Passing WPE tough for students

By Michael Watanabe
Daily Forty-Niner

Every student at Cal State Long Beach must take the Writing Proficiency Exam to graduate, but to students studying English as a second language, it can be daunting.

"We started seeing so many people who can't pass the WPE," said Kathy Lenz, coordinator of the International Conversation Lab. "Or students that had graduated from the university and can't even speak grammatically."

Despite many misconceptions, Dr. Gen Ramirez, director of the Learning Assistance Center, said she believes the idea that the WPE is frightening is basically a language-development issue.

Learning a language is "not something that happens in a month or a few weeks. It's a progressive skill-building process," she said.

Ramirez said she hopes that while learning English, students will learn not only passive qualities, such as understanding what is heard and read, but active qualities as well, including the delivering of thoughts through oral and written media. This is where the WPE comes in.

Ramirez believes that the WPE should be given and passed in its current form because it demands that students "discuss issues and ideas analytically and that they express those ideas with a certain level of proficiency and accuracy."

Students may see the WPE as intimidating for several other reasons. Many students are not focused on becoming proficient in English, Lenz said.

"They just want to get a degree, then get a job out there," she said.

Students who have immigrated to the United States also have problems, even though some might have experience with the U.S. school system. As long as the students could handle the course content in primary and secondary schools, they were not necessarily given enough instruction to develop good and adequate language skills, Ramirez said.

That is where the International Conversation Lab comes in.

Initially, the program was not growing because ESL students' language problem was not obvious to staff or faculty on campus, Lenz said.

The language barrier should be "notified or noticed at the beginning of the students educational career, not at the end," she said.

But, students must be praised for what they have accomplished, Ramirez said. She said she often tells International Conversation Lab tutors to put themselves into the student's shoes, asking them to consider how well they would do if they were to take college courses in another country.

Ramirez said she really admires international students for what they have done.

"Because, man, they're working hard," Ramirez said.