ALL In: Accelerated Language Learning as a Practical Methodology for Today's ESL Classroom
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.58997/6.2pp2Keywords:
acceleration movement, California’s Community Colleges (CCC), English as a Second Language (ESL), transfer-level English classAbstract
The past 10 years have seen a major shift in English and English as a Second Language (ESL) placement and pedagogy in California’s Community Colleges (CCC), driven by a developmental education reform movement known as acceleration. Popularized by the faculty-led California Acceleration Project (CAP), the acceleration movement focused on reducing or eliminating prerequisite pathways in English and math due to a decade’s worth of state-wide data showing that each level of remediation statistically reduced a student’s chances of ever reaching or completing the first transfer-level course in the respective discipline (Hern & Snell, 2010). Faculty from many of the state’s 117 community colleges participated in CAP’s communities of practice, starting with the first cohort in the academic year 2011–2012, and returned to develop accelerated pathways at their own colleges. As these models proved successful and the data supporting acceleration mounted, CAP leaders joined forces with the College Futures Foundation and other partners to lobby for legislative action to compel a system-wide change. The resulting legislation, Assembly Bill 705 (Cal. Assemb., 2017), was signed into law in October 2017 and implemented as of January 1, 2018. This law required that all state community college districts maximize the probability that incoming students would access and complete their first transfer-level English and math class within a year of first enrolling and that students who enrolled in ESL courses would access and complete their first transfer-level English class within three years of first enrollment (Rodriguez et al., 2022).
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