New ACCESS Program Supports International Students as Writers and Researchers

by Anna Habib, Center for International Student Access and former director of the Writing Center, and Karyn Mallett, Assistant Director, English Language Institute

The 2010-2011 academic year at Mason included the launch of a new internationalization initiative – the ACCESS Program – directed out of the Provost’s Office and the Center for International Student Access (CISA). In partnership with the English Language Institute (ELI), the ACCESS Program is built upon a language-supported approach to campus internationalization, aiming to meet students at varied points of academic, linguistic, and cultural need. For the pilot year of the ACCESS program, the composition director and select English Department and ELI faculty worked together to design a co-taught, year-long model of introductory composition that moved students toward several major goals, including the development of rhetorical awareness, the expansion of academic writing skills, and the advancement of English language acquisition. The expanded composition course focuses on building the students’ fluency and accuracy as they learn to navigate the conventions and expectations of academic writing in the U.S.

Although most of the ACCESS students were relatively fluent in spoken English (at the beginning of the academic year), many of them struggled with their written English. On a class wiki, students indicated that they were very aware of their challenges with English grammar and mechanics and reflected on how their limited proficiency affected their confidence and comfort with writing in all their courses. Therefore, in addition to weekly practice with writing, grammar, and reading exercises, students kept online vocabulary and error logs to help them self-monitor their language acquisition over time. They completed a Language Acquisition Portfolio at the end of the spring semester that included an analysis of their own writing and a reflective essay that tracked their language development and evolution as academic writers over the course of the year.

While the fall semester was designed to give students the confidence and strategies to write more fluidly in English, the spring course focused primarily on developing the students’ critical reading skills and their accuracy writing in academic English. These goals came about through a partnership with Zofia Burr, Dean of the Honors College, and Linda Schwartztein, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, who taught the Introduction to Research course designed for ACCESS students linked to the second-semester composition course. The curricula were reworked to complement each other—the Introduction to Research course guiding students through the process of academic inquiry and research methodologies (with the assistance from peer-mentors in the Honors College) and the composition course focusing more specifically on how to build complex, academic arguments using secondary sources.

This co-teaching approach and the cross-curricular collaboration have resulted in significant progress towards the ACCESS program’s goals for these students. Students who struggled with their English language proficiency and their confidence as newcomers to the American academic culture ended their first year at Mason with a much stronger sense of the conventions of academic inquiry and how to write and research in this new language and context, which, for most, is very different from the education systems and academic approaches in their home countries.