WELCOME TO THE HOSTOS ANNUAL ESL FORUM!

MISSION STATEMENT

Today’s globalized world constitutes new challenges in higher education and has an immediate impact on a new generation of students which poses new questions in the area of academic literacy and English language acquisition (ELA). For the first time, teachers in today’s colleges are facing a generation of learners who has become literate during the information age. They are consumers of information and entertainment generated in the shared global space of the world-wide-web and their primary function of language and communication is performed in the “message”, either as email, sms or on “walls” of digital social networks, such as Facebook and My Space.

Apart from technology and multimedia information processing, globalization has further brought about a steady rise in cultural diversity in toady’s college populations. Mobility and communication are breaking up cultural boundaries and it is becoming increasingly possible to exist in and across multiple cultures simultaneously.

In the area of academic ESL/ELL, these two components constitute a shift in teaching and learning that requires a discussion among scholars and educators. This dialogue would help promote a deeper understanding of what makes up adequate curricula and teaching methods for this new generation of learners. As one of the largest urban colleges in the nation, CUNY forms a fertile ground for such academic exchange of shared scholarship, experience and teaching practices.

The Hostos Annual ESL Forum is a full day symposium that seeks to bring together educators and scholars within and outside CUNY to build networks of shared expertise and experience in the areas of learning and teaching academic ESL. In this respect, we have set up a Forum Blog to allow a continued dialogue and exchange of ideas, practices and research.

This year’s forum will concentrate on academic literacy development in the face of a new generation of global learners and will involve three main focus areas.

• DIVERSE LITERACIES IN ELA: To find an adequate response to what and how we teach academic ESL/ELA today, we need to consider the broad and challenging diversity in literacy among ELA learners. Who really qualifies as 1.5 generation? Is the 1.5 generation student in fact bilingual? How about students from Creole English speaking countries such as Nigeria and Ghana who end up in our ESL classes? Which methods do we have in place to truly measure language proficiency in this context? And how do we handle the influx of diverse educational backgrounds among immigrant students? The Forum seeks to shed light on these challenges and work toward possible solutions that best support the enhancement of academic ESL/ELA.
• TECHNOLOGY AND MULTIMODALITY LITERACY: The student generation of the information age is experiencing a shift from traditional forms of literacy. The dominance of the written text is being replaced by a multimodal world of language that entails a rich inter-textual form of discourse made up of images, icons, sounds and written language. How are we as language educators responding to this new turn in literacy and how much of these multimodal ways of information processing are we ready to integrate in our academic ESL/ELA curricula? The Forum centers its attention around this very new and intriguing aspect of teaching and learning, especially in the area of academic skills development.
• CURRICULUM AND ASSESSMENT: Where are we as ESL/ELA educators in our efforts in selecting adequate content and learning materials that reflect a new global community of students? How far are we in our methods when dealing with the first millennia generation and are we aware of the impact that these new forms of teaching and learning have on the assessment of academic language skills in ESL/ELA? It is the goal of the Forum to build a platform from which knowledge, expertise and experiences can be shared and the rich community of ESL/ELA educators within CUNY can serve as its own network of resources.