Remedial English courses are designed to provide basic instruction in English to students who enter college with below expected English proficiency skills.
Remedial English courses begin with an emphasis on fundamentals of grammar, sentence structure, punctuation, and capitalization.
Once students can successfully organize their thoughts in sentence form, remedial English courses expand into organizing sentences into paragraph structure.
The final stage of remedial English is organizing thought into written essay form. The student is taught to view the essay as a collection of paragraphs, with each paragraph being a collection of sentences that come together to illustrate a point.
Students completing remedial English are expected to integrate into college-level English courses and eventually display college-level writing skills in all subjects.
Community colleges are not the only educational institutions teaching remedial English. A 2008 study conducted of the California State University system estimated that only 46 percent of California students are proficient in English. This same study by The Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning showed that 24,000 out of 40,000 admitted students failed entry-level placement tests in either math or English.