Category Archives: critical thinking

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.

Grammar and clear writing in the 1980s

Because College English has a decided lack of ESL issues, I chose two texts this week that I hoped had a common thread in discussing grammar. I chose one text from College English and one from the ELT Journal, both from the 1980s to see what they said about grammar use in the writing and ESL classroom and I hope next week to examine if any texts from the 2000s address grammar, given the popularity of “Hartwell’s “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar,” which, in the mid-1980s, became a popular call to avoid teaching grammar at all.

I started with College English. In Thomas Friedmann’s “Teaching Error, Nurturing Confusion: Grammar Tests, Tests, and Teachers in the Developmental English Class,” he argues in favor of asking or requiring students not to “fix” errors that they find in grammar workbooks or in their own writing, but instead to model and write the correct spelling, grammatical element, or sentence as a way of better correcting the “rule” that has been broken for future writing tasks. He starts out by noting that most developmental English students simply don’t have the models in their head to correctly fix a sentence or pick the one correct spelling out of a list of five words, stating that “developmental students have not acquired the correct image” (391), and that asking them to fix their work only reinforces all of the wrong possibilities that also exist in their minds.

Friedmann notes that such learning is at its core psychological, noting that “similar items confuse,” and instead of teaching the difference between there/their or to/too, one shouldn’t teach the similar item but instead teach the singular item in context, such as teaching “there, here, and where” as a bunch (394-95). He provides similar examples for how to teach apostrophes, language rules (such as foot/feet rather than feets), and spelling. He also argues that students must be required to write out the whole corrected sentence or word, as simply adding in a letter or “corrected” word into a longer sentence does not actually break the negative pattern that is already been engrained (398). Friedmann ends by noting that in the humanities “ambiguity is applauded” but that in teaching grammar, ambiguity must be cast out for the betterment of our students (399).

While this article does not directly address ESL students, it might be meaningful to think of many of them as developmental writers. At least at my institution, NOVA, a significant portion (a sizeable majority) of all developmental composition students come from the ESL classroom. But because this article does not address the various needs of different developmental populations, it is hard to put into context the differing needs of these two distinct groups and how to best help them individually. This is particularly true because Friedmann notes that if any given student is not having problems in one particular grammar area, the teacher should avoid confusing these students by teaching them to correct errors. This may be difficult in a classroom in which an ESL student has trouble with a particular part of grammar usage while most of the native developmental students do not. Clarifying how to help the many populations that inhabit the same classroom seems like it would have been important in the 1980s and yet this is not addressed.

Additionally, like last week’s College English articles, this one also does not contain outside sources or references to follow to shore up pedagogically sound methods. I am increasingly frustrated that these articles do not appear to be based in any particular research method or built upon other best practices of teaching pedagogy. Therefore, it is impossible to know if this advice is based upon method or methodology that may reach into the ESL pedagogical world or not.

The second article was also from the 1980s in the ELT Journal. “How to Cope With Spaghetti Writing” by Damien McDevitt defines “spaghetti writing” as that with “long incoherent sentences” and “subordinate clauses searching for a main one” (19). He states that simply telling students to write in simpler sentences will end up with them being accused of writing “baby English” and those trying to master the language will not be helped by this accusation (19). McDevitt then provides a series of exercises that teachers can work through with students to help in areas such as creating compound or complex sentences, expanding and linking sentences together through questions such as when and why, and error correction (20-21). McDevitt concludes by noting that such exercises will not make ESL writing perfect but will help students “review their own writing in a more critical and systematic manner” (22) with the certain hope of improvement.

There are some interesting connections between this and Friedmann’s article. From both perspectives, grammar has much to do with clarity of writing, and errors must be corrected to make for clearer sentences. Interestingly, though both talk about essay writing as a place for needed improvement, both talk about correction down to the sentence level rather than word level. Though McDevitt does stress some “error correction” which Freidmann shuns, they both talk about modeling good forms and working with students to take simpler sentences and make them more complex with correct grammatical forms. Neither, however, talks about how this will fit into the overall coherence of a longer essay, or why such grammatically correct language is important for the forms of writing students will be doing in college or elsewhere. Again, like our other articles, both suggest similar activities and ideas, but don’t differentiate between the two different populations they are working with (ESL vs. “developmental”). Ultimately, this suggests a lack of understanding on what the purpose of grammar instruction is in an ESL classroom versus a developmental English class. An ESL course could be teaching students basic communication skills while developmental English suggests a student who is college-minded and –bound. If the purpose of these courses is different, how should grammar instruction be tailored to each of these populations? Whether or not these articles can or should address this complex question is unclear, but it is one that has been weighing on my mind for several years of study in these cross-disciplines.

There were some additional interesting connections between the other works I’ve read this semester. The most interesting connection was with Oster’s College English article. “The ESL Composition Course and the Idea of a University.” In this article, she argues that while students are ready for the rigors of challenging their beliefs in college English, those coming out of ESL often aren’t ready for the language challenges themselves. While she acknowledges that student writing improves over the course of several semesters, she’s skeptical of their abilities in grammar and clear writing. I think this speaks to a common perception of college English teachers that students should come prepared to their classroom to write in Standard Written English (SWE), yet most, and this includes our native speaking students, do not (or lack at minimum some deficiencies). Because both authors today, as well as Oster, seem to take up the banner that improving grammatical usage is a process that takes time and is one that can go beyond ESL to composition, I then wonder when and how our disciplines decide when a student is ready and in what way they are ready to pass our classes and to take on the rigors of other college work. Is there a gatekeeper level of written accuracy that we need to hold students to, or does each institution or teacher have different ideas about this? If we maintain that students have the ability to think, but scarcely the ability to write, what does composition (and ESL for that matter) value most as a discipline, and why? If we ultimately value too many things, such skills cannot be taught in the matter of a single semester or even two, as most college composition sequences are set up.

Works Cited

Friedmann, Thomas. “Teaching Error, Nurturing Confusion: Grammar Tests, Tests, and Teachers in the Developmental English Class.” College English, vol. 45, no. 4, 1983, pp. 390-399.

Hartwell, Patricia. “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar.” College English, vol. 47, no. 2, 1985, pp. 105-127.

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

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

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.