This week, I began my preliminary search of College English. By examining past issues from the 1980s, I noticed some patterns that were of interest. It is clear that during this decade the primary focus was on literature. There was a dedicated section of poetry in each journal and while some issues of composition are mentioned, much of the work focused on the teaching of literature courses. While there were some articles on social issues, particularly on feminism, disability, and cultural differences, there was little to nothing specifically on linguistic differences. I found only one article with a title that uses the acronym ESL or something similar.

Likewise, the 2000s search was surprisingly devoid of ESL issues other than a special issue in 2006 that focused on linguistic differences (such differences go beyond the bounds of nonnative speakers of English alone). This decade made a big change in content mostly related to the social turn, focusing even more on feminism, disability, and now genre theory. The focus was also on composition rather than literature, and the poetry section was gone.

I was disappointed by the extreme lack of ESL and language issues throughout both of these decades. I was almost certain in the 2000s I’d find many articles related to this population. I will have to look through additional bibliographies or see what else I can find that relates as closely as I can to these language differences for this journal to be a part of this semester’s search and examination.

Because of the difficulty I had in searching for ESL-related topics, the articles I picked for this week didn’t have any substantial initial connection like last week’s. Instead, I picked out two that appeared to discuss students with clear linguistic differences in college composition.

The first ended up being quite different from my initial expectations. “The ESL Composition Course and the Idea of a University” by Judith Oster (1985) focused on building up student confidence for those who are often from cultures where it is “unthinkable to challenge what the teacher says” (67). Oster sees this challenge as one in which students are trained to not only examine an issue from one side, but to see the complexity of a cultural issue from both perspectives. Many students, she says, start out believing an issue has one “truth” but through training, students come to learn “about life in America” and to correct “amazing misconceptions” about our culture and history (72). Through a sequence of two or three semester courses, Oster says, they should be taught and learn how to challenge their own first judgments and thoughts about a particular topic. Essentially, Oster focuses upon a class in which critical thinking skills are the primary teaching and learning goal.

While this article primarily focuses on this critical thinking approach as a practical matter, Oster also makes many passing references to student’s abilities in grammar, syntax, and language use often disparagingly. While she notes that most ESL students are ready for the rigors of college English, they are “not as well prepared” as their native speaking classmates (67), profiling students such as “Omar,” whom she follows over three semesters to examine how his writing changes. In early semesters, his writing presents difficulties in many areas such as word choice, clarity, transitions, and mechanics, (69-70), but in later semester she states that his “mechanics and sentence structure have continued to improve” (71). This focus is particularly interesting because Oster does not offer any advice on how to deal with such issues, seemingly dismissing language differences as less important to the overall goal of college English while still diminishing the quality of the writing. For example she later states that another student had English that “was not yet ready for such a topic, nor was his logic, but as a person he was ready” to write about a complex Dostoevsky passage (75).

While this article had a fairly modern approach towards focusing on critical thinking over grammar and syntax, the continual reminders that her ESL students were deficient in linguistic areas was somewhat distracting from her overall goal of providing practical guidelines for preparing students for the critical thinking they will have to take up in all of their college work. Additionally, her lack of acknowledgement about other ESL courses they may have taken fails to shed light on what previous preparation these students have for college English. She also fails to have any works cited or bibliography at the end of the article, which is frustrating as a researcher, as I am not sure where she drew her methods or methodology and upon what work she might be building. Therefore, I have no sense of how this might connect to the study of best practices for teaching ESL students in the college.

My second article from College English was part of the special issue on working with writers with language differences. “Taking Up Language Differences in Composition” by Anis Bawarshi talks about “uptake” and its relation to genre theory. With uptake, Bawarshi examines how language ultimately “coordinate[s] forms of social action” and can situate roles of power and who is included or excluded from social actions (653). Bawarshi calls for teachers to be more aware of the types of uptake that control our classrooms and in which our students live so we can “be more attentive and hospitable to language differences” and also that we must invite students to interrogate these “dominant designs” so we can explore alternate uptakes to those that are dominant (654).

In addition to understanding, using various uptakes, and challenging those that are predominant, Bawarshi also calls for recognizing that what uptakes often “promise” as the benefits of acquiring standard English and what they actually deliver can be quite different, and to not consider this as an issue of reproduction of power (a la “the myth of linguistic homogeneity”) is a disservice to all of our nonnative students (656).

These pieces do have some overlap in that both focus on critical thinking as a site for better teaching for our nonnative students, but that is where the similarities end. Bawarshi, 20 years later, articulates how genre theory must be taught from a perspective of the power dynamics that standard English users often use to their advantage over those that speak other forms of English. While Oster challenges teachers to focus on critical thinking for their students, this does not take a backseat to forcing them to fit into the linguistically homogeneous categories that were beginning to be dismantled with the social turn. These two articles, in that sense, mimic quite clearly the pre- and post-social turn theory of language difference. While Oster believes that language differences can and should be fixed slowly, over time, Bawarshi wants students to understand at a bare minimum how the production of standard English furthers the effort to marginalize them, while allowing for alternative forms of uptake to be equally powerful.

Because both of these articles are about power and learning to think, they do not say much about the development of the English language or what students are arriving with before they enter the college composition classroom – are they building upon skills from previous ESL classes? We know these students are not coming into our classroom with no previous English knowledge, so one thing these authors could address would be what types of experiences and linguistic backgrounds are they arriving in class with? How are these different or the same as their native speaking peers? Are the practical methods described in both of these pieces in any way different from what might be taught to native students? And if so, how? I think one of the biggest struggles I’ve had in examining the connections between nonnative students in the English classroom is the how/why we are treating them differently, or if what is good for one group is good for the other. And if that is the case, why does this field of inquiry even exist? In particular because one of the articles from the ELT Journal last week also discussed genre theory, clearly the two fields are drawing from some of the same knowledge and pedagogical pools, but through what training and how/why do these overlaps exist? I will continue to dig next week.

Works Cited

Bawarshi, Anis. “Taking Up Langauge Differences in Composition.” College English, vol. 68, no. 6, 2006, pp. 652-656.

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