What to do about the Lost Forty?

  Hello Everyone,

Last Friday I was in a meeting with members of the ESL Department, Registrar’s Office and the Centre for International Education.  One of the questions we considered was the plight of international ESL students who have completed EASL 0450 but received an EXP grade in EASL 0360.  These students must earn a Mastery grade in 0360 before they can take courses in other subjects at the college. They also must study full-time in order to maintain their student visas.  So what can they take to fill out the other half of their course load while they are repeating 0360?  We were told in the meeting that substantial numbers, possibly 40-50 of these students per semester, leave the college and go elsewhere to study.  So I'm calling them the 'lost forty.'

The proposal under discussion was to allow students in this predicament to take selected, non-language-intensive courses, possibly in computing studies, student success, math or DVST math, concurrently with EASL 0360.

At one point in the discussion, I was asked what the ESL faculty members would think of the proposal.  I thought for a moment and gave it my best guess.  In my next post, I’ll tell you what I said.  Meanwhile, let me ask you, “What DO you think of this proposal?”  And what do you think we should do about the lost forty?

Express your opinion by responding to the poll on the upper right of this page.  Then, feel free to elaborate by commenting on this post.

I look forward to hearing from you.

All the best,

Jonathan

Welcome Colleagues!

Hello Everyone,

Here is the blog I promised at last Thursday's faculty meeting. I have made you a member. I suggest that you subscribe to the RSS feed by clicking on the button. This will ensure that you receive an email message when something new appears.

The purpose of this blog is to keep all faculty and staff in our department well informed about 'what is going on' from the coordinator's point of view. It also affords you with the opportunity to respond with comments, questions and suggestions. This way we can keep a running dialogue. As a side benefit, the blog is a searchable record of our discussion.

There are also links on this blog to other web sites that might be of interest. One of them is our shared calendar. Google has been kind enough to provide us with an electronic calendar that we can use to post our faculty, PD, committee and course group meeting times and locations. I'll also post all the college dates and deadlines as well as DCFA meetings. So, if you are a committee chair or course group leader, please post your meetings soon.

You have already noticed that the blog's title is different from the current name of our department. I did this because we have voted to change our name to English Language Studies (ENLS). So the name of this blog will be our name in the near future.

I will close with a few words of appreciation.

Thanks to all of you who attended the PD session and meeting on Thursday at the David Lam Campus and the faculty/staff lunch on Friday at the Old Spaghetti Factory in New Westminster. These were significant and memorable times.

Special thanks to Janice Penner who arranged for the PD session and Linda Villarreal with Sheilagh Badanic who organized the lunch celebration to honour our staff and Brenda and Ted, dean's assistant and dean who are moving away from our area.

With warmest holiday greetings to you and your families,

Jonathan