Research Paper

Chapter 1: The Problem and its Setting Introduction Generation 1.5 students, students from non-English speaking cultures who have been long-term immigrants or life-long residents of the United States, often have difficulty in academic writing even though they may be culturally assimilated and orally fluent in English. Their strong oral background but weak literacy skills present a series of unique challenges to the students themselves, English as a Second Language (ESL) instructors, and first language (L1) composition instructors. First, Generation 1.5 students‘ oral proficiency may blind the students, as well as the people who want to help them, to the disconnect between their oral proficiency and their writing abilities. Complicating Generation 1.5 students‘ situation further, L1 composition instructors may not know how to approach Generation 1.5 students‘ grammatical and lexical problems. In turn, ESL instructors may have difficulty helping these students develop grammatical accuracy because these students lack a background in formal grammatical concepts, and in fact, do not approach language accuracy from a formal grammatical perspective. An overarching instructional challenge results: What instructional mode should be used with these students that teaches both the language and vocabulary skills they need while recalling that their educational background and experience in American schools is very much like that of their monolingual English-speaking counterparts? Moreover, do these Generation 1.5 students truly require special instruction, or will they acquire the writing skills they need, through an acculturation to academic literacy that all undergraduates go through during their four years in college?

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To address Generation 1.5 students‘ need for greater grammatical and rhetorical accuracy in their academic writing, Christine Holten, from University of California Los Angeles‘ Department of Applied Linguistics and TESL, spearheaded an effort to design

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