When I
started taking ESL classes at South Seattle Community College, I did not know
how important that program was to get me ready for college. Since I moved on from second level to third
level, I began to feel less enthusiastic with the ESL classes as my instructors
just focused on some topics that I have seen in the previous levels such as
topic sentence, the main idea in a paragraph, simple, compound, complex, and
compound complex sentences, grammar, etc. I wondered why those teachers were so
concern about all those topics. Some of my tablemates always complained that
they were tired of being taking ESL classes that they wanted to be in college.
I just said yes to them and kept doing all my homework assignments on time and
practicing all those topics again and again. However, some of my classmates did
not pass the ESL COMPAS test because they didn’t do their homework and wanted
to jump from ESL to English 101, but I didn’t talk about college and just focused
on my ESL classes.
I kept
learning ESL for a while and after level 5B I decided to take the ESL COMPAS
test. Something usual happen that I got a really good score on grammar skill,
ok on listening comprehension, but poor on reading. When I showed my test
result to the counselor Virginia, she got surprised and said “wow! This is unbelievable
because everybody here has problems with grammar and you are the opposite.” She
did not know what decision to make with me and sent me to show the result to
Don Bissonette where he was teaching that day. He wrote a note telling Virginia
to register me in ESL Transition I. Since then, I have been figuring college
level classes out thanks to the significant background I gained in the ESL
programs.
I was curious about how you felt about your reading abilities? Do you think the low reading comprehension hindered your abiity to do the college level reading? I am curious.
ReplyDeleteYes, the reading deficiency really hindered my ability to do the college level reading because most of the assignments had to do with a lot of reading every day. When I took the Transitional ESL and English 98, and 101, it was tough because there were a lot of materials which had to be read and summarized in a short period of time. So as the class where advancing, I started to improve my reading as I learned great skills and vocabulary from the different text books I used in those courses. However, when I sat down to write essays, I came up with appropriate thoughts and put them in papers, which helped to cover my reading weakness.
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