Reflections

To end the semester, I wanted to wrap up what I’ve discovered about the connections and overlaps (or lack thereof) between ESL and composition and also think about what further questions remain for future work. Overall, I think the most important discoveries I’ve made are the following:

  1. The split between ESL and composition is large, though only a few decades old. This divide can be seen somewhat in the things that the fields value. For example, ESL puts more of an emphasis on grammar and usage while composition does not.

Several examples of this can be seen in writers emphasizing the importance of grammar for ESL students. Damien McDevitt, for example, talked about working on “error correction” with ESL students and forming simpler sentences that are made more complex through correct grammatical forms. Likewise, Judith Oster suggests that grammatical usage is process that takes time to develop beyond ESL courses, but one that ESL students must continue to work on throughout their writing experiences in college. Likewise, Caroline Vickers and Estela Ene, who teach a containment course for freshmen composition students stress that they must teach grammatical skills for their ESL students that are not emphasized in “regular” composition courses.

Despite this emphasis in the ESL teaching world, the world “grammar” nearly never comes up in a search of the journal College English. This shows that at least beginning in the 1980s, this is not a skill that is as valued for composition students.

The split in this skill can likely be traced back to the divisions of the fields, as early as the 1970s, when TESOL became standardized and training preparation started to develop that was separate from English, where the attitude had previously been “if you speak it, you can teach it” (Gray). This continued into the 1990s when it was thought that although some teaching techniques could come from composition studies, the unique needs of ESL learners required different methods as well (Matsuda and Silva).

Clearly, these two fields separated because of a perceived need in the types of challenges they felt their students were facing. Despite pulling somewhat from each other, distinct journals and methods continued to be advocated and created. However, this leaves further difficulties in finding overlaps between these courses and fields that would help students better scaffold between them.

  1. These differences are also seen in part because of the inconsistent training backgrounds of teachers, particularly ESL teachers who come from backgrounds as varied as linguistics, TESOL, composition, and writing studies. Scaffolding between courses can and should be expected to be difficult when teachers with such varied backgrounds are teaching varied courses.

Matsuda and Silva point out, for example, that ESL teachers are being trained in various fields of study. Though many have some kind of linguistics backgrounds, others are simply graduate students studying things as varied as creative writing, literature, or composition themselves. Though this is true in composition as well, more and more teachers are coming into composition with rhetoric and composition degrees and less in literature or creative writing than before.

Such training discrepancies can be seen in the ultimate learning outcomes of these courses. Terry Santos notes, for example, ESL teachers still concern themselves more with product than composition’s process and this is the result of the pedagogical values emphasized in applied linguistics, in which many of their teachers are trained. Clearly, the educational values of each discipline are going to be further reflected in their course and student outcomes.

Though training is somewhat inconsistent, some teachers do advocate for further cross-training between the two fields. For example, Desmond Allison calls for further cross-departmental communication, including setting aside time to talk about the work teachers in other fields, including composition, are doing to help better help students succeed at tasks in those classrooms. Other authors have advocated for such teaching for transfer approaches as well (James). Such work might make ESL students in particular better able to handle the many rigors of college study.

  1. Despite these differences, the social turn strongly influenced both fields and strong overlaps in the ways that we think about respect for language and respect for our students has clearly been shown consistently between the two fields.

Though ESL may have taken slightly longer to get there, it was only by a little bit. Canagarajah notes that by the 1990s the ESL field was concerned with communities of practice, identity theory, collaboration, and asking teachers to acknowledge and contextualize their values and beliefs (23-24). Likewise, Crandall and Christison see more value placed in ESL on sociocultural perspectives by the early 2000s. McKay also talks about ideology as something “imbued in everything that teachers do that cannot be extracted from the job (66) and finds teaching with the use of such social practice and understanding as crucial to the job. Though Santos pushes back upon these social values, he is the only author to do so in all of the pieces from this semester. He wants further value placed on clear writing rather than ideological concerns. He appears to be in the minority.

Likewise, composition strongly values social and ideological considerations for student success. Matsuda in “The Myth” argues that we simply can’t assume linguistic homogeneity in our students and must empower teachers to work with diverse language and learning needs and empower students to find their voices within the academy. Akbari and Horner both stress the importance of students deserving not only rights to their own language but also respect for being multilingual speakers afforded value for that talent and skill. While power dynamics often discourage such language play and value in the classroom, both argue that we must help dismantle such systems of oppression for students and more generally within the academy.

Clearly, the overlaps here are most powerful. Though both fields talk about the social turn in their own ways, they are ultimately advocating for the same types of empowerment for students.

  1. Finally, problems with our research might result in some of the difficulties we currently have with encompassing both of these groups more seamlessly. We lack truly niche/overlapping journals, we lack more qualitative studies and replication studies, and we’ve perhaps relied too heavily on just a few, strong voices.

While there are some journals that suggest they are niche such as Journal of Second Language Writing clear pedagogical interest towards ESL courses can be seen in a fairly extensive search of the articles found there. While some journals like Teaching English at the Two Year College attempt some overlaps as well because they are dealing with these divergent communities, none focus on the nexus in a clear way. It could be that further research and scholarship is needed at these intersections to keep moving these students forward.

Likewise, of the research we do have, very few quantitative studies have been done, with over 90 percent of all journal studies being qualitative in nature (Loewen et al). Though most college teachers have training in a variety of research methods, we’re often clearly boxing ourselves into particular types of studies. Additionally, as Porte and Richards point out, we are terrible at replication studies that would better help us see how past work affects new populations. This leaves a significant area ripe for study – how can past composition studies be implemented on ESL students, or on the intersection of these two populations? Without replication studies, we do not have answers.

Finally, the bit of intersecting material I have found comes almost entirely from a few strong, loud voices, particularly that of Paul Kei Matsuda. Though he is surely a “legend” in the field, if too much of his work is being read or being drawn upon by the small number of other scholars in the field, this could be a potential disservice to new ways of thinking and examining these populations. More voices are needed.

From here, I think the main question I’ve developed is “where do we go from here?” While so much has been done, there are still great discrepancies between the fields that must be filled. Finding places for these niche studies and unique populations must come next. I also still continue to question in what ways the methods and methodologies used to help and study these groups are different. Why is a method used for one population different from that used for another? If we see grammar training as the big differentiation between these populations, how do we help classrooms full of mixed student populations? This is the big place that I see for the types of niche studies I am referring to. Unless we figure out how to better scaffold between ESL and composition or how to help very diverse classrooms, struggles and frustrations will continue. This is one reason I have set out to study with my dissertation what I have set out to study. I think there is so much yet to look at and discover, and I am excited to see where these questions and this process takes me over the next several years.

Works Cited

Akbari, Ramin. “Transforming Lives: Introducing Critical Pedagogy into ELT Classrooms.” ELT Journal, vol. 62, no. 3, 2008, pp. 276-283.

Allison, Desmond. “Training Learners to Prepare Short Written Answers.” ELT Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, 1986, pp. 27-32.

Canagarajah, Suresh. “TESOL as a Professional Community: A Half Century of Pedagogy, Research, and Theory.” TESOL Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 1, 2016, pp. 7-41.

Crandall, JoAnn, and MaryAnn Christison. “An Overview of Research in English Language Teacher Education and Professional Development.” Teacher Education and Professional Development in TESOL: Global Perspectives, edited by JoAnn Crandall and MaryAnn Christison, The International Research Foundation for English Language Education and Routledge, 2016, pp. 3-34.

Gray, Phebe Xu. “The Formation and Development of TESOL: A Brief History.” International Education, vol. 27, 1997, http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.odu.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=2&sid=d561380b-c307-4433-a9e2-e6fa1296b70a%40sessionmgr4010&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=507597464&db=eue. Accessed 1 Mar. 2018.

Horner, Bruce. “’Students’ Right,’ English Only, and Re-Imagining the Politics of Language.” College English, vol. 63, no. 6, 2001, pp. 741-758.

James, Mark A. “Teaching for Transfer in ELT.” ELT Journal, vol. 60, no. 2, 2006, pp. 151-159.

Loewen, Shawn et al. “Statistical Literacy Among Applied Linguists and Second Language Acquisition Researchers.” TESOL Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 2., 2014, pp. 360-388.

Matsuda, Paul Kei. “The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition.” College English, vol. 68, no. 6, 2006, pp. 637-651.

Matsuda, Paul Kei, and Tony Silva, ed. “Introduction.” Landmark Essays on ESL Writing, vol. 17, Routeledge, 2001, pp. xiii-xxv.

McDevitt, Damien. “How to Cope With Spaghetti Writing.” ELT Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, 1989, pp. 19-23.

McKay, Sandra Lee. “Examining L2 Composition Ideology: A Look at Literacy Education.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 2, no. 1, 1993, pp. 65-81.

Oster, Judith. “The ESL Composition Course and the Idea of a University.” College English, vol. 47, no. 1, 1985, pp. 66-76.

Porte, Graeme, and Keith Richards. “Focus Article: Replication in Second Language Writing Research.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 21, 2012, pp. 284-293.

Santos, Terry. “Ideology in Composition: L1 and ESL.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 1, no. 1, 1992, pp. 1-15.

Vickers, Caroline H., and Estela Ene. “Grammatical Accuracy and Learner Autonomy in Advanced Writing.” ELT Journal, vol. 60, no. 2, 2006, pp. 109-116.

Back to the start – messages of empowerment

For my very last research post, I wanted to come back to where it began – the ELT Journal and College English. Though my intentions to read solely these two journals was, I think, a reasonable one, for practical purposes, it didn’t work out. However, I thought they deserved the last word in my research, whether that related directly to the overlaps I set out to find this semester or not. What I did find in this week’s two journal articles from the 2000s, which, as you will see has “social turn” at the forefront of these messages, is overlaps in how we should respect our students as important creators of language and meaning, and how in particular this applies for students who do not speak English as a first language. This overlap shows, I think, that even when our disciplines lack some of the types of overlaps and conversations I wish we were having, that one thing does remain a great equalizer, which is finding ways to appreciate the diverse language backgrounds that American colleges encounter each day.

First, in Ramin Akbari’s “Transforming Lives: Introducing Critical Pedagogy into ELT Classrooms,” he argues that the way we often think of teaching English as simply “teaching a new system of communication [that] does not have much political/critical significance” is not a good way to think about it because all language is “infused with ideological, historical, and political symbols and relations” (277). He argues that one way to deal with this often-seen disconnect is to introduce critical pedagogy (CP) into the ESL classroom. CP acknowledges that educational systems themselves mirror our cultural and social systems, which therefore reproduce systems of discrimination based upon race, class, and gender (276). He sees this reproduced in applied linguistics specifically because it must acknowledge and deal with the “socio-political implications of language teaching” (277).

What Akbari would like to see is that in the classroom, learners are able to talk about their cultures and cultural identities, which includes acknowledging the power in the students’ L1 for language learning instead of acting as if it is a deficit in the language classroom (279). Likewise, CP must also seek to acknowledge and deal with the needs of the learners in their various local contexts; for example, what a student is taught might be very different in a rural context than in an urban one. Additionally, taking up conversations on students’ home cultures, which may include traumatic or difficult ordeals is necessary to acknowledge their experiences and transform their understanding of the world in ways that go well beyond the basic, generic conversations that play out in their textbooks (280-281). Akbari concludes by noting that CP is a “pedagogy of hope and understanding” in an effort to empower students and teachers alike, and push them towards meaningful learning experiences (282).

In College English, there were some similar overlaps in the way the idea of language and language teaching as an entry point into discriminatory practice against our students was discussed. In Bruce Horner’s “’Students’ Right,’ English Only, and Re-Imagining the Politics of Language,” he argues that despite the revolutionary nature of Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL), at its core, the policy is still one that pervasively pushes the idea of “English Only” in composition that “continues to cripple both public debate on English Only and compositionists’ approaches to matters of ‘error’” (743). For example, he notes that while SRTOL wants to encourage “respect and tolerance for racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity,” it also assumes that English speakers have “static communities of language uses and users” which, while one is not superior to another, still assumes that users can move from one to another and back again. What he means is the idea of language communities and language situations having a simple, fixed dialectical need that only need to be translated to be understood is simply preposterous (743-744). Along with this assumption, Horner says that SRTOL pushes it even farther, asking one group or another to change their language practices, and suggests that teachers can, in fact, teach students to communicate in Edited American English (744).

Horner then transitions into a definition of two views of ESL literacy practices: ethicists, who believe that the mother tongue is part on one’s identity and tied to their ethnicity, so the use of English by ESL users is a “betrayal of that identity,” and universalists, who assume English is a “neutral medium” that anyone can use to overcome barriers to entry into another community. Horner argues that both of these views are in some ways part of the SRTOL document because it attempts to champion linguistic diversity but also allow EAE to remain central without “degradation” (745).

Just as SRTOL advocate for both of these views of language, arguments for English only policies do as well, not only from a legislative perspective in which others must learn and assimilate to American culture, but also in the idea of English as a world language (746-747). Ultimately, both views “ignore the role of power relations in determining language practice” and therefore push the status quo. The idea, he says, of everyone both speaking the “king’s English” as well as their own language is simply a fantasy that does not exist (748).

Despite our desire to be “liberal” as teachers, Horner says, we usually still push such ideas through our attempt to train speakers to speak the way we do. This is particularly true for developmental students who we continue to send off into spaces like the writing center or in one-on-one conferences, justifying our “fixing” of the language in economic terms or in “’academic’ social identity” (749-750). While he says that changing our thinking about student language does not require us to abandon EAE, we also shouldn’t denigrate language practices, and instead should be “questioning and challenging power in every language interaction to consider “what conditions, when uttered by whom, to whom, and listened to how” (753-754). He suggests instead of simply teaching EAE to students that teachers ask them to consider examples of various, diverse language practices and who accepts them and who does not (754). Finally, he wants students to engage in the “question of and struggle over recognition of anyone’s use of language” to help them to understand their place in language and to respond to the “material social conditions” that surround language in our world (755).

Though both of these pieces were written for different audiences, since clearly there is a stark divide between ESL and composition teaching and pedagogy, they both seem to come to the same conclusion – that students deserve more than a right to their own language, with the tacit assumption that that language is English – but they instead also deserve the respect inherent in being both multilingual and speakers of English shifting from various contexts over the course of their lifetimes. What really stuck out to me was the idea that we should help language users not to specifically gain purely academic language skills, but to make them think through the power situations that make their English “less than” or nonstandard. Though Akbari and Horner acknowledge that we may not be able to change the cultural systems in which these languages were created and became status quo, by helping our students acknowledge the power dynamics that created these systems, and perhaps even challenge them, we will give them the self-respect and autonomy that they deserve.

I had never considered SRTOL to be particularly lacking in the ways that Horner describes, but he is ultimately correct – the document does define English as the standard-bearer despite the fact that English is not the national language in the U.S. Even if we do allow students to move in and around language communities while respecting their use of English dialects (though he points out that this is often championed ideologically more than practically), this does not, as Akbari would point out, acknowledge the many diverse language backgrounds and take into consideration the languages they come into our classrooms with that might actually help them improve their English or at a minimum help them learn the importance of their life experiences to their place in the world which transcends language in many ways.

I think that these articles have enough overlaps that they might be an awfully good place for ESL and composition to start making connections with each other – with an empowered message of wresting power from EAE not only from the perspective of English learning and mastery but also from a perspective of English being the standard default at all. How this looks in our courses certainly needs to become a bit more practical – certainly Akbari starts thinking through the practical nature of this dilemma – but more connections between scaffolding this from ESL to composition would be a wonderful way to begin building bridges between these communities and well beyond them.

Works Cited

Akbari, Ramin. “Transforming Lives: Introducing Critical Pedagogy into ELT Classrooms.” ELT Journal, vol. 62, no. 3, 2008, pp. 276-283.

Horner, Bruce. “’Students’ Right,’ English Only, and Re-Imagining the Politics of Language.” College English, vol. 63, no. 6, 2001, pp. 741-758.

Quantitative Studies in L2 and Composition

Attempting to find quantitative studies in L2/composition turned out to be particularly difficult this week, as I suspected it might be. I did a fairly thorough search of at least five of the journals I’ve been examining this semester. In journals that don’t specialize, such as College English it was difficult enough to find articles related to ESL issues, and that was before the quantitative work came into play. Likewise, the Journal of Basic Writing had very little overlap for the two, and in the Journal of Second Language Writing when using “quantitative” as either a keyword or word in the title, only 26 results total came up. It was about the same in the TESOL Quarterly in which looking at either keywords in the abstract or title about 30 results were returned. Clearly, we’re not a discipline that values our quantitative research very much, or I am somehow looking in the wrong places.

I did find one article that spoke to some of the likely deficiencies in quantitative research that shed some light on this general lack in the field of ESL/SLA. In “Statistical Literacy Among Applied Linguists and Second Language Acquisition Researchers” by Shawn Loewen et al., they note that statistical and quantitative analysis is very important in both applied linguistics and SLA, but also that it is “relatively rare” (361), noting that a 2000 study by Lazaraton found that over 90 percent of all journal publications were qualitative studies rather than quantitative in the field of SLA (363). Ironically, the authors note, this is despite the fact that many studies have shown that most teachers in the field, no matter whether they come from TESOL, applied linguistics, or other educational backgrounds, have statistics background, with Lazaraton’s study showing that on average, most participants in his study had taken two statistics or research methods courses (365).

Because such a quantitative study of statistics methods had not been done, really, since the comprehensive Lazaraton study, Loewen et al. wanted to follow up and find out more about how statistics were being used in these fields in 2014. They sent out 1000 surveys and received 331 replies (366). After analyzing the data, they discovered that 81 percent of the respondents had taken some sort of statistics class (369), although 40 percent of PhD students did not feel they had adequate training in statistics, along with 30 percent of professors (370). The study also reaffirmed that most of the respondents still felt more prepared for qualitative studies than quantitative (375). They conclude by suggesting that it is important to improve statistical literacy for quality research and encourage further quantitative work in these fields (377-378).

I thought this piece was interesting because although it did not have insight into composition, it did back up my struggle to find quantitative data when I searched among a wide variety of journals, including journals for composition, which would suggest that this is a “problem” across both disciplines. The fact that 90 percent of studies being done are qualitative shows that even if teachers feel they are at least somewhat trained in quantitative methods, they are certainly not comfortable using them. What this study shows me is that more quantitative data is needed to help to quantify in new and interesting ways the gaps between ESL and composition. Such data could provide further insights into how to best help these populations in new and meaningful ways.

In addition to the Loewen et al. article, in “Focus Article: Replication in Second Language Writing Research” by Graeme Porte and Keith Richards, the authors argue that research methods in the field of L2 writing are missing significant replication studies that would show further validity of pas results, both qualitatively and quantitatively. They argue that despite this ongoing lack, which they argue has been over the course of L2 language studies as a discipline, replication is “feasible, necessary, and publishable” (285).

First, they examine issues with quantitative studies, noting that often “novelty” is what drives research in the field, with no one wanting to replicate. Unfortunately this leaves large gaps in our knowledge and its validity, which, particularly in L2, which is a “young field.” They note that while there is much to be explored, discovering what we already know about our present knowledge is equally important (285). They also note that error happens in data collection and analysis and replication can help to fill in some of these details about what we do know. They suggest that one reason the field might shy away from replication is the idea that only exact or literal replication, which is nearly impossible, will work. However, Porte and Richards argue that the more flexible approximate replication is enough. In this research, getting matching results is not the goal or the ideal, but instead discovering that if there are nonmatching results, and analyzing what this might mean for the field or that particular data set, is still important. Such work will tell us more about our learners than attempting new research constantly, they believe (286). To begin to meet such a goal, instead of simply publishing and stating that “more work” can be done, Porte and Richards suggest that authors instead give enough background on the study so it can be replicated by other readers (287).

Likewise, in quantitative research, some researchers have shied away from replication because of the belief that “’human behavior is never static, [therefore] no study can be replicated exactly regardless of the methods and designs employed.’” (288). Porte and Richards dismiss this logic but suggest that it is important for researchers to include full and complete description for their “research design, data collection, and analytical procedures” so the work can be replicated, even with another set of people. They also argue that technology should make this easier, as authors can make further data available to others who want to replicate their study (289).

Finally, Porte and Richards argue that without replication in both qualitative and quantitative work, “we might expect at best considerable conflict among research outcomes, and at worst, confusion and stagnation.” It is only through replication, they argue, that we can better understand the field and how to help our learners (291).

Despite the fact that this was, again, not an actual quantitative study, it’s an interesting one to think about in the sense that again, there are big gaps in our knowledge as far as empirical methods because of the practices (or lack of certain practices) used in our field(s). Like Loewen et al. point out, it’s clear that there are large gaps in the way we obtain and analyze data about our students and our fields, which is doing a disservice us all. It seems that if there are gaps in each of these fields (as divergent as they clearly are), there are almost certainly not studies of the kind I am truly looking for – ones at the intersection of ESL and composition. Therefore, further work in both qualitative and quantitative methods seems really crucial for further understanding the overlaps and gaps I have noticed.

Despite mostly finding articles this week on the gaps in our research, I did manage to find one interesting study that did seem to address L2 and composition using some qualitative methods that is worth addressing. In John Hedgcock and Natalie Lefkowitz’s article “Feedback on Feedback: Assessing Learner Receptivity to Teaching Response in L2 Composing,” they want to discover more about the differences in feedback types preferred by foreign language and L2 students. They start by noting that such studies have been undertaken for L1 writers, but not for L2 students (142). They do note one such study by Leki (1991) that they attempt to partially replicate with some moderate changes, which had discovered that L2 students generally “display a strong concern for grammatical accuracy” while L1 learners usually do not prioritize grammar in their writing (143). Likewise, they discover that the most (ironically) consistent finding in their research background is how disparate the types of feedback given by L1 and L2 writing instructors is, with some focusing on “substance, organization, and writing style” and others on “spelling, capitalization, and punctuation (144). However, despite these differences, both L1 and L2 instructors often focus on giving learners time to reflect, seek clarity and coherence, and deemphasize correction of grammar until the later stages. However, Hedgcock and Lefkowitz note that given the “wide variation” in teacher response, it is important to examine what is most useful in the eyes of the students (144-145).

Because Hedgcock and Lefkowitz feel that some of the work looking at differences in L1 and L2 feedback assessment has been done, they instead decided to focus their quantitative survey study (sent to 247 writers) on ESL vs. foreign language (FL) writers (146). What they discover are fairly large discrepancies in the types of feedback these writers prefer. The most important findings are that while all writers in both groups most prefer written feedback combined with writing conferences, and both groups were worried about grammatical accuracy, the ESL writers cared much more about idea development, style, and sequencing, and FL writers cared more about formal accuracy (150-151). The authors note this difference is likely because ESL students care more about the work they will encounter in freshman composition classes, which care more about “the generation of substantive ideas” instead of “editorial concerns” (151). Therefore, ESL instructors need to know how to teach students to practice the rhetorical styles they will encounter in their various academies, as well as being more consistent with their teaching of a process over product approach (152).

This is a fascinating article in the way that it does use some quantitative data to compare overlaps not only in ESL and FL but also to composition in some important ways. What it shows is that regardless of the types of feedback ESL students are receiving in the academy, these students have a fairly good idea of the types of feedback and the writing opportunities they need to be successful in the academy. In fact, as writing is going to be an important part of their studies outside of English classes, being clear that rhetorical knowledge is more important than perfect grammatical accuracy is insightful and promising. What this shows is that if more overlap is being done between the fields of composition and ESL, not only do students perceive that they are gaining more from their coursework, but ultimately they probably are having better outcomes.

One limit on this study, I think, is that it is only a survey of students. Something that could make this more well-rounded would be additional information regarding the types of assignments these students were encountering in their classes and how this also fed into the types of feedback they were interested in. Likewise, knowing how their teachers assessed them would be equally meaningful as this might also affect the types of feedback they preferred. Additionally, though Hedgcock and Lefkowitz note that they undertook this study to look at ESL vs. FL learners because L1 and L2 learners had already been compared in the past, I am disappointed that the study itself did not focus further on L1 writers, as the findings here would have been very useful for my own work. Perhaps this is an avenue for replication in my own future research.

Though I don’t know if I ultimately found what I was looking for this week, what I did discover gave some good insight into the types of research and work our fields are doing and the types that are lacking. I believe that the lack of good, critical qualitative data that would help us look more clearly at the split between L1 and L2 writing courses is something that needs further work (and replication!). While Hedgcock and Lefkowitz got me a bit closer to seeing some of those overlaps, and in fact replicated part of Leki’s 1991 study, it seemed that they stopped a little bit short of what more they could have done with quantitative methods and making their study a bit more all-encompassing and useful. Finding further ways to introduce and assess L2 writers on the types of writing instruction they need to be successful beyond the ESL classroom appears to be a great place for future quantitative research across both disciplines. Likewise, nearly any quantitative research in the field(s) would help to open up new, promising avenues of discovery and further exploration.

Works Cited

Hedgcock, John, and Natalie Lefkowitz. “Feedback on Feedback: Assessing Learner Receptivity to Teaching Response in L2 Composing.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 3, no. 2, 1994, pp. 141-163.

Loewen, Shawn et al. “Statistical Literacy Among Applied Linguists and Second Language Acquisition Researchers.” TESOL Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 2., 2014, pp. 360-388.

Porte, Graeme, and Keith Richards. “Focus Article: Replication in Second Language Writing Research.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 21, 2012, pp. 284-293.

Two-Year College Pedagogy

This week I decided to make (at least) one additional effort to look at solely composition journals, rather than specialized or ESL journals, to see what I could find about ESL writers in the composition classroom. I thought it might be nice to look at Teaching English at the Two Year College because I teach at a two-year institution and thought there might be some interesting insights into helping the ESL population that is unique to these institutions.

In “Understanding ESL Writers: Second Language Writing by Composition Instructors” by Sarah J. Shin, she argues, like many of the authors we’ve seen over the last few weeks, that ESL students, particularly those who have made it to college composition, deserve the opportunity to be judged based upon the fluency of their work versus the accuracy. She highlights her own past as a composition instructor in which she corrected each and every mistake she found in a paper, leading to the discouragement of her students who felt they would never improve as writers (68). Instead, she later went on to learn that by only correcting surface errors, she failed to acknowledge the good ideas contained in what the student has written.

As a result of this experience, she now requires the future composition teachers being trained her own writing methods course to write an essay in their own second language. Because the majority are drawing on past experiences from coursework in languages like Spanish and French, they get a firsthand experience of what it is like to be in their student’s shoes. What Shin discovers from feedback based upon reflective essays, this is an impactful assignment for her students. The teacher trainees discover that it is uncomfortable to write in a foreign language, and they are frustrated by the experience of knowing what they want to say but struggling to say it (72). Likewise, they often recall extremely negative experiences in being critiqued for grammatical correctness in their own language study, leading many towards Shin’s preferred model of fluency over accuracy (73). These teachers in training, Shin hopes, will take these experiences forward with them into their classrooms so they can respect and approach the ESL population in a better way than she once did.

This is a particularly useful article for a few reasons. First, it reiterates much of what I’ve been reading about fluency vs. accuracy and again challenges the idea of teaching for accuracy, which is a big and clear trend I was unaware of before just a few short weeks ago. Likewise, this is one of the first pieces I’ve found that talks about how to train teachers who are to go into these classrooms – not ESL classrooms, but composition classrooms. While many other articles emphasize training after the fact – once teachers have been in the classroom – this article focuses on building that corps of knowledge before these teachers get to the classroom. Even more ideal is that by placing them in their students’ shoes, the experience actually becomes one that is likely the type of formative experience that would stick with them.

I also like that this article, though it does not state this explicitly, is actually useful in differentiating between the types of feedback that one would give to a native speaker and a nonnative speaker. In this case, because the teacher is not so concerned with accuracy, they can provide either similar types of feedback for both sets of students, or can target the student individually without concerns for what “population” they come from. One of my big questions has been how to target individual populations within a diverse classroom, but the recommendations here make that much simpler – really, the driving force for the teacher is empathy and understanding while also looking at the big picture ideas rather than grammatical ones, which means all students are, in theory, being judged in the same way.

Next, I read “Preparing ESL Students for ‘Real’ College Writing: A Glimpse of Common writing Tasks ESL Students Encounter at One Community College,” by Julia Carroll and Helene Dunkelblau. Here, Carroll and Dunkelblau distribute a survey among their college to find out what types of writing tasks are being assigned across disciplines. What they discover is that the most common type of work being assigned include essays, summaries, and research papers, as well as reaction and reflection papers. Less emphasis is made on outlines, book reports, lab reports, and other writing tasks (276). They note the importance of understanding these various tasks so teachers can better prepare their students for those challenges.

While they do give a literature background on English for Academic Purposes (EAP), and suggest that such courses have been used in the past to prepare ESL learners for the challenges of writing in their major, they also note some of the problems with this approach, such as teachers who are unprepared to teach science writing to future scientists, for example (273). Instead, Carroll and Dunkelblau suggest that simply understanding the types of assignments students will encounter might help teachers re-think the assignments they give out in their writing classes, including work that involves several pages of written content, critical thinking, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and citation (278). Finally, they also suggest that keeping lines of communication open between the various disciplines will help teachers to reflect upon and create opportunities for understanding the work of these other disciplines to make writing courses as useful as possible (280).

I have personally never liked the idea of EAP courses because I believe that they attempt to undermine what we do in composition and diminish it as a “skill” that will simply prepare students for work they will do in other classes, which is seemingly more “important.” It suggests that our only job is career preparation and making other teachers happy. Ideally, we should be able to teach writing in a way that is transferrable to a wide variety of contexts, which is important when in year three that science major decides to go into architecture instead. Likewise, many of the skills that most compositionists value are hugely important not only for writing but for developing critical thinking skills, something that simply teaching how to write a lab report cannot accomplish.

While this article dances the line between advocating for EAP and avoiding it, I think it strikes a nice balance in that it suggests that looking at the types of assignments rather than the actual specialized language and skills of that field are important to teach. For example, knowing that other disciplines teach research papers might be more useful in shifting how composition teachers prepare their students than attempting to teach them science writing specifically. While understanding those basic modes is ideal, as long as the disciplines do not expect students to come into their classrooms writing coherent lab reports, the idea behind Carroll and Dunkelblau’s discovery can be a meaningful one.

I do wonder, however, how important this is for ESL students, which the article focuses on, versus non-ESL students. This, again, strikes me as the type of article that could be written for any population of students learning writing. It’s just as important for native speakers to be taught meaningful, transferrable writing skills as ESL speakers, and little differentiation is made here, which makes this article less useful than it could otherwise be.

Finally, I decided to read a third piece that I hoped would bridge this gap between ESL and non-ESL a bit further, since Carroll and Dunkelblau did not do so. In “Beyond ‘ESL Writing’: Teaching Cross-Cultural Composition at a Community College” by Susan Miller-Cochran, she describes a college in the Southwestern United States where she works that had previously offered a two-sequence college composition class of either 101/102, which was “regular” composition while 107/108 was composition for ESL students. Not only did the courses count for the same credit, the outcomes and curriculum were meant to be the same, so she envisioned a cross-cultural composition section of approximately half students from 102 and half from 108 (22). Her idea behind this class was that it would reduce the types of segregated and “linguistically monolithic spaces” that are becoming more problematic in our linguistically diverse college world (21).

The class focused on an assignment sequence related to the students own linguistic and literacy experiences, and Miller-Cochran ran the class in such a way that students needed to read and respond to each individual in the class throughout the course of the semester. This helped the ESL students to feel empowered when they heard the feedback from their native-speaking classmates and were able to acknowledge their similarities rather than just differences. It was also an opportunity to for all of the students to co-design standards for assessment and think about “which strengths each student brings to the table” (23, 25). While the class was successful, Miller-Cochran did warn that some considerations to think about were asking teachers to think through their own stance on teaching ESL students, as well as being trained to teach them effectively; likewise, the stance of the college itself might factor in to how and what to teach in such a course (24). However, in a linguistically diverse institution, such a course, she argues, could be of great benefit.

While I can see some differentiation between how to teach ESL versus non-ESL students here, it is not particularly well articulated. It seems more like Miller-Cochran focuses on a sort of Vygotskian cooperative learning theory, which is well known to be good for all learners. Likewise, I see a good bit of the sorts of ideologically driven “social turn” type stuff that has mostly dominated composition since the 2000s.

In fact, something worth considering about not just this piece, but all of the pieces I’ve read so far is the background research upon which these authors are relying. Some trends that I’ve noticed is that many, many of these authors are relying on “big names” like Matsuda and Sylva, both of whom, while important, seem to get named so much, the conversations around these learners is almost entirely from the perspective of the ideological aspects of learning articulated by these writers. Several weeks ago, Santos sort of pushed back upon this ideologically driven method of pedagogy and seemed to argue in favor of teaching ESL from a more linguistically-driven perspective, which is much of what I have seen come out of the ESL field. So that means we have ESL coming from one “camp” – the sort of linguistics camp and composition coming from the ideological camp that is certainly driven in part by the domination of names like Matsuda.

I think part of why I may not be finding the types of answers related to helping ESL students specifically in the composition classroom is because if authors look at either only ideology or only linguistics, its hard to find overlaps between those two things because they are so vastly different. Again, we do have some Vygotskian theories of learning that are at least in part quantitative, but very little else that I have come up with in my search through composition journals has been quantitative. I think because this appears to still be a gap in my knowledge, it is where I intend to go next week. I will seek out quantitative type works (if they can be found) related to teaching ESL students, maybe in composition, maybe not. I hope this might be a worthwhile avenue because there are still some clear problems with the one-track and “big names” approach I have found so far.

Works Cited

Carroll, Julia, and Helene Dunkelblau. “Preparing ESL Students for ‘Real’ College Writing: A Glimpse of Common writing Tasks ESL Students Encounter at One Community College.” Teaching English at the Two Year College, vol. 38, no. 3, 2011, pp. 271-281.

Miller-Cochran, Susan. “Beyond ‘ESL Writing’: Teaching Cross-Cultural Composition at a Community College.” Teaching English at the Two Year College, vol. 40, no. 1, 2012, pp. 20-30.

Shin, Sarah J. “Understanding ESL Writers: Second Language Writing by Composition Instructors.” Teaching English at the Two Year College, vol. 30, no. 1, 2002, pp. 68-75.

Curricular Reform for Basic Writing

I wanted to look at one additional specialized journal this week with the hopes of discovering more about what and why we are doing what we are doing inside of our ESL and composition classrooms. In the Journal of Basic Writing I found two articles from 2011 dealing with curricular reform for basic writing courses in efforts to best help ESL writers. I have continued to seek out answers to the question of how we are preparing teachers for these populations, but I am not sure that I found the answer this week, despite hoping these articles would shed some light. However, I think they are useful in looking at the motivations of institutions and what they hope to teach ESL writers, which is useful in continuing to think through some of the gaps in these two fields.

First, in Shawna Shapiro’s “Stuck in the Remedial Rut: Confronting Resistance to ESL Curriculum Reform,” she presents a case study of a university ESL program that attempts to prepare students for college credit English, but ends up remediating more than what she refers to as “mediating” or helping prepare students to “navigate the academic curriculum” (25). She argues that remediation focuses more on grammar concerns and “fixing” writing and also acts as a “solution and a scapegoat for literacy and language problems” for a particular institution, noting that by separating the program from other credit-bearing courses, the ESL program can be diminished in value and other parts of the institution can point the finger and blame that particular group for not getting students up to circular speed (25-27). While other institutions have moved away from “basic skills” such as grammar, and towards things like academic literacy and critical thinking, her own institution, Northern Green University (NGU), had not (28).

Aside from the remedial model of grammar drills, she also noted that NGU’s ESL focused heavily on testing, not only for placement but also for passing the class (30). They also felt that it was their job to be sure they taught students sufficiently enough that they would not be a “burden” on other discipline faculty (32). Because of these practices, students frequently failed the class, which they felt was not only too difficult, but did not emphasize the skills they did have, but simply penalized them for the skills they did not. They instead wanted more difficult reading and more attention to the types of skills they would need in the university, rather than simply grammar, and they felt that the ESL program was simply trying to take money from them, rather than give them functional skills (31, 34).

Because of these disagreeable outcomes, in 2009, the program developed a new curriculum that involved more reading and writing instruction, and assessments other than test alone counted towards the final grade. The program also asked for student input regularly to tweak the curriculum and make it more useful, and focused more on the types of writing assignments they felt students would need for the rest of their college experience (39). Though Shapiro notes that lingering problems do remain, the students found the program to be greatly improved and morale was boosted (40).

This article gives, I think, a good overview of the divisions between ESL and credit-bearing English courses that I have noted in many of the other readings over the last several weeks. The idea of ESL being about grammar and “fixing” writing rather than helping student encounter the types of reading and learning they will experience in the rest of their coursework is intensely problematic. While this institution did make an effort to change their curriculum, knowing how such changes have trickled down to other institutions (and in what percent) would be useful to know.

Shapiro also pointed out something very interesting in her discussion at the end of the article. She noted that ESL was marginalized at her university because it was seen as a gatekeeper function to keep linguistic differences out of the rest of the disciplines, and by looking at it in this way, that marginalization “prevented [ESL] from recognizing what information it was lacking, as well as what expertise it had to offer to the broader conversations about writing and learning that were already taking place. In essence, this case study illustrates how institutional isolation breeds ignorance and alienation” (40-41). I think this is very insightful because if ESL courses are continually looked at as places of remediation before we allow students to do other coursework, by isolating them from the rest of the college and the work of those institutions, communication issues will continue to marginalize faculty in ways that are likely to prevent them from more fully encompassing institutional norms that would be a service to students. This is something I think I am seeing at my own institution. Although ESL and composition are housed in the same division at NOVA, there is very little interaction between ESL and composition in ways that are likely alienating to ESL and proving to be a disservice to our students.

Finally, I think it is worth pointing out that this article shows, yet again, that may ESL programs highly value grammar as a basis for its curriculum. This would explain why we are hiring so many applied linguists in the field, or why TOEFL programs value this skill so much. However, if we are to break out of this “rut” towards greater inclusion in the other types of writing and thinking expected in the college, we may need to also think about how to retrain these teachers; if I have a single answer to the question I set out to answer this week, it is that we simply have not yet begun to prepare our ESL teachers to face these varying challenges.

Similar outcomes to the NGU program were found at Indiana University in Doreen E. Ewert’s “ESL Curriculum Revision: Shifting Paradigms for Success.” When Indiana hired Ewert, she also noticed that their developmental English curriculum was dominated by an emphasis on language competence over academic literacy, despite L2 “making strides” in acknowledging the importance of the latter (6). The effort was created change the emphasis of a series of eight ESL support courses, in which students tested in, based on placement tests, to somewhere between one and all of these courses with “no regard for sequencing” resulting in students taking more advanced and easier courses at the same time (8). Additionally, there were no stated objectives for any of the courses, allowing teachers to create any course they “felt fit the needs of the students.” While some of the teacher’s courses were “well-grounded in current approaches” there was so much variation that the entire program was very problematic (10).

Ewert started by drawing on current literature in regards to how to best work with L2 students as she began to envision a new sequence of courses. She first wanted the teachers to see reading and writing “as a unified whole rather than … two separate components.” Likewise, she decided to create courses that focused on fluency before accuracy, in which students focus less on language structure and more on “reading repetition, reading under time pressure, and extensive reading” as well as reading and writing to learn because evidence showed this would strengthen students more than “attending explicitly to the accuracy of specific linguistic features” (13-15). Finally, the new courses focused on thematic content because they wanted students them use and re-use language in ways that would help build up “conceptual and linguistic knowledge with which to read and write more fluently” (16).

Overall, students and faculty found the newly revised classes to be highly beneficial. Students used language more frequently in class (17), and they focused more on clarity and fluency instead of accuracy (20), resulting in many benefits including higher GPAs, as well as greater student satisfaction (23). Likewise, teachers in first year composition noted the benefits these students received and the greater skills they came into the classroom with, including skills that often exceeded students who were not required to take those courses (27).

What I particularly liked about this article is that it does not suggest, as much scholarship (or perhaps legislative initiatives) is pushing nowadays, that we completely dismantle ESL/basic/developmental writing sequences or placement tests. Instead, Ewert suggests that they simply need to be reconsidered by thinking about how to revise them for greater benefits in the academy – one in which we expect students to perform at a certain level. One big push I’ve seen is to essentially mainstream all students immediately by suggesting that basic courses are essentially a way to weed out those not academically ready for college, discouraging them from ever completing. However, that overlooks the need for basic standards to be considered college competent at a certain point. We can’t keep shifting the standards or a college degree becomes meaningless. However, Ewert and her colleagues smartly struck a balance between acknowledging and “treating” these differences while also embracing them and not asking teachers to make a basic grammar fix. It seems to me this is a good way of thinking about these ESL/composition connections – we have to help students get to a place where they can be successful in college composition, but we also have to expect the teachers to overlook some grammatical inaccuracies. This links clearly back to some of my previous reading, in particular, McKay’s argument from two weeks ago that we accept and meet students where they are while they also work to understand some of the values that we are inviting them to share. Both pieces make this need for reciprocity a key piece of the puzzle in ways that are meaningful to both groups.

So far, what I’ve discovered during these last few weeks essentially to me appears to “place the blame on ESL and make them shift their curriculum.” I’ve seen this now not only in ESL specialized journals but in those that appear to cater to a specialized cross-audience as well. I certainly don’t want that to be the case, but I am still struggling to find articles that talk about the composition side and not only what we should do to best help these students, but as my earliest posts noted, how to help them separately from helping all of our students equally. We must acknowledge the different needs of these learners, but are there specific things we should do in composition that would uniquely help these learners? How do we target these learners when they might make up only 25 percent (or more, or less) of a given class? While answering these questions when students are still in ESL classes is easier – because you’re sitting with a whole population of them (though this doesn’t account for linguistic differences, say, between Asian and romance languages) – it is so much more difficult in a classroom filled with students from even more diverse linguistic backgrounds. I think what I sought to find these past two weeks is how composition is facing these challenges, yet I continued to find articles on how ESL can best help these students, which represents a big disappointment. With that said, I’m not sure where my work will lead me next week. Perhaps I will go back to journals that are not specialized but focus entirely on composition to make a last effort to discover what those journals are saying about these learners and if there is any way to help them uniquely within a composition classroom.

Works Cited

Ewert, Doreen E. “ESL Curriculum Revision: Shifting Paradigms for Success.” Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 30, no. 1, 2011, pp. 5-33.

Shapiro, Shawna. “Stuck in the Remedial Rut: Confronting Resistance to ESL Curriculum Reform.” Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 30, no. 2, 2011, pp. 24-52.

ESL/Composition Overlaps in Journal of Second Language Writing

I wanted to continue to look at the Journal of Second Language Writing this week to see how it develops over time and perhaps shifts its focus towards issues related specifically to teacher preparation for composition instructors working with ESL writers. I choose to look 20 years after the issues from last week because I though that would be a sufficient amount of time for the journal to develop into its niche. I therefore looked at the early 2010s for this week, but found that much of what I was looking for never materialized. While the journal does a good job of looking at the development of L2 writers, I am still not seeing a significant overlap with composition as a discipline. Much of what is here relates to writing across the disciplines and on topics such as error correction – useful for sure, but maybe not for my study. However, I found a few articles that I think are useful in looking at those issues, so I have chosen two articles that seem to align most closely with that goal of discovery. However, I feel I will have to move on from this journal next week to see what other types of specialized journals I can find that might talk more about how we are preparing teachers in the composition field specifically to work with L2 writers, since this journal fits loosely, but has clearly changed somewhat in its goal since the early 1990s.

In the first article, “Writing Teachers’ Perceptions of the Presence and Needs of Second Language Writers: An Institutional Case Study,” Matsuda et al undertake a study of the attitudes of writing teachers at a Southwestern university with a large multilingual population. What this study sought to discover is the ways in which credit-bearing composition teachers were dealing with L2 students and in what ways they thought students could or should be helped. This particular university offered both mainstream and multilingual sections of first year composition, with students being given multiple avenues (including placement tests, SAT scores, personal choice) for placement. The teachers at this university were also diverse, with training from bachelors degrees (T.A.s) through PhDs in fields such as rhetoric, linguistics, creative writing, and TESOL (71).

What Matsuda et al. discovered is that a majority of teachers (77 percent) had some preparation in working with multilingual writers and most (67 percent) felt comfortable working with them, a net positive (though they suggest this could be related to those who decided to respond to their survey) (71-72). Despite these feelings of general preparation, most teachers also believed it was crucial for students to be correctly placed for them to be successful in college, and that they also had “certain expectations about students’ language proficiency before they can be enrolled in first-year composition courses” (76). Likewise, teachers found these students often more difficult to work with, more time consuming, and found their biggest problems were related to grammar and mechanical issues (77). They also suggested that the objectives of this university, drawn heavily from the WPA Outcomes Statement of 2000, which focused “largely on rhetorical issues rather than language issues” put L2 students at a disadvantage because they were less able to focus on the types of needs of this population (78). Finally, many teachers believed that placement procedures at the university should be improved to help make sure that students ended up in the “correct” classes, implying that some may not want to work with students who do not speak English as a first language (80-81).

What Matsuda et al. note about these findings is that there are a “wide range of perspectives, attitudes, and experiences” of working with L2 learners, though most are positive.” However, they believe that more training is necessary not only at the graduate level, but also in-service training must be offered to “cut across the L1/L2 divide,” with more being done by not only this university but likely many others to bridge these knowledge gaps to be sure students are set up for success (82).

What was so interesting about this is the ways in which Matsuda keeps bringing up these issues, but change is slow and incremental. This survey shows that while many teachers recognize these language differences, many others are still ready to contain or separate students with someone they feel is better equipped to handle these student issues. It seems in some ways like the wheels are spinning but the bike isn’t moving forward – the problems of 20 years ago (or even 40 or 50 years ago) are becoming more urgent, yet only small changes seem to be made. In particular, this article is also really interesting in the context of last week’s “ESL Composition Program Administration in the United States.” The similarities between the problems these two articles present demonstrate this lag in moving forward distinctly. Some of the issues Williams brought up in that article include the wide array of teacher training and degrees within the single field, and sheltered course that eventually lead to L2 students in mainstream courses with a sink-or-swim approach in which they receive no further help with L2 issues and have teachers who are unprepared or unwilling to help them further. Despite being written 20 years apart, the similarities are resonant.

One very interesting development, however, is the emphasis at the Southwestern university Mastuda et al. study, which uses the WPA Outcomes regarding rhetorical teaching rather than grammar teaching. By the 2000s, particularly with the social turn in composition, the focus on rhetoric rather than an applied linguistics model of teaching writing is, I think, at many institutions almost universal. This again shows why more bridges need to be built between ESL and composition courses, because these difficult adjustments in thinking and scholarship cannot be made in one semester (or even two) without revision from both divisions. Neither could or should give up what they do and emphasize in their courses, but some adjustments may need to be made to smooth this transition and help students prepare for the types of work they will expect in both writing and outside coursework.

The second article I read was quite different in thinking about writing with a greater emphasis on writing across the disciplines. In What Our Students Tell Us: Perceptions of Three Multilingual Students on their Academic Writing in First Year” by Morton et al, they highlight an Australian university that encompasses first year writing as an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course in which students write as part of their undergraduate degrees, meaning that students in business will learn to write much differently from those in science or liberal arts (as the three students the study highlights shows) (2).

What the study finds is that while all three struggle with writing tasks that are varied according to their programs of study, ultimately all are able to find mechanisms in which to be successful. Fei, the business student, finds that writing is social, in which she finds that writing is a process upon which receiving lots of feedback from many people is useful. Fei also finds it helpful in some cases to write in a mix of Mandarin and English as she works towards improving all of her work in English (4-5). Kevin, the scientist finds that he has little improvement in his writing because his science EAP course does not ask him to write extensively at all, though he did find benefits in reading the work of other students (6). Laura, the liberal arts student, works to find her own authentic academic identity and voice, which she succeeds at doing as she reads and learns more about her discipline, feeling more a member of the academy and that group and her place within it. Laura also found great help in receiving feedback from professors and other experts (7).

What Morton et al. conclude is that “disciplinary values and beliefs, embodied in different types of assessment practices can have [a strong influence] on shaping students’ perspectives on academic writing.” They also note that for many nonnative speakers, “spaces and practices outside the academy” are important for writing development, such as Fei speaking and writing in Mandarin online or in her assignments, and Laura speaking about her homework with her husband (9).

While this article was useful in the sense that it articulated ways in which nonnative speakers come around to using English academically, such as the use of multilingual modes for thinking about and writing about their work, much of what was highlighted here is actually, I would assume, similar to the types of strategies even native speakers would use for learning English. For example, Fei notes that her high school work in Australia (she spent a year finishing high school there) did not prepare her for the challenges of her work in university. One would assume that even native speaking English students might experience a “culture shock” in some aspects of new, complex writing tasks. These students would also likely find coping mechanisms for improving their ways of thinking and expressing themselves in English. Therefore, it would be interesting to replicate this study using native speakers to see if the results were any different.

I do think this article is useful, however, in the sense that it tells us that all nonnative students can ultimately be successful in college writing given the tools, the space, and the feedback to do so. While we did not hear from the teachers in this article as we did in Matsuda’s piece, hearing from students is just as valuable in thinking about how we can bridge the divides between ESL and English: by providing spaces for multilingual writing to be appropriate; for providing meaningful and substantive feedback from both teachers and students; and to temper expectations to what we know students have learned before entering our classroom. Though this certainly does not exactly replicate a good model for composition with multilingual students, it does suggest that putting time and effort in with these students, while allowing them the time to develop, can help them succeed in ways that are meaningful to them and to their future career development.

Works Cited

Matsuda et al. “Writing Teachers’ Perceptions of the Presence and Needs of Second Language Writers: An Institutional Case Study.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 22, 2013, pp. 68-86.

Morton et al. “What Our Students Tell Us: Perceptions of Three Multilingual Students on their Academic Writing in First Year.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 30, no 1, 2015, pp. 1-13.

L2 Ideology in the Specialized Journal

This week I wanted to start to look at the Journal of Second Language Writing specifically because in the early weeks of this study, I struggled to find the types of literature I needed in College English and the ELT Journal. Since then, my investigation has shown me that this is likely because of the deep fractures between these two departments and perhaps both journals are relegating most of the issues I hoped to discover as something out of their purview. This week (and likely next), I intend to look at a specialized journal to see what types of articles I can find that might deal with the overlaps in the fields. While I hoped to keep up with the work of my original project by looking at one article from the 1980s, this journal began in 1992. Therefore, I began by looking at the early years of this journal hoping to get a sense of how they define Second Language Writing and L2 Composition and what their ultimate goals and aims as a publication are. I ended up finding so much in just the first few editions that this week I decided to look at just a few of those articles where I feel the journal is beginning to define itself and how it differs from other work in ESL and composition.

I started with the “From the Editors” note in the first issue. The editors state that the goal of the journal is to reflect an “explosion of interest in research on composing in a second language.” It also specifies that the journal will cover “a wide range of areas of interest for L2 writing professionals” (n.p.). With the vagueness of this definition, my next question was how an L2 writing professional is being defined. Is it someone who teaches composition, ESL, or both?

From here, I moved onto the first article in the first issue to see if I could discover more. “Ideology in Composition” by Terry Santos provided a fascinating look at some of the pedagogical fractures between ESL and composition, though interestingly only hinted at any overlap between the two disciplines. He argues that although ESL writing has “borrowed theories from its L1 counterpart” ultimately composition has focused more on process where ESL still emphasizes more on product (1). This emphasis on product has more to do with the pedagogical values in training teachers, as ESL comes from a background of applied linguistics, while composition has a strong sociopolitical and ideological view of writing, which is completely overlooked in ESL writing (2).

Santos argues that the ideology that is emphasized in composition includes writing as a social act as well as a social construct that pedagogical methods such as collaborative learning can seek to correct (3-5). This is likely because of the historical nature of composition as a department, which was originally aligned with literature, while, again, ESL was simply focused on applied linguistics and a more scientific method, which “remained aloof from ideology” (8). Likewise, prominent practitioners in the ESL field suggested that it simply wasn’t their place to try and teach “sociopolitical consciousness” (9). While he does not come out and state it clearly, Santos also suggests some distain for CCCCs “Students Rights to Their Own Language,” stating that composition is becoming “more ambivalent about the relationship between academic discourse and students’’ native dialects or language,” seeming to imply that ESL writing still focuses on the goals of “correct” writing (11). While Santos does not yet know what the future holds for ESL writing, he suggests that if ESL writing goes towards composition as a field, it could be similarly influenced by the ideological desires of the composition field (12-13).

I found this piece absolutely fascinating because although it does not yet help me to answer my question about ways in which the two fields overlap, and in fact talks about them in very distinct terms, what it does do is help fill in a significant gap related to my dissertation project. One of my major impetuses for taking on this project is because I have noticed that ESL writing courses simply do not emphasize the same types of thinking and writing skills that composition does. What Santos calls ideology I believe many in the composition field would refer to as “critical thinking” in that it is not so much the pushing of an ideological agenda, but more in asking students to do more than learn to summarize and regurgitate grammatical forms, but to also apply and analyze various concepts and ways of thinking. While I get the sense that Santos distains these types of emphases as a bad thing to teach (and appears to want ESL to avoid the trap), without some overlaps between these goals, students cannot scaffold very well from one course to another, and they are simply not being taught to think in ways that teachers well beyond composition will expect them to think. This is something I am noticing is still a fundamental “flaw” of the differences between ESL and composition. It is interesting to me that Santos seems to feel that such ideological boundaries should remain.

I next looked at Sandra Lee McKay’s “Examining L2 Composition Ideology: A Look at Literacy Education” because I wanted more background on the ideological concept or divide between L1 and L2 writing. One thing that was initially disappointing about this reading is that one of the sub-sections is titled “What is L2 Composition?” from which I was hoping for her to answer this in a way that made distinct if this was something of a cross between ESL and composition teaching, but she did not. Instead, the best definition I could come up with based on this article is that she is simply referring to the teaching of writing to nonnative speakers of English. While this could be in theory in a composition classroom, the pedagogy she advocates would seem to be more aimed at classrooms full of ESL students.

Though McKay’s argument and definition of ideology was somewhat different from Santos’s, she also departed radically from Santos’s dismissal of the usefulness of ideology as a concept to bring to nonnative speaking students. Unlike Santos, when McKay refers to ideology, she assumes it is imbued in everything that we do as teachers and cannot be extracted from the job (66). She then begins to define some of the ideological traditions that encompass writing studies, including “the use of literacy as a social act,” (68), as well as dismantling the larger social structures of power in the classroom (a Freirian view), and addressing the idea that there is only one correct or right way to speak or write (70-71).

At this point, her argument begins to shift towards the idea that students from different cultures may write in different ways, based upon their L1 training. She brings forth the problems with expecting L2 writers to produce the same types of language that Western writers favor (72-74). She challenges current social practices that value Western types of writing, as such practice “serves as a gatekeeping function because those who do not demonstrate their ability to use such discourse can be denied entry into an academic institution or to a higher level course” (75). She suggests instead that it is the job of both the teacher and the writer to meet somewhere in the middle and adjust their expectations, as well as learn about “these alternate traditions” to empower both groups (76-77). Finally, she states, writing courses do not offer the final solution to this problem, as all disciplines in the academic community must be made aware of them and accept the “value of such traditions” (78).

Though McKay does not define L2 in ways that would be more useful for me, I think it’s clear she is talking about either an ESL class, or a section of composition that is made up of ESL writers, as she emphasizes specifically a pedagogy that asks for an understanding of and teaching students, essentially, what Santos dismisses: that students have a right to their own language. In that sense, these pieces seemed almost diametrically opposed with Santos, fighting against what he sees as an oppressive ideological emphasis in the college, while McKay sees the necessity of such understanding.

While I see many overlaps here to modern composition scholarship, particularly the work that came out of CCCCs “Students Rights,” I also thought about ways that it differed, particularly from other groundbreaking work of this era, such as Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University.” In this seminal piece, Bartholomae argues that students need to be invited into the academy by allowing them to play with and be invited and even initiated into academic discourse by their professors. While much of that also sounds like McKay’s argument, she adds that we also need to reduce our emphasis on the importance of Western academic discourse entirely, allowing students to do some of the “invention” of their own, for which we should try to meet them. In that sense, maybe this piece has its own niche place in the sense that it brings together traditions of not only ideology formed from composition, but also from ESL.

Finally, I read a survey study of colleges and universities from 1995 called “ESL Composition Program Administration in the United States” by Jessica Williams. In it, she surveys 78 colleges and universities to find out more about how they administrate composition classes to both native and nonnative speaking English students. Some of the things she discovers include: the “vast majority of institutions” have separate ESL composition courses regardless of total ESL population size, ranging from very small to very large (158); in most cases (77 percent), this course was required for students before they took required native speaking composition courses (159); half of all surveyed institutions have separate administration and staff training for native and nonnative courses; (160); in most cases, students did not receive any further ESL instruction after leaving the sheltered courses, and a big complaint of native speaking composition courses were the number of students who couldn’t “write” based upon their grammar and syntax (162); instruction in nonnative classes is provided by teachers with degrees ranging from TESOL, composition, literature, and linguistics, with few instructors having backgrounds in both composition and ESL (167); and finally, staff turnover for nonnative composition is very high, with some reporting staff turnover of up to 75 percent every two years (170). Williams suggests that the “programmatic separation” of these two populations must be questioned and suggests that students might learn best together; at a bare minimum, teachers working with the native speaking students must also be prepared programmatically to have nonnative speakers in their classes (174-175).

I thought this piece was really interesting because it again shows both the divide and even the discord between these two groups of teachers. The fact that teachers in native composition are not being taught to work with nonnative speakers, and worse, that they are pointing fingers that students are not coming into their classrooms prepared for the work seems highly problematic and is one of my major goals and interests in working on my dissertation topic. Likewise, the lack of consistent training in the nonnative composition programs – that some come in with TESOL backgrounds and other linguistics – suggests a disconnect between what will be valued in that teacher’s classrooms. All of these problems disadvantage our students who are, as this survey points out, nearly always required to move from nonnative composition into native composition. While this survey is now more than 20 years old, one of my goals for an upcoming week might be to see if the journal has updated this at any point in our current decade, and if not, if this is something that I might undertake as part of my dissertation or personal publication work.

Works Cited

“From the Editors.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 1, no. 1, 1992, n.p.

McKay, Sandra Lee. “Examining L2 Composition Ideology: A Look at Literacy Education.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 2, no. 1, 1993, pp. 65-81.

Santos, Terry. “Ideology in Composition: L1 and ESL.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 1, no. 1, 1992, pp. 1-15.

Willimas, Jessica. “ESL Composition Program Administration in the United States.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 4, no. 2, 1995, pp. 157-179.

And Now, a History of Composition

I wanted to shift this week to look at the history of ESL writers in the composition classroom after weeks of looking at ESL as its own discipline. I thought a good place to start, before diving into some of the other questions I’ve raised about where these conversations are happening, was to find some history on ESL writers in the composition field. For this investigation, I am looking at two histories by Paul Kei Matsuda. While there are other good histories I turned up that I hope to touch upon in upcoming weeks, these two give, I think, a good and complimentary background to issues of ESL writers in composition that will provide a good base for further investigations to come.

In Matsuda’s “Composition Studies and ESL Writing: A Disciplinary Division of Labor,” he confirms what I have discovered over the last several weeks about the divisions between ESL and composition, now seen as separate fields. Matsuda notes that ESL has been taught in the U.S. since English became a dominant language. Generally, however, there was little respect for ESL teachers with the assumption that anyone who could speak and write in English was qualified to teach it (703). This began to change in the 1940s when the Michigan ELI was established to create a professional preparation program for ESL teachers that focused on applied and structural linguistics as a way of teaching the language (703-704). During this time, journals were created that dealt with applied linguistics and more graduate and certificate programs were developed for those who were interested in teaching TESOL (705). It was only in the 1960s that applied linguistics became part of a larger field dealing also with “’studies in first language acquisition, in bilingualism, translation (human and machine), in linguistic statistics, in sociolinguistics, in psycholinguistics, and the development of writing systems for unwritten languages…and so on” (706), therefore emphasizing the need to train students well beyond just basic grammatical competencies.

A similar change in teaching emphasis can be seen in the composition world. While ESL was first a small component at CCCC conferences in the 1950s and 1960s, attendance at these workshops grew particularly because of the growing numbers of ESL students teachers were encountering, and their general lack of preparation in helping these students. There were also scholars and teachers who were “active in both TESL and composition studies” during this time (707-708). However, fractures began between these two groups, particularly because of Michigan’s push to professionalize the discipline of TESL, arguing such students needed to be contained in special classes with specially trained ESL instructors. Additionally, composition departments were often on board with this practice because they wanted to “release composition specialists from the extra ‘burden’ of teaching ESL students in their classes.” Essentially, by the end of the 1960s, composition teachers were told they were not prepared to teach these courses or students and were happy to give them up (710-712). “The disciplinary division of labor was thus institutionalized” Matsuda argues (713).

Matsuda points out how unfortunate this disciplinary division is because while we “reinscribe the view that the sole responsibility of teaching writing to ESL students falls upon professionals in another intellectual formation: second language studies, or more specifically, Teaching English as a Second Language,” we continue to face courses and institutions in which these writers make up a good percentage of students in composition classes, yet now we have no strategies to help them (700-701). Ultimately, Matsuda does not suggest that the disciplines should be merged, as he sees this as a poor solution to the problem, but he does suggest that specialists in both disciplines must “try to transform their institutional practices in ways that reflect the needs and characteristics of second-language writers in their own institutional contexts,” as well as advocating for greater graduate school preparation, further publications, and more emphasis in writing courses on methods that would help these students succeed (715-717).

Matsuda’s second piece pulls a bit farther away from the ESL world and focuses more specifically on the challenges and issues facing ESL students in the composition classroom, adding additional information and nuance to create a fuller history of these divisions. Written seven years after “…A Disciplinary Division of Labor,” Matsuda’s piece “The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition” suggests that the basic changes he suggested in the first piece have not made it yet into practical composition pedagogy. He defines the “myth of linguistic homogeneity” as the student audience as imagined by the teacher, in which their students have matching sets of what they know, what they need to know, and how to best teach them (639). This often means students who fit a “dominant linguistic profile” and speak or write with “privileged varieties of English,” often related to grammaticality (638). A significant problem in the academy is therefore excluding students who do not fit this particular linguistic profile, Matsuda argues (639).

Matsuda points out how unrealistic such assumptions are in a country in which increasing numbers of international or non-dominant language speakers are showing up in English classrooms, noting that as of 2000, one in six people speak a language other than English at home [note: who knows how much higher this might be now] (641). He notes that these unrealistic assumptions have always been at the basis of the creation of college composition, with the goals and aims of the course being to remove linguistic differences from the college. First created at Harvard in the late nineteenth century, placement practices have continued to try to separate students and “fix” their problems before they are able to truly “join” the academy by enrolling in required composition courses (641-642). For example, while many of the earliest international students were assumed to come to the U.S. fully prepared for college writing, they often ended up placed into preparatory schools with young children to improve their English to a level that the university was comfortable with. Later, most institutions developed special English language courses (such as Michigan’s ELI), which later bore separate “tracks” of credit-bearing composition courses for those student who could not get up to linguistic standards (644-647). This meant that throughout their college education, there were many stopping points in which students were separated and contained as they worked to fit the dominant linguistic goals of their institution.

Ultimately, Matsuda argues that such containment policies work to continue the idea that we should have one simple image of what a student should sound like in a composition classroom, pushing all others into separate courses, such as ESL or basic writing, without actually distinguishing the various different issues they may have with writing, which is a huge disservice to these students (648). While he does not advocate for removing placement practices which students may prefer (649), Matsuda does want us, as educators, to remember that further training to work with such diverse populations as well as recognition of the differences in these populations is crucial for quality teaching and learning (637-638).

As I stated earlier, what these pieces show is that my investigation from my study of the ESL literature basically ring true – that the fields divided because they saw distinct professional interests that the other side was ultimately reluctant to address. The unfortunate thing is that there clearly was a time (before the late 1960s) in which the fields overlapped in a significant way and that there were practitioners interested in studying both disciplines as overlapping in significant and meaningful elements. This continued division does appear to offer a significant disadvantage to students and faculty alike, as Matsuda so powerfully gets at this week, setting up unrealistic expectations for both groups to the determent of students. While I think he’s correct that removing the distinction between these disciplines is entirely counterproductive, without further overlap, our students can suffer and faculty will continue to have mistaken ideas about who and what their students are and should be.

Matsuda does point out, however, that there are some composition scholars and journals taking about these issues, and that is what I would like to know more about, and where I will pick up next week. Questions I would like to answer include: who in composition is taking about these issues (other than Matsuda, of course)? What are they saying? What steps, if any, has the field taken since 2006, when Matsuda’s later piece was written? Do we see any changes in graduate or teacher preparation? My next stop will be the Journal of Second Language Writing and I will see where the work takes me from there.

Works Cited

Matsuda, Paul Kei. “Composition Studies and ESL Writing: A Disciplinary Division of Labor.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 50, no. 4, 1999, pp. 699-721.

Matsuda, Paul Kei. “The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition.” College English, vol. 68, no. 6, 2006, pp. 637-651.

TESOL History – divisions and overlaps

This week I finally made some breakthroughs with my research as far as finding more information on the history of ESL education and how the field has looked for the last several decades in the U.S. However, despite finding many interesting articles this week, I think it has opened up new questions and complexities I will have to deal with down the road.

In “The Formation and Development of TESOL: A Brief History” by Phebe Xu Gray, she notes that the teaching of English has been around since “the founding of this country” but that it was not until the 1960s that Teaching English of Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) became a recognized profession. Gray notes that “[t]he assumption [prior to the 1960s] was that anybody who speaks English could teach English,” and most universities had few teachers who were there to work specifically with foreign students.” This seems apparent from a 1967 article in the inaugural edition of the TESOL Quarterly in which there are a series of job applications posted for ESOL teachers, and nearly all of them require “[l]ittle or no training in linguistics or ESOL methodology” (Light 61). According to Gray, most of the teachers on university campuses who did work with ESL speakers were there to study something else, such as linguistics, literature, journalism, and creative writing. However, with the increasing influx of foreign students, it was clear that qualifications to teach these students were becoming necessary. In 1966, the professional organization Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Language was created, and it was the first time that those who wanted to specifically teach speakers of other languages were permanently brought together.

By 1975, national standard guidelines for Certification and Professional Preparation of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages in the U.S. were ratified. This included preparation including courses in linguistic and grammar, psycho and sociolinguistics, culture, and society. Teachers were recommended to also take pedagogical courses in human growth and development, learning theory, and curriculum development, and understand another language as well as complete a practicum. Gray concludes by stating that TESOL has continued to develop and be “influenced by political and social factors” that will change how the field is taught and students developed.

Paul Kei Matsuda and Tony Silva add nuance to this history in their introduction to the book Landmark Essays on ESL Writing (**note, I used a Google book intro chapter, but I am getting the physical text from the library, and will fill in correct in-text citations when it arrives). They note that since the development of TESOL in the 1960s, the field separated substantially from composition studies, which they label as a major limitation between the “’disciplinary division of labor’” which has “not been easy to reconcile” despite the strong need to do so.

They also develop a brief history of the TESOL field and how it has shifted over time. Before the 1960s, most TESOL involved mastery of applied linguistics, through “pattern drills” with little emphasis on writing. By the late 1960s and early 1970s repetition and correcting grammar was on its way out, while “invention, revision, and formative feedback, ” also known as a process approach, became the new trend, and the field of composition scholarship was dipped into to help this group improve their writing.

By the 1980s, process was still central, but so was a sentence-based approach, in which it was necessary to teach both types of text analysis for comprehensive language growth. Matsuda and Silva note that this decade also saw the development of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural research, such as examining discourse grammar. This was also a decade in which ESL teaching was no longer seen as simply remedial, but also acknowledged the importance of teaching of English for Specific Purposes, and, at the college Teaching for Academic Purposes.

Despite continuing to draw heavily from composition studies in the 1990s, the field also found that some techniques simply weren’t applicable to ESL writers. At this time, the field broke further from composition by acknowledging the “distinct characteristics of second language writing and writers” which couldn’t be helped by L1 composition theory. At this time, the field developed more disciplinary infrastructure, including journals, conferences, and bibliographies, of their own. This disciplinary break from composition still exists.

In addition to what I discovered from the two readings this week, I also had an informal conversation with some of my co-workers in the ESL department. It appears that while some came out of masters for TESOL programs, most who have PhDs came from some sort of linguistics program, whether that be applied, sociolinguistics, or another related field. Therefore, the reading this week and these conversations tell me a few things about the field. First, the reason there may be no set standard curriculum or pedagogical consistency as far as I can discover in their journals is because people are coming into the profession from a variety of teaching and learning fields. As early as fifty years ago, there was little to no training at all for people who wanted to teach ESL – if you could speak it, you could teach it. Coming from that perspective, while many advancements have been made on what should be done, if there is no standard on how it should be done (as in what programs are best to train these practitioners) some ambiguity could remain between these disparate parts.

Additionally, while we see that the field has, at times, drawn heavily from composition theory, and the two fields seem to have taken a similar social turn which focuses on both empowering teachers and learners to acknowledge and work in ways best for them, there still is, as Matsuda and Silva point out, a distinct gap in the field that is placed there because these practitioners recognize that there are different learning needs that cannot be addressed by composition scholarship alone. Some of these overlaps I have noticed when I’ve been doing the reading for previous weeks, but these differences also merit more investigation.

For now, I plan to take a break from writing about ESL and shift my search to composition and discover more about when they started taking about speakers of other languages, as well as what methods and methodologies they used to work with these writers. I expect, now more than ever, to find significant differences that reflect the stark diversion of these two fields.

Works Cited

Gray, Phebe Xu. “The Formation and Development of TESOL: A Brief History.” International Education, vol. 27, 1997, http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.odu.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=2&sid=d561380b-c307-4433-a9e2-e6fa1296b70a%40sessionmgr4010&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=507597464&db=eue. Accessed 1 Mar. 2018.

Light, Richard. “English for Speakers of Other Languages: Program Administration by the U.S. Office of Education.” TESOL Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 1, 1967, pp. 55-61.

Matsuda, Paul Kei, and Tony Silva, ed. “Introduction.” Landmark Essays on ESL Writing, vol. 17, Routeledge, 2001, pp. ____(coming soon).

ESL Teacher Training: A First Look

This week I wanted to begin investigating teacher training and pedagogy in the ESL field. I was curious to find out if anything would suggest why the fields are so divergent or if there is overlap of any kind. The two pieces I read provided different perspectives: one was on what the research showed about teacher training, and the other talked about the difference between theory and practice in the classroom, or the difference between teacher training and classroom outcomes. Both are an important part, but an incomplete one, in looking at ESL teacher training. They are, however, a good place to begin.

The first article, “TESOL as a Professional Community: A Half-Century of Pedagogy, Research, and Theory” by Suresh Canagarajah, discusses the development of “significant pedagogical and research domains in TESOL during the 50-year history of TESOL Quarterly” (7). While this study was specifically about a particular journal, Canagarajah suggests that it is a fairly encompassing view of the trends the field went through over the course of 50 years.

What was so interesting about this piece in particular is that the TESOL field, while clearly segregated from English and composition in scholarly activities, had a similar trajectory as far as how the field developed and how practitioners saw themselves. That segregation can be seen when Canagarajah mentions, “there is a need for TESOL to establish its autonomy” from other “older and larger organizations” (7). However, distinct overlaps in what the two fields value remain. For example, as late as the 1960s and 70s, a “modernist” approach to teaching language was most important, in which the assumption was that we all learned languages the same way (whether your native language was Spanish or Arabic) and that “grammar was key to knowing a language” (11).

However, by the 1980s things began to shift, and the modernist approach no longer made sense, because of growing awareness of both technology, diverse communities, and the “knowledge traditions” of other cultures (12). Here, the postmodern approach took over, and “language purity” was challenged, with the field looking at how languages came in contact with other languages and created new grammars and meaning in these various “contact zones” (14). By the mid-1990s, language learning was no longer seen as linear and the social met the cognitive, with an increased focus on emphasizing negotiated social practice to learn grammatical structures “according to [students] own needs and contexts” (16). It was also acknowledged that nonnative speakers simply couldn’t be effectively measured against native speakers with those nonnatives seen as deficient (17). There was also continuing acceptance of the idea that English couldn’t be or shouldn’t be separated from other languages and that learners create and co-construct meaning with their own grammars for the changing communicative need (19).

Canagarajah also argues that the field became “post-method” as of the 1990s, which means that the scholarship acknowledges there is no “best method” for teaching in such diverse contexts in which students have different expectations and teachers their own philosophies (20). Additionally the field now values meaning and rhetorical structure in reading and writing tasks over “sole focus on form,” and multimodality is also a central to the field (21-22). While teacher development was once focused on grammar knowledge and “implementing prescribed methods” teacher development programs now focus on communities of practice, identity theory, collaboration, and are concerned with teaching teachers to acknowledge and contextualize their values and beliefs (23-24). Finally, the field has developed their own research using both qualitative and quantitative approaches and the field is becoming more professionalized. Canagarajah also sees connections and overlaps to other fields in which they are making contributions, such as sociology and anthropology (31-32).

In this study, I see the overlapping social turn that seemed to happen around the 1980s and 1990s in both English and TESOL, where the focus was less on grammar and drills and became about, obviously, the social. Canagarajah gets at that clearly in the study of the literature, which shows a greater emphasis on teaching students to value their power in using English and the ultimate interconnectedness of language systems to each other. What was so fascinating is that he articulates connections and overlaps to fields such as anthropology, but never to English or other writing courses. It’s unclear if this is because he simply failed to make those connections explicit, or if the field of TESOL is so interested in separating its professional identity that it purposely severs these connections. However, this article talks only about what is being published in the field, not what is actually happening in classrooms, which could also reflect different practices than solely what is being published.

The second article I read this week gave some depth to the types of work that ESL teachers do in graduate school, but I felt it was a bit of an incomplete picture. I think I may continue with this work a bit further next week and follow a few more leads to see what else I can find about ESL teacher training. However, some of the insights in “An Overview of Research in English Language Teacher Education and Professional Development” by JoAnn Crandall and MaryAnn Christison were still highly useful in thinking through the differences between theories and practices in professional development.

Crandall and Christison mention, as does Canagarajah’s article, that prior to the 1980s, most teacher training programs emphasized applied linguistic theory, which would focus on things such as grammar. However, by 2000, a change had occurred to a more sociocultural perspective, which “recognized the teacher as one who creates knowledge by bringing prior learning and beliefs to the teacher education program.” This included acknowledging teacher learning as situated in communities of practice and allows teachers the chance to become both “users and producers of theory” in their teaching and learning (4). Likewise, instead of an emphasis on “teacher training” the field now stresses “teacher development” in which learning is a lifelong process. This is reflected in studies which show that for most teachers, even with education in teacher training programs, most teachers have “’surprisingly little change’” during their graduate programs on beliefs such as the importance of teaching grammar, vocabulary, or incorporating new ways of teaching and learning that are outside of their previous teaching and learning experiences. For example, while many teachers were able to incorporate learning strategies they learned during pre-service training, they did not continue with them after their education was over (6-7).

In addition to the importance of previous teaching and learning experiences on their own careers, new teachers often notice “the gap” between what they were taught in their education programs and what the reality of their new positions were, which led them to often have difficulty implementing these taught methods. For example, there was a lack of emphasis on things such as classroom management and working with special needs students or technology. This gap led to a disconnect between theory and practice. In fact, many teachers wished for more practical matters in their teacher education and less theory, which they found “not very helpful” (9-10) Ironically, this flies somewhat in the face of Canagarjah’s work, which suggests that the “post method” turn of the 1990s allowed teachers to acknowledge that there was no “best method” for teaching diverse communities. Crandall and Christison suggest here that some methods other than “do what works best for your communities” must have been taught during graduate training, yet what those methods are is not clear here.

Finally, Crandall and Christison discuss reflective teaching and collaboration as important parts of teacher development after graduate programs are complete. These are ways in which teachers continue to learn and improve their teaching well into their careers. Reflective teaching asks teachers to “confront their own beliefs, values, and assumptions about their teaching, their students, their curriculum, and their practices” and encourages them to consider how to best improve their work and help their students. Such work might involve creating teaching portfolios to best see over time the changes between their classroom learning and the practices they undertake in their classrooms (15-16). This also goes hand-in-hand with collaboration, in which teachers work together in peer review, coaching, and discussion, which reduces loneliness, stress, and improves practice (19). Ultimately, Crandall and Christison acknowledge the gaps between theory and practice taking place in teacher development, but see great hope in research in best providing a fix to help improve student learning outcomes (22).

While this piece was very useful in thinking through the ways in which theory and practice either align or fail to align in teacher training, what isn’t quite clear are the types of theories that are being taught, whether ultimately used or not, and if research is helping to improve such gaps, as Crandall and Christison suggest, what is being valued in that theory, and what types of learning outcomes teachers currently value. This is particularly important because it somewhat contradicts Canagarrajah’s work and makes both feel a bit incomplete. These gaps suggest that I need to dig just a bit deeper, and I will continue reading next week to see what else I can discover about what these theories and further information about preparation in TESOL master’s and PhD programs. Unfortunately, while neither of these pieces has great insight into the division of ESL and composition, I hope more light will be shed next week.

Works Cited

Canagarajah, Suresh. “TESOL as a Professional Community: A Half Century of Pedagogy, Research, and Theory.” TESOL Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 1, 2016, pp. 7-41.

Crandall, JoAnn, and MaryAnn Christison. “An Overview of Research in English Language Teacher Education and Professional Development.” Teacher Education and Professional Development in TESOL: Global Perspectives, edited by JoAnn Crandall and MaryAnn Christison, The International Research Foundation for English Language Education and Routledge, 2016, pp. 3-34.