Category Archives: College English

Back to the start – messages of empowerment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

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

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.

Big changes, bigger questions in College English

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.