Not an afterthought: Authoring a text on adult ESOL

Abstract

In her article in this special issue, Catherine Wallace makes the case that the active reading of a text is tantamount to “authoring” a new text. As a reader engages with a given text, the reader is not only grappling with the content of the text, but is seeking to make sense of the text in the light of past experience, pre-existing ideas, and intertextual connections. As I read through these five articles on adult ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages), I scribbled comments in the margin, underlined different sections, added questions and exclamations, drew arrows from one section to another, consulted other articles, and started writing a series of notes to myself. It is these preliminary thoughts that I wish to “author” for my Afterword for this special issue of Linguistics and Education. In authoring this text, I am drawing primarily on my own research with adult immigrants in Canada, with whom I have worked for the past two decades. In the process of writing this Afterword, I sought to update myself on adult ESOL research internationally, in order to bring a comparative perspective to the British focus of the special issue. However, like Murray (2005), I found that there is no coherent body of research literature on adult ESOL education. As Murray notes, delivery systems for adult language learners in English-dominant countries, including Australia, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the USA differ considerably. This, in turn, leads to different perceptions of the adult ESOL learner and different research foci, the result of which is fragmentary, context-specific research, with findings that cannot be generalized to other contexts. I found, in addition, that the question of funding is a common theme in research on adult ESOL, largely as a result of adult ESOLs ambivalent status within the education systems of different countries. In most English-dominant countries, there is a central focus on elementary and secondary education, which is compulsory to mid-adolescence, with adult education receiving a fraction of per capita spending. For example, while the impressive figure of almost half a billion dollars was allocated to adult education programming in the USA in the year 2002, amounting to $374 per adult learner, this was a small percentage relative to the amount of $6835 average spent per student in the elementary and secondary education system (National Centre for ESL Literacy Education, 2002 ,p . 5).