Category Archives: Genre theory

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.

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.