Economic factors impact bilingual learners’ school success in a general way, but they also have a particular impact on those who wish to attend college. Today’s economic climate has “eliminated many well-paying skilled industrial jobs…cutting off traditional routes of economic integration and upward mobility” (Roberge, 2009, p. 9). At the same time, college costs are rising; yet, aid is moving away from need-based awards. Also, ethnicity and income level affect a family’s willingness to use loans (Harklau & Siegal, 2009).
Standardized testing creates an especially frustrating barrier to entering college.
Tests such as the SAT and ACT “have persistently shown bias against non-White and non-middle-class groups” (Harklau & Siegal, 2009, p. 28). Aside from the cultural bias that persists in standardized tests, the vocabulary of some prompts may be difficult for bilingual learners to understand. For students who must mentally translate parts of the English test questions into their L1, the test time limits may be unrealistic. As Anstrom observes, to meet state or school standards, bilingual learners “have to perform at much higher cognitive and linguistic levels than their native-speaking peers.” While their monolingual peers are able to focus most of their attention on the cognitive tasks of the test, bilingual learners must also focus on the language of the test (1997, p. 100).
Like all incoming freshmen, bilingual learners must adjust to the cognitive, social, and self-management demands of college. Unlike the majority of their monolingual peers, however, bilingual learners must manage cultural and linguistic differences as well. At times, it may seem as though they must suppress their own cultural values and understandings if they wish to meet the demands of their college courses. Hyland, quoting Bizzell (1987, p. 131), explains why adjusting to tertiary education may be so difficult for bilingual learners:
Not only does it confront them with a more complex and relativistic style of learning than they knew at school, but they also have to “employ cultural and discourse literacies very different from those of ‘standard English’ varieties.” These difficulties are compounded for second language speakers, particularly as success is principally judged by the display of competence in a specialist [disciplinary] written genre. (2000, pp. 146-147)
To “help” bilingual learners, colleges may give them extra support, like “remedial”
courses or tutoring, “often referred to as ‘fixing up’ their language problems, which is fondly believed to then facilitate learning” (p. 147).
If an immigrant student is the first in her family to enter higher education, she may feel isolated from both her family and the university culture, an experience common to many first-generation college students but exacerbated by bilingual learners’ minority status (Harklau & Siegal, 2009). If this student or anyone in her family is undocumented, the isolation may be more severe. Besides not qualifying for federal financial aid,
undocumented students or their families may fear the school or school officials as an
“arm of the state” (Louie, 2009, p. 44). Colleges tend to be unaware of how they may be viewed by bilingual learners’ families or, if they are aware, may not know how to allay such fears.
Upon entering college, bilingual learners often find little language-learning support because, at the post-secondary level, extra English language support is mainly designed to help international students. The differing needs of resident ESL students traditionally have been overlooked because “the college TESOL community did not include resident ESL students within the scope of its work” (Matsuda & Matsuda, 2009, p. 58). Bilingual learners, therefore, were shunted into developmental writing classes designed for monolingual students at the basic skills level.
Developmental writing instructors, as well as college professors, are often ill-equipped to deal with the challenges presented by resident bilingual learners’ particular needs. Instructors and professors may lack “multicultural knowledge” and may be unaware that “previous experience with institutionalized racism, stereotyping, and sheer lack of faith in their abilities” is part of the background these students bring to their college experience (Stein, 2005, p. 84). Teachers may find it nearly impossible to “get beyond [the students’] language problems when evaluating their work” (Forrest, 2006, p.
107). Also, most faculty are unaware of the principles of second language development.
For example, they may not realize that, for bilingual learners who have learned English predominately orally (through mass culture, older siblings, and peers), their L2 writing may still rely heavily on their L2 speaking. College courses, on the other hand, focus more on reading and writing without building on oral skills (Makalela, 2004). The students, themselves, may be as unaware as their professors that there are problems ahead:
What camouflages and complicates the problem for Generation 1.5 students is that they have graduated from American schools. These students expect to do well because they have gone through, at least in part, the American school system and have graduated, usually
with a high grade point average, from this system. Likewise, faculty expect these students to do well precisely because they have graduated from American high schools” (Goldschmidt &
Ousey, 2006, p. 17).
Bilingual learners—especially those who are first-generation college students—may not
“have clear notions of how college learning might differ from what they [experienced] in high school” (Allison, 2009, p. 86). While this is a problem for all first-generation college students, it can be intensified by linguistic and cultural mismatch with the college
community when faculty are as unaware of bilingual learners’ expectations as bilingual learners are of the expectations of college-level work.