Teachers of English as 2nd Tongue Trade Plain Words : Curriculum: With millions in funding at stake, English departments seek to defend their turf against champions of a newer academic discipline.

English teachers, the masters of semantics, are waging a bitter battle of words at community college campuses around the San Fernando Valley and throughout Los Angeles over who will control language instruction for the region’s fastest-growing student market: recent immigrants.

On one side of the battle are the English-as-a-second-language warriors, primarily ESL instructors, who say separating ESL courses from their English department roots would bring coherence to the program’s administration and political clout to immigrant students and their teachers.

On the other side are the defenders of the English department’s encampment in academia, who say isolating English as a second language from English could thwart student access to the greater depth of knowledge traditional English teachers can provide. An English-teaching credential typically includes study of literature and composition; an ESL certificate requires study of such areas as linguistics and cultural awareness.

The turf battle highlights drastic changes in the student population at Los Angeles’ community colleges and offers a hint of what the future will hold.

“We have in this issue about as much academic tension as any issue could develop,” said James Heinselman, a vice chancellor for the nine-campus Los Angeles Community College District.

Stripped of eloquent language, it is a basic struggle for power, prestige and, perhaps most importantly, money. Based on a state formula used by the district, ESL students represented about $4.7 million in funding districtwide last year, up from $1.7 million in 1980.

“If we are part of other disciplines, we don’t get very much return on the money our students bring to the college,” said Louise Barbato, an ESL instructor at Mission College in San Fernando. “If other people are administering that money, it doesn’t get back into our pots.”

A memo circulated among members of the district’s English Council more than a year ago urged campuses to vote against the separation because “contractually mandated clerical positions will be lost as the number of full-time English faculty shrinks; chances for new full-time English hiring will diminish; the political leverage of the English discipline will be reduced.”

Still, last fall, Mission College joined two other district colleges in making ESL a discipline, giving it equal footing with English and other subjects. Others, including Pierce College in Woodland Hills and Valley College in Van Nuys, have resisted the trend.

Against a backdrop of declining community college enrollment in the 1980s, the number of hours ESL students spent in language classes increased 178%, from 16,052 in 1980 to 44,650 last year. During the same period, regular English classes expanded only 5%, from 58,887 hours to 61,831 hours.

Those figures don’t count the thousands of students turned away from full classes.

By all estimates, growth will continue past the turn of the century, with amnesty classes--the introductory language and civics training required of immigrants granted legal status under a 1986 immigration law--expected to whet the educational appetite of tens of thousands more.

“That will be the bread and butter of this district,” said David Lopez-Lee, a Los Angeles Community College District trustee, at a board meeting last fall when the proposed separation of ESL was discussed. “We want to survive and be responsive.”

ESL classes traditionally have been taught under the English discipline as well as under speech and in the field formerly reserved for remedial education, “developmental communications.”

English teachers say that the cross-fertilization among disciplines is essential to students’ success in academic subjects. ESL instructors contend that students are confused by course titles that vary widely from discipline to discipline and from college to college.

ESL instructors say that other teachers are not sufficiently aware of the effect of cultural differences on language acquisition. English teachers maintain that cultural awareness must become part of all community college instructors’ training.

In the style of trained rhetoricians, proponents of either side can punch expansive holes in the other’s arguments. But they also are not above a little academic name-calling.

Speaking of ESL teachers, Marvin Zuckerman, chairman of the English department at Valley College, said, “Some of them are retreads from other disciplines where it was difficult to find work. . . . You’re a PE teacher who couldn’t find work. . . . You couldn’t spell ESL, now you are one.”

Phoebe Rivera, who believes she was the district’s first full-time, ESL-educated instructor when she was hired at Mission College in 1975, makes her point with a similar edge.

“There’s a certain snobbishness involved,” said Rivera. “A lot of teachers could teach composition, but they wouldn’t think of hiring someone without that degree. Yet, when it comes to ESL, everybody’s an expert.”

The continued resistance to granting ESL enhanced status at some district colleges places Los Angeles far from the ESL vanguard, said Saeed Ali, a dean with the state community college chancellor’s office. Most other community colleges in the state already have freed ESL from its English department ties. At Glendale College, ESL has been a discipline for more than 10 years. At College of the Canyons in Valencia, plans call for splitting it from English later this year.

In fact, a resolution adopted last summer by the Board of Governors for California Community Colleges states that all California colleges should “recognize ESL as a unique discipline” by July 1. The resolution does not indicate what ranking that discipline must have in the departmental structure--which varies from college to college--so in some cases it could remain subsumed by the English department.

Mike Anker, a member of the state academic senate which recommended establishing the ESL discipline, described its inclusion in a list of community college reforms as “a close call.”

“It only came after very difficult discussion as to whether or not two fields that clearly overlap--no question about that--whether or not it was appropriate to make a distinction between them,” Anker said.

The resolution further dictates that, after July, new ESL instructors must meet a set of minimum qualifications, including specialized study in teaching English as a second language. In the past, any English teacher could teach ESL.

Already, some Los Angeles colleges are debating the effect of the state resolution. There are questions about whether college autonomy rules might dampen any state enforcement efforts. Los Angeles City College has even proposed changing course names so that they do not mention “ESL” to keep them from being folded into the new discipline.

The ESL debate dredges up an increasingly controversial issue at community colleges: the disproportionate number of part-time instructors. Districtwide, about 25% of classes are taught by part-timers, but even more ESL classes--far more than half, based on district and college estimates--are taught by part-time teachers.

Part-timers do not have office hours--or even offices--which many say are particularly important for non-English-speaking students.

“Language always requires more face-to-face instruction,” said Roselle Lewis, who taught ESL part time at Valley College from 1976 to 1988. “Often the classes are far too large for that--50 students sometimes.”

The growth in ESL began to rapidly accelerate about the time Proposition 13, the 1978 property tax initiative, started draining public coffers, leaving less money for hiring new full-time ESL instructors to meet the need, district administrators say. But ESL teachers add that the few positions that have opened since then have been taken by English department faculty members. They hope the separation of ESL and the new teacher qualifications will change that.

The debate over control of ESL is not just about power, though. It has widened to include the different approaches toward language of those trained in ESL and English.

“Just because the two areas have English in the title doesn’t mean they are the same at all,” Barbato said. “Maybe some people know a lot about medicine and how to heal a person when he’s sick . . . but you wouldn’t want to have them doing anything serious to you.”

In her ESL class at Mission College last week, Barbato stopped her lesson to remind students of the importance of using the possessive case in English. In Spanish, the native language of most of her students, there is no equivalent. It is the kind of thing she believes instructors without specialized training might overlook.

“An intelligent person, someone who’s willing to retrain or read, will figure a lot of things out,” she said. “But an education in the field makes it a lot easier, there’s less improvisation.”

Frank Beyer, chairman of the English department at Pierce College, is teaching his first ESL class this semester. He has no formal ESL training.

“I teach ESL using the same kind of authors and writing that I would if they were native speakers,” Beyer said. “It complements students that they are reading people like Tom Wolfe, Alice Walker and James Baldwin.”

Beyer and other English teachers say independence from the established power structure would make ESL an isolated backwater, another negative result for students.

“I think why students are legitimately at the community colleges is to study at the college level,” said Jean Stearns, who teaches both ESL and English at Valley College. “Separating the two would not aid their stepping right into regular English classes.”

GROWTH OF ESL CLASSES

Los Angeles Community College District

* Hours spent in class

Fall 1980 Fall 1988 Change English as a Second Language 16,052 44,650 +178% Traditional English 58,887 61,831 +5% All other classes 1,184,832 848,986 -28%

* ESL class hours as percentage of total class hours

Fall 1980 Fall 1988 City College 3.6% 11.1% East College 2.1% 3.7% Harbor College .6% 1.9% Mission College 1.6% 10.0% Pierce College .4% .7% Southwest College .1% 18.0% Trade Tech. College .4% 2.7% Valley College 1.3% 3.0% West College .5% 2.6% Districtwide 1.3% 4.7%

Sources: Los Angeles Community College District, Office of Research, Planning and Analysis; English as a Second Language Instruction in the Los Angeles Community College District, Fall 1980-Fall 1988. Source: Mission Hills Chamber of Commerce