Title III Work Group: Suzanne Helfmann, Judy Hubbard, Ulysses Pichon, Julie Pesano, Julie Sartwell,
Cheryl Woodward
What we have accomplished so far:
 Thoroughly assessed student writing and student anecdotal data to determine greatest
student needs.
 Identified at-risk factors.
 Designed strategies to support student success.
Plan that we decided will ensure greatest success:
 Design a series of small group instructional modules that address the wide variety of student
needs in the classroom. The basic instructional 1/2 unit modules include but are not limited to:
o Nouns, gerunds, articles and prepositions
o Simple present and past verb forms
o Basic vocabulary
o Advanced vocabulary
o Sentence boundaries, fragments and run-ons, subordinating and
coordinating conjunctions
o Advanced sentence combining, appositives, verbals, and adjective clauses
(sentence focus)
o Paragraph development
o Editing and proofreading
The important things to know about the modules are:
 most of them will be assigned to the students on the basis of their placement
test scores and required before EWRT 1A.
 Students may also be referred to appropriate modules by instructors
from anywhere on campus.
 And students can elect to take them and will have some recourse when they fail a
class because they are having problems not with the content of the course but
with the basic English structures that they need to understand.
 They will be taught in small groups of 6 — 8 and be largely based on the
students learning rules, applying them to their own writing and learning
to edit using the rules.
 They will take the place of the one-size-fits-all co-requisite labs at the 211
level in English.
 They will be taught by RTAs who have been thoroughly trained.
Some questions and answers?
Question: Why not just use the modules already in place through the Skills Center?
Answer: The modules in the Skills Center cannot even begin to address the vast numbers of
students who need the skills. The modules are not based on the students learning to edit their own
writing and the modules were not developed by the English Department. The group of instructors who are
teaching and examining the LARTs are the ones who need to write the curriculum for the support labs
because they are the ones who know their students best.
Question: Where are the added resources to staff these modules to come from?
Answer: The proposal is to drop the EWRT 212 co-requisite for all of the EWRT 211and LART 211
classes and use the resources from those co-requisites to create new pre-requisites and to hire and
train the RTAs to teach the above pre-requisites instead of the old co-requisites.
Question: Why do away with a long-standing co-requisite for EW RT and LART 211?
Answer: Because the students' needs are varied and many of the students simply do not need
the lab while others, particularly Generation 1.5 students, don't need the work in paragraph
development as they are getting it in EWRT 211 now that the portfolio system is in place. But
they do need to consciously learn the written rules of the language. Realistically, we have to face
that our existing labs is not effective because it is not addressing the great variety of needs.
Question: Why not just have peer tutors or RTAs work with the students one -on-one as we
have been doing?
Answer: The people who teach the 1/2 unit labs need a structured program and thorough training
in order to teach concepts that are already difficult enough for our trained English faculty. We
can also serve more students and studies show that students benefit from working in sma ll groups
of 6 — 8.
Question: Who is going to coordinate scheduling, train RTAs and oversee the teaching of the
modules that are appropriate for the students' needs? We are already looking at cuts in release
time. How can we get more?
Answer: What we are proposing is not to add more reassigned time but to re-allocate. Currently
English Readiness is allotted .875. What we are proposing is that the EWRT Readiness
instructor get .375 to run the EWRT 201 and LART 201 program and to coordinate the portfolio
program. (The continuation of the portfolio program is crucial to the success of the new and
improved consistent standards in EWRT 211 and LART 211.)
The remaining .50 would be given to the WRC coordinators to train and schedule staff for the
new modules. That would take care of the issue of where releàse time is to come from for the
WRC coordinators and put the training of the RTAs and tutors who work in the WRC under their
charge which is where we feel it belongs.
Question: Who is going to decide how the students are assigned pre-requisites?
Answer: The team of instructors on the top of the page is currently examining written placement
samples in or der to determ ine a r ubric that the c urrent plac em ent tes t readers will be
trained to us e.
What is left for our team to do:
 Continue to write and refine the modules.
 develop SLO's for these basic skills classes so as to aid in the determination of students'
readiness to proceed from one level to the next and on to college level English.
 Evaluate student written placement tests and develop a rubric so that students can be
accurately placed.
 Get department, division, and counseling and administrative support for the proposal.
 Train RTAs and instructors how to use the new modules.
 Create an overall coordinated support system, linking all the support services across
campus Title III, LARTS, First Year Experience, Puente, Umoja, Tutorial, WRC, Listeningspeaking lab and others.
 Add a counseling component to the student services that is on -site and available to the
students. Perhaps a 1/2 unit counseling module for students or a counselor available to
developmental students. W e haven't really had a chance to flesh out that idea but we
know that it is crucial for the instructors, staff and students to be more closely conne cted
to counseling.