A Letter to English Language Learners at CUNY

A Letter to English Language Learners at CUNY



Dear student,

Welcome to the English Department at Queensborough Community College, City University of New York. You are required to study with us for a transient period to improve your reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills before you can take mainstream courses to pursue your academic career at the college. While you take reading and writing courses with us, you will learn the linguistic conventions of North American academic discourse and, hopefully, articulate your thoughts in speech and writing with relative ease and success.

Our students come from diversified social, linguistic, cultural, economic, and spiritual backgrounds. Rather than perceiving these variables as impediments to teaching and learning, the department considers them great opportunities for candid discussion of ideas in a global context of mutual respect and tolerance for various beliefs. It is in this conducive environment that students with their unique strengths and weaknesses actively participate in collaborative learning by studying authentic texts and by considering opposing viewpoints with equanimity. 

It is important for you to understand that our classes are student-centered and content-based, not “teacher-fronted”. The Department’s philosophy of imparting knowledge to its students may represent radical departures from the ways in which you may have learned the English language. Please know that the Department is not responsible for the curricula of other lands and educational institutions, but our faculty have the clear rationale to delineate what and how we teach in this Department and explain our methods of instruction to you at the beginning of the term.  

As you take our remedial reading and writing courses, you will focus on more than one linguistic skill simultaneously in your individual and group work: you will raise and respond to questions during discussions, read and analyze challenging texts, and so forth. The Department emphasizes practicing multiple skills because it believes that it is the acquisition of outstanding reading and comprehension skills that facilitates a mastery of speaking and writing skills in the English language. You will be guided to avail yourself of the opportunity to achieve proficiency in the major linguistic skills and to apply them in academic contexts. Keep in mind that the material is intellectually and linguistically challenging, and that students are expected to respond orally to the issues that arise during discussion. A good deal of emphasis is given to the development of discussion skills and critical inquiry.

All of the text designated for each of the remedial sequences are selected to provide you with linguistic features and cultural mores that are prevalent outside the classroom. In your remedial reading courses, you will have the opportunity to read a novel or a memoir that treats the interaction of mainstream American culture and foreign cultures. Our faculty members will guide you to make and appreciate these intercultural links consciously.

Each faculty member begins the term by locating impediments to your learning and by identifying the set of curricular goals that is appropriate for you in the classroom, establishing these with reference to your test scores as well as a battery of reading and writing diagnostic exercises that are conducted before the semester begins. This diagnosis occurs before anything else transpires in the classroom, allowing the faculty member to use this information to guide instruction and provide you with more “direct teaching” as opposed to the typical “chalk and talk” approach.

After the diagnostic phase, the instructors apprise the students of their responsibility to take ownership of their own learning. The required textbooks are designed to target specific linguistic skills to help students improve their English language proficiency. In addition to textbooks, instructors have ancillary materials at their disposal that include previously successful activities and connections to related issues.  

Throughout the semester, you will play a pivotal role in your linguistic growth, as the department believes that students who come to class to learn (rather than to be taught) are more active, take more responsibility for their own learning, and make a conscious effort to internalize new information.

It is our firm intent that students make conscious academic links between what is happening in the classrooms and what is transpiring in the world that encompasses their classroom lives. In other words, our instructors will design activities that enable you to make conscious links between the topics being covered in the classroom and real events unfolding in the world.

Our teaching philosophy and procedures involving teaching and learning in the classroom may seem unorthodox to some of you. However, rest assured that our instructors are formally trained, experienced, and competent. The instructors require students to assist their peers in creating tasks and achieving them individually and collectively. It is expected that you will play an active role in your academic growth as you recognize your strengths and improve your weaknesses.  

I wish you much success in your academic endeavors as you embark on your intellectual journey with your instructors.

Best wishes,

Jilani Warsi, Professor

English Department

Queensborough Community College

City University of New York