ABSTRACT
Our work with generation 1.5 students and their teachers began over a decade ago when we jointly served on San Francisco State University’s (SFSU) Committee on Written English Proficiency. As part of our committee work, we embarked on an examination of the progress of students placed in SFSU’s ESL and basic writing programs toward meeting the University’s written English requirements. In our examination, we identified many students who were different from international students in that they brought to the classroom a comfortable fluency, an ease with the English language and American popular culture alongside a rich and varied background from growing up in multilingual and multicultural environments. But they were also different from native speaker basic writers, for they had characteristics that marked them as second language writers, characteristics that all too often are inappropriately subsumed in composition research and literature under the label of academic “under preparation.” We initially referred to this group as long-term bilinguals, but along with a growing number of researchers adopted the term “generation 1.5.”
