Dear
ESL Colleagues:
This will be the third year that ESL faculty
have participated in the Intersegmental Major
Preparation Articulated Curriculum (IMPAC)
project. As many of you know from attending
meetings during the past two years, IMPAC,
a faculty-designed and faculty-run project,
focuses on ensuring that students transferring
from California community colleges to UC and
CSU institutions will be prepared for upper
division academic work.
For the ESL discipline, discussions at IMPAC
meetings have included the following topics:
1) assessment and placement practices; 2) degree
and transfer credit for ESL courses; 3) the
academic curricula of community college ESL
programs; 4) ways to remove the stigma of ESL
designated courses;
5) promoting language support for ESL students across disciplines through
ESL faculty and discipline faculty collaboration; 6) the differing academic
language needs of specific English learner populations, such as generation
1. 5 students and international students who enter community colleges with
advanced degrees. The attached annual report summarizes our discussions
and recommendations for the 2004-2005 academic year.
As the ESL Lead
for IMPAC, I am writing to encourage you and
your colleagues to attend the IMPAC regional
and statewide meetings now scheduled for 2005-2006.
Faculty from the South and Metro regions attend the regional meeting scheduled
on November 19th at LAX Sheraton Gateway, and North, Central, and Bay regions
on January 21st at San Francisco Westin (See the attached announcement.)
As part of this year’s ESL agenda, we will be reviewing the results of
an ICAS ESL Task Force survey completed by faculty in the CC, CSU and UC segments.
This survey asked for information about ESL students, programs and support
services on our campuses. The survey topics concern many of the issues raised
in IMPAC meetings. We will also be developing informational materials related
to ESL students and instruction to share with faculty from other disciplines.
A third agenda item, begun last year, is to gather descriptions of effective
practices for assessment, placement, and instruction for ESL students and for
promoting ESL and disciplinary faculty collaboration, with the goal of making
these descriptions available on the internet.
Please visit the
project’s website at www.cal-impac.org
for past meeting reports and other information
about IMPAC. I also hope that you will tell
others in your program or department to visit
the IMPAC website for updates on the project.
If you have any
questions about IMPAC in general or about our
ESL meetings, or if you wish to add topics
to an ESL regional meeting agenda, please contact
me either by e-mail (frodesen@linguistics.ucsb.edu)
or telephone (805 893-3303).
I look forward
to meeting with you during the 2005-2006 sessions.
Cordially,
Jan Frodesen
IMPAC ESL Lead
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