At the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference this past March in Chicago, I had the opportunity to collaborate with a group of scholars from across the United States on a colloquium entitled "Linguistic Minority Immigrants Go to College: Preparation, Access, and Persistence." Most of the presentations were based on chapters in an upcoming collection by the same title due out next year from Routledge, co-edited by the co-organizers of the colloquium, Yasuko Kanno and Linda Harklau. The impetus for the collection and colloquium resulted from the realization that linguistic minority students are the fastest growing student demographic, but their progression through the K-12 system and into college has been largely ignored. In an e-mail interview, Kanno explained this:

The way Linda and I understand it is that this topic has fallen through the cracks of a disciplinary division of labor. We applied linguists tend to focus on linguistic minority students’ linguistic challenges, especially L2 writing issues, while educational sociologists, though they have a long and rich tradition of tracking the college-going of ethnic minority and low-income students, have been rather oblivious to linguistic minority as a variable. So there has been no tradition of examining linguistic minority students’ access to and graduation from college.

Kanno and her colleague, Jennifer Cromley, began the colloquium with a presentation that took a national view on English language learners’ college access and attainment. Drawing from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, which followed approximately 25,000 8^th graders from 1988 to 2000, Kanno and Cromley analyzed the college-going trends of three groups of students: English monolingual speakers (EMs), English-proficient linguistic minority students (EPs), and English language learners (ELLs). The presenters found that EPs had more in common with EMs than ELLs, as 1 in 3 EMs and 1 in 4 EPs earn a BA within 8 years after high school graduation, while only 1 in 8 or 9 ELLs does. Nonetheless, according to Kanno and Cromley’s findings, language and racial/ethnic status do not account for lower college achievement; rather, family income, parental education, expectations for postsecondary achievement, and high school coursework all were more important predictors.

My contribution to the panel was a presentation based on my dissertation project, a year and a half study of Mexican and Mexican American students transitioning to college on the U.S.-Mexico border. In the presentation, I discussed why the students in the study were interested in college, how they made decisions on where to attend school and/or whether to attend a four-year institution or a community college, and how they chose their majors. In addition to explaining how the participants viewed postsecondary education as the primary way to secure a better life for themselves and their families, I also revealed how closeness to family played an important role in shaping decisions regarding where to attend college. I ended the presentation by showing a college decision ecology map, which was a visual representation of the complexity of multilingual students’ college-going decisions.

Continuing with case-study research, Linda Harklau reported on a study of a Latina, Paola, whom she worked with from 2001 through 2005, from 8th grade into college. Drawing on previous studies and details that emerged from her 35 interviews with Paola, Harklau identified both facilitative factors, as well as some limiting factors, for college-going. The facilitative factors included parental and sibling support for education, attendance at a prosperous suburban school, involvement in sports, religiosity, and self-efficacy (i.e., Paola’s confidence in herself to achieve academic goals). On the other hand, limiting factors included disrupted schooling, unstable family income, generational and legal status, and learning disabilities.

The next presenter, Anysia P. Mayer, reported on a six-year ethnographic case study of an International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Program at a California high school that was approximately 60 percent Latino. Using a pattern-matching analysis approach, Mayer compared the practices in the IB program. She observed two best practices that researchers have noted in other high schools serving linguistic minority (LM) students. In her presentation, Mayer discussed how the IB program valued students’ language and culture and how the program worked to be culturally relevant to the students it served by including readings such as “House on Mango Street” and focusing on civil rights revolutions in U.S. and Latin American history. Mayer also found that the IB program promoted college access for LM students by maintaining high academic expectations for students and hosting events such as weekend personal statement writing retreats and meetings between high school seniors and college freshmen.

Moving away from a focus on a program that supported LM student success, Shawna Shapiro discussed the deficit-oriented language policies and alienation of LM students at a major U.S. university. From a survey conducted with faculty across the university, she found that faculty rarely made accommodations for LM students in their classes and, in some cases, resisted the idea of supporting these students. From interviews with students, Shapiro found that they felt alienated at the institution and in their classes, which resulted in lower self-confidence and the feeling that they were a “burden” on faculty. Shapiro also discussed institutional factors that contributed to the alienation of students, noting that the placement diagnostic test was overly difficult and biased against students; that students in the ESL program were required to pay extra tuition; and that the ESL program itself was marginalized, located in a hard-to-find building well away from the main campus, and not depicted on campus maps.

Guadalupe Valdes closed the colloquium with a brief response focusing on the importance of filling the research gap in this area by conducting diverse studies like the ones in this colloquium and by constantly reconsidering the way researchers label students. The sizable audience demonstrated interest in learning more about LM students’ transitions into and through college. Moreover, Kanno, who has organized several panels on this topic over the past several years, noted that it is very common for publishers to approach her afterward inquiring if she has interest in developing a book on the topic. For those who were unable to make the colloquium or simply want to read more about the presenters’ work as well as other studies on the important area of linguistic minority students transitioning to college, I recommend that they look out for the collection when it is released early next year.

Todd Ruecker is a doctoral candidate in rhetoric and composition at the University of Texas at El Paso. His research is focused on investigating issues surrounding the increasing linguistic and cultural diversity of higher education and addressing them through pedagogical development and structural change. He has published articles and book reviews in Composition Studies, ELT Journal, and TESOL Quarterly.