are demotivating for generation 1.5 students and can lead to discouragement and drop-out. In this chapter, I will argue that through drawing from these students’ prior knowledge of academic and everyday genres in American cultures and through encouraging them to use context-sensitive invention strategies, we can motivate them to ask the right questions about-and produce-appropriate texts for academic contexts, thus contributing to their success.
