Adult ESL Education in the US.

This article discusses the state of the art in the field of “adult ESL” in the US. It identifies the size, characteristics, and settings of adult education and discusses relevant professional standards, assessment procedures, and teacher preparation. Three approaches to noncredit adult ESL education will be presented (Functional Literacy, Critical Literacy, and New Literacy Studies), each of which has relevance to current status and funding of adult ESL within the Department of Education. A broader view of curriculum design and expansion of technological applications are recommended to address the growing needs of immigrants from Latin America and around the world. T he education of adult English as a second language (ESL) students in the US has come a long way since Leo Rosten’s humorous description of ESL teaching in New York City in The Education of Hyman Kaplan (1937). Classes for “Americanization” of immigrants still exist in the form of civics classes, but they are only part of the inspiring array of ESL classes being offered to adults in noncredit adult education programs. Based on a yearlong research project aimed at uncovering and documenting important issues and new developments in adult ESL, this article will paint a portrait of the US adult ESL classroom, foregrounding the Herculean efforts of too few trained ESL instructors teaching a limited few of the potential ESL students in the US. It will begin by identifying who adult ESL learners are, presenting a description of characteristics of adult learners and categories of immigrants within a variety of current ESL settings in order to highlight the complexity of this student population. Following this description is a discussion of the evolution of adult ESL professional standards, assessments, and teacher-training options, which have not been uniform across the nation. Next, “adult ESL” within the infrastructure of “adult education” will be problematized with its consequent status,