High School/Community College
English Language Learner/Basic Skills Colloquium

Mark Roberge presents:
"Generation 1.5 students: Best Practices for Student Success"

About the Event
from SMC's Missed Information newsletter

They are called “Generation 1.5” and they are showing up more and more at SMC, creating new educational challenges for the college. And SMC professors are taking the challenge head-on.

SMC’s ESL and English departments recently hosted a Basic Skills Generation 1.5 Colloquium that drew 74 attendees, not only from SMC but also from more than a dozen high schools, community colleges and state universities across the L.A. basin.

Just who are these Generation 1.5 students and why are they drawing so much attention?

These are students who immigrated to the United States from other countries – primarily Latin America and Asia – at a young age before they had a chance to gain literacy skills in their native tongue. That has left them speaking a kind of mish-mash of English and their first language (think “Spanglish,” for example) without a solid basic skills foundation in either.

Using state funds set aside for basic skills instruction, SMC brought in San Francisco State University researcher and composition teacher Mark Roberge to talk about Generation 1.5 students and their special needs and to offer teaching strategies at all levels of the educational pipeline.

ESL professor Kathy Sucher said these teaching strategies could be applied campuswide in just about all disciplines.

“This type of professional development activity proved to be an effective and cost-efficient vehicle for reorienting and empowering faculty to work with our shifting student demographic,” Sucher said. “Moreover, the colloquium facilitated articulation among secondary and higher education partners. This was an excellent way of putting basic skills fund to work for the benefit of our students.”

http://www.smc.edu/missedinformation/stories/Generation_1-5.html