Category Archives: Approaches

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.

Teaching for Transfer – which discipline cares?

One of my goals for this semester is to look into the teacher and graduate preparation for ESL instructors from the 1980s on. The purpose of this is to see in what ways it might differ from the preparation for composition instructors, which, I believe, might tell me something about the divide in these fields. While I’ve found a few promising histories, I first wanted to think about one important way in which the fields might overlap – teaching for transfer (TFT). The concept of TFT started becoming a “buzzword” in the 2000s as far as I can tell, though authors have written about this issue previous to that decade. TFT is the concept of teaching students to apply what they have learned and read outside of the classroom, often in other classes. For example, most teachers hope that the research skills students learn in a writing class could be transferred and used in other college courses. Because this is often easier said than done, the concept of TFT emphasizes a retraining in thinking to help students apply these concepts more effectively in other places. I wanted to see overlaps n this concept specifically because TFT in itself is about overlap. If each of these disciplines disregards the need for TFT, this might tell me something about what each of these disciplines finds to be important to teach and why.

Ironically, although I undertook a fairly rigorous search of College English for keywords such as “transfer” “TFT” and other similar “buzzwords,” I could not find anything in the journal that talked about this concept specifically. In the ELT Journal I was able to find several articles related to transferability, and so I have chosen two of those articles this week.

First, I read “Training Learners to Prepare Short Written Answers” by Desmond Allison from 1986. Here, he argues that it is the job of the ESL teacher to prepare students for the communication tasks they will encounter in other classes, because they will otherwise face great difficulties in meeting these writing challenges (27). While he does acknowledge that reading assignments based on practicing the work students will face in other classes is important, he advocates for written assignments which set a “different kind of ‘comprehension’ task” (28). For example, students have to decide things such as whether or not they will have to find outside research to complete the task, and they will have to set up the answer in a way that makes sense to the reader (29).

Allison notes how important it is for cross-departmental communication to be in place to facilitate the best preparation for students. He suggests setting aside ample time to talk to colleagues about texts they use and the communication they expect in their classrooms (27). He then provides a possible framework for creating a lesson that would work with these other teachers to help students learn to succeed in other tasks. First, there is the “presentation stage” in which students talk about what makes for a “good” short answer. This should include comments from colleagues so the teacher can understand what is desired in other disciplines. Then, in the practice stage, the teacher provides handouts of previous student work for the current students to analyze and discuss, deciding what the writing is doing well and what it isn’t (30). Finally, in the production stage, the students write based on a prompt from another subject, and the teacher grades them according to information from the teacher of that given subject. Allison mentions that this is crucial – the teacher “will need detailed guidance from the subject teacher” for this to be successful (31). Ultimately, the goal of this three-step process is for students to learn and to see how important writing across disciplines is, and how they can apply what they do in the ESL classroom to other college work (31).

Although this article does not talk about the cross-communication between ESL and composition, nor does it use the concept of TFT specifically, this seems to be a good early example of thinking about writing as a concept that needs to be used across a variety of fields. In fact, as this article highlights, even fields such as science use a lot of writing and require certain stylistic choices that are important to understand before even entering these courses. By seeking to foster good working relationships between departments and asking for input from other teachers, clearly Allison encourages a relationship that is not about us vs. them, but about working together for the common goal of education. It is clear that in many ways, the ESL field both did and does attempt to find ground upon which to help students develop beyond their own subject matter and in ways that suggest success is important for their continuing education, rather than suggesting English is simply a basic life skill. This seems like an important development.

Next, I read “Teaching for Transfer in ELT” by Mark A. James, from 2006. In this piece, he provides a bit more of the pedagogical and educational psychology background on TFT and highlights why it is necessary for good ELT teaching. He states that if students are unable to perform tasks that are different from what is learned in class, “then education is deemed to have failed” (151). He articulates two forms of TFT which are low-road transfer, an “unconscious process that is triggered when a situation that one is perceived as similar to a previous situation in which learning occurred,” such as moving from playing a six string guitar to a twelve string guitar, and high-road transfer, “a conscious process that can occur between two situations that lack obvious similarities” such as moving from playing a guitar to playing a piano (152).

He then highlights good ways to achieve both low- and high-road transfer. For low-road, he suggests setting expectations that knowledge in one class will be used in another; matching, which is using authentic materials that students might encounter outside of the classroom, in particular using things that students will encounter in college rather just basic academic studies of English; simulating and role-playing; modeling, which involves bringing in target language and work from other courses, such as business courses; and problem-based learning such as asking students to create something or identify differences in lists so they can get exposure to target language and learn how to use it to solve the given problem (153-155). For high-road transfer, he suggests asking students to anticipate and predict; asking students to look at examples of target language and “deriving language rules themselves;” using analogies such as asking students to identify how writing in English is similar to writing a technical report; parallel problem solving, which is solving problems that are “in different areas but have similar structure” and metacognitive reflection, including setting goals and evaluating outcomes (155-157). Though James notes that many teachers are already including such practices in the ESL classroom, transfer cannot be “assumed” and “needs to be addressed explicitly and consistently” so students have the best possible outcomes (158).

This article seems to encompass and expand on the article from 1986. While James, too, advocates for working with the materials from other disciplines, he also includes well-documented reasons for including other explicit transfer strategies in the ESL classroom. One thing this article does fail to acknowledge is in what ways, if any, this might differ from the work that students would or could do in a regular composition course (an answer I’ve been seeking all semester), but perhaps it is not the job of this author to do so. Because he is writing about writing, however, it would be a nice addition. Though he does not explicitly make these disciplinary connections, he does suggest strategies that seem like ones that could be used across both the ESL and composition discipline.

When comparing these readings to previous weeks, one of the most interesting things of note is how different they are than the other work that has been done so far. For example, neither of these articles dealt either explicitly with teaching of specific grammar or writing forms, nor deal with the “social” aspects of empowering students as members of the academy or analyzing power structures. Instead, these both dealt more specifically with being sure that the writing students do ends up being applicable to their “real” lives and continuing studies. This seems so important but so far has been mostly overlooked. If we fail to teach students real-world applications for what we are teaching them, as James points out, we’ve failed as teachers completely. I will be curious to see in what ways each of these disciplines seems to value real-world applications and how that relates to teacher training and the ethos of the discipline.

Ultimately, I am again disappointed that I didn’t find anything in College English about what I believe to be an important concept in the field. This is particularly disappointing because clearly the ESL/TOEFL field is talking about these issues and making them at least a small priority. I am not yet sure how this will be reflected in the work over the next couple of weeks in thinking about teacher preparation, but the findings would suggest that while ESL courses see themselves as a stepping-stone to other coursework or “lifework,” composition may see itself as somewhat removed from other departments and areas of study – a true disservice to our students. While my initial hypothesis at the start of this semester was that ESL courses and the ESL field were more insular and may not be preparing students for the work of composition and other coursework, it actually might be the other way around. I will try to make more sense of this as I start my look at field histories next.

Works Cited

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

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

ELT Journal “Approaches”

For my first foray into a historical look at the intersection of ESL and composition scholarship, I decided to begin with the ELT Journal exclusively, looking at one article from the 1980s and one from the 2000s that approached writing teaching in some way to see how the approaches differed between these decades. The first thing that I did was to look though each issue of the journal from these decades to see what types of conversations were taking place. While searching, I noticed some immediate patterns that will surely come up during the course of this semester, such as the focus on peer review and teacher written corrective feedback that dominated the 2000s with little to no mention of these methods during the 1980s. Something that I found disappointing was that both decades had little (dare I say no) emphasis on preparing students for other writing tasks outside of the ESL classroom. I hope that my quick search based on titles alone actually hides some gems that focus in this preparation.

Once I had skimmed and scanned these two decades, I wanted some sort of coherence for my first two chosen articles, so I selected two that focused on “approaches.” I wanted to see what different approaches researchers emphasized in these two decades, and how they either differed or remained the same.

The first article I read was “A Quantitative vs. a Qualitative Approach to the Teaching of English Composition” by Behrooz Azabdaftari from 1981. Here, Azabdaftari defines qualitative approaches as the use of teaching techniques that emphasize the quality of the writing rather than the quantity. He defines quality as encouraging “primarily correct responses” in which a controlled choice based on a student’s abilities is emphasized (411). Azabdaftari then discusses authors who have advocated for qualitative writing techniques with success, including R.J. Owens, who noted that quantity in writing at the ESL stage is pointless because any effort to write by these students is “concealed translation and the more he is required to write, the more he produces mistakes” (411). In general, Azabdaftari finds that “many … language teachers” believe that controlled composition is necessary for quality writing at this stage (412).

On the other hand, he also notes that some experts believe that quantitative techniques – simply getting students to learn to write by writing – is best. One expert, D. Wolfe, believes that simply teaching drills and exercises never gives students a chance to work with the writing itself (412). Azabdaftari himself seems conflicted with this method, noting that many studies have shown that the act of writing to teach writing has mostly “contradictory results” (413). He believes that quantitative techniques can be best for native speakers because of their knowledge of the language rules, but nonnative speakers simply need some kind of qualitative teaching (414). He concludes by stating that composition practice will be more “more rewarding” when taught in “minimal steps” that advance within strict boundaries of their capabilities (414).

The second article I read was published in 2000. Called “A Process Genre Approach to Teaching Writing,” authors Richard Badger and Goodith White discuss the growing movement towards teaching genre in writing courses that had begun during the 1990s. They first articulate previous approaches, including the product approach and the process approach. The product approach is about “linguistic knowledge with attention focused on the appropriate use of vocabulary, syntax, and cohesive devices” (153), and is primarily concerned with structure of language and imitation of work provided by the teacher (154). The process approach is about the writing process including planning, drafting, and peer review with less emphasis on grammar and structure. Badger and White note that this style emphasizes writing development rather that conscious learning of writing skills (154). Finally, they explore the genre approach, which is about teaching the social context and situations in which texts are written as well as the analysis of these situations (155-56).

Ultimately Bader and White advocate a “process genre approach” in which all three methods are combined. First, teachers “replicate the situation as closely as possible” and allow students to identify the social context; then they use the process method to write what they know, share with each other, and re-draft and proofread (158). The authors believe this approach is best to combine both the “old” ways of thinking about writing with the newer emphasis on genre theory.

Despite being written 20 years apart, the overlaps between the concepts and ideas in these two articles are fascinating. What Badger and White call a product approach seems to mimic many of the ideas of Azabdaftari’s qualitative approach, in which teaching writing is about correct language rather than a free flow of ideas. Likewise, his quantitative approach overlaps some with Badger and White’s process approach, in which they acknowledge that second language writers may develop such writing skills rather than “learn” them (154). What Badger and White add is the genre approach, which was something that began to develop as part of the social turn, when compositionists and writing instructors began to think about alternate discourse communities and power. This is likely why such a consideration is not made in the article from 1981. In general, these two articles present an interesting model of thinking through how things “change” over time – incrementally. While some of the ideas and strategies remained fundamental to the field, others were added and changed based upon the social situation of the day.

It was also striking how much both of these articles emphasized many of the writing skills, techniques, and knowledge that college composition values, despite having ESL instructors as the intended audience. There was some discussion of grammar and modeling, particularly with those parts emphasizing student’s need to write “correctly,” but overall the emphasis was more geared towards the rhetorical aspects of writing than I expected. I was disappointed, however, that while these ideas are present, neither article acknowledges that the emphasis on this writing knowledge could be useful in other courses, particularly in a college composition course. I would suggest that all research, particularly for those experts writing about working with English language learners, in which such knowledge built at this level will affect all of the student’s subsequent learning, should acknowledge ways in which learning about process, product, genre, qualitative, quantitative, and other such methods will have implications for all learning and writing these students will complete in the future. I will be curious to see if these trends continue as I dive further into this journal over the course of the semester.

Works Cited

Azabdaftari, Behrooz. “A Quantitative vs. a Qualitative Approach to the Teaching of English Composition.” ELT Journal, vol. 35, no 4, 1981, pp. 411–415.

Badger, Richard, and Goodith White “A Process Genre Approach to Teaching Writing.” ELT Journal, vol. 54, no. 2, 2000, pp. 153-160.