Locating ESL Sections of First-Year Composition

A friend of mine, who has just gotten a WPA job asked me about an interesting institutional arrangement in U.S. higher education, which has not been discussed widely in the literature. Since I wrote a fairly extensive response that might be interesting to some people, I thought I'd post it here as well:

I don't think there has been enough discussion of issues surrounding having mainstream and ESL composition courses in two separate departments, but the arrangement itself is not that unusual. Many institutions have mainstream composition courses in the English Department and ESL sections in foreign language, linguistics, applied linguistics, and even communication departments, and the departmental affiliation often changes overtime. (See, for example, Stephanie Vandrick's description of changes that took place at University of San Francisco.)

As with anything else in higher education, the reason has mostly to do with disciplinary and institutional (and sometimes personal) politics rather than pedagogical effectiveness. ESL composition, just like mainstream composition, is a major cash cow that ensures enrollment, especially where department budgets have been dependent on the FTE at one point or another. They might even use it as an excuse for creating another tenure-track position--often with no real intention of hiring anyone with the necessary expertise.

My hunch, based on what I've seen, is that, if there is a department that has a TESOL program, that department would usually claim it; if not, linguistics would grab it; foreign language department is next on the list. If none of them claim it, then the English Department would reluctantly hire someone to teach one. If the English Department really doesn't want to bother, then communication department might seize the opportunity.

Unless there is someone in the department who specialize in ESL writing, none of these departments are really equipped to do an adequate job, but the sad truth is that there still aren't enough ESL writing specialists to go around, so the practice goes on. And if anyone with a specialization were to arise or to be hired into a department, it would be the existing department--whatever it happens to be--that has the ESL writing courses. On occasion, they are hired into a new administrative unit being created that does not have a department status, such as an independent writing/communication unit. In rare cases, people who have a strong background in ESL writing have found themselves in a different department for reasons other than the programmatic needs of the ESL sections per se. You seem to fit into this category.

But then again, this is how composition at most institutions ended up in the English Department. Few people in the emerging departments of English in the early part of the 20th century had an expertise or strong interest in teaching composition, but no one else seemed to be more qualified (or interested) than those who dealt with written English, albeit on the consumption side (or "creative" production side, which rarely gets mentioned in this discussion).

Had the new rhetoric of composition arisen a few years earlier, things might have been different. There were a number of historical moments when composition could have moved to communication along with rhetoric (which may have made more sense), but, according to Diana George and John Trimbur, so-called "expressivists" like Ken Macrorie tried to make sure that composition had nothing to do with what they saw as the pseudo scientists.

The irony is that composition became established as a discipline at around the same time partly because of the rise of social scientific research, but then again, that strand of composition has become somewhat alienated by those with strong humanist inclinations and anti-utilitalian sentiments--in what Bob Connors would have described as the Englishization of composition.

Revelant Sources

Connors, Robert J. "The Erasure of the Sentence." College Composition and Communication 52.1 (2000): 96-128.

George, Diana, and John Trimbur. The "Communication Battle," or Whatever Happened to the 4th C?" College Composition and Communication 50.4 (1999): 682-698.

Vandrick, Stephanie. "Shifting Sites, Shifting Identities: A Thirty-Year Perspective." The Politics of Second Language Writing: In Search of the Promised Land. Ed. Paul Kei Matsuda, Christina Ortmeier-Hooper and Xiaoye You. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor, 2006. 280-293.