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.