Category Archives: History

And Now, a History of Composition

I wanted to shift this week to look at the history of ESL writers in the composition classroom after weeks of looking at ESL as its own discipline. I thought a good place to start, before diving into some of the other questions I’ve raised about where these conversations are happening, was to find some history on ESL writers in the composition field. For this investigation, I am looking at two histories by Paul Kei Matsuda. While there are other good histories I turned up that I hope to touch upon in upcoming weeks, these two give, I think, a good and complimentary background to issues of ESL writers in composition that will provide a good base for further investigations to come.

In Matsuda’s “Composition Studies and ESL Writing: A Disciplinary Division of Labor,” he confirms what I have discovered over the last several weeks about the divisions between ESL and composition, now seen as separate fields. Matsuda notes that ESL has been taught in the U.S. since English became a dominant language. Generally, however, there was little respect for ESL teachers with the assumption that anyone who could speak and write in English was qualified to teach it (703). This began to change in the 1940s when the Michigan ELI was established to create a professional preparation program for ESL teachers that focused on applied and structural linguistics as a way of teaching the language (703-704). During this time, journals were created that dealt with applied linguistics and more graduate and certificate programs were developed for those who were interested in teaching TESOL (705). It was only in the 1960s that applied linguistics became part of a larger field dealing also with “’studies in first language acquisition, in bilingualism, translation (human and machine), in linguistic statistics, in sociolinguistics, in psycholinguistics, and the development of writing systems for unwritten languages…and so on” (706), therefore emphasizing the need to train students well beyond just basic grammatical competencies.

A similar change in teaching emphasis can be seen in the composition world. While ESL was first a small component at CCCC conferences in the 1950s and 1960s, attendance at these workshops grew particularly because of the growing numbers of ESL students teachers were encountering, and their general lack of preparation in helping these students. There were also scholars and teachers who were “active in both TESL and composition studies” during this time (707-708). However, fractures began between these two groups, particularly because of Michigan’s push to professionalize the discipline of TESL, arguing such students needed to be contained in special classes with specially trained ESL instructors. Additionally, composition departments were often on board with this practice because they wanted to “release composition specialists from the extra ‘burden’ of teaching ESL students in their classes.” Essentially, by the end of the 1960s, composition teachers were told they were not prepared to teach these courses or students and were happy to give them up (710-712). “The disciplinary division of labor was thus institutionalized” Matsuda argues (713).

Matsuda points out how unfortunate this disciplinary division is because while we “reinscribe the view that the sole responsibility of teaching writing to ESL students falls upon professionals in another intellectual formation: second language studies, or more specifically, Teaching English as a Second Language,” we continue to face courses and institutions in which these writers make up a good percentage of students in composition classes, yet now we have no strategies to help them (700-701). Ultimately, Matsuda does not suggest that the disciplines should be merged, as he sees this as a poor solution to the problem, but he does suggest that specialists in both disciplines must “try to transform their institutional practices in ways that reflect the needs and characteristics of second-language writers in their own institutional contexts,” as well as advocating for greater graduate school preparation, further publications, and more emphasis in writing courses on methods that would help these students succeed (715-717).

Matsuda’s second piece pulls a bit farther away from the ESL world and focuses more specifically on the challenges and issues facing ESL students in the composition classroom, adding additional information and nuance to create a fuller history of these divisions. Written seven years after “…A Disciplinary Division of Labor,” Matsuda’s piece “The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition” suggests that the basic changes he suggested in the first piece have not made it yet into practical composition pedagogy. He defines the “myth of linguistic homogeneity” as the student audience as imagined by the teacher, in which their students have matching sets of what they know, what they need to know, and how to best teach them (639). This often means students who fit a “dominant linguistic profile” and speak or write with “privileged varieties of English,” often related to grammaticality (638). A significant problem in the academy is therefore excluding students who do not fit this particular linguistic profile, Matsuda argues (639).

Matsuda points out how unrealistic such assumptions are in a country in which increasing numbers of international or non-dominant language speakers are showing up in English classrooms, noting that as of 2000, one in six people speak a language other than English at home [note: who knows how much higher this might be now] (641). He notes that these unrealistic assumptions have always been at the basis of the creation of college composition, with the goals and aims of the course being to remove linguistic differences from the college. First created at Harvard in the late nineteenth century, placement practices have continued to try to separate students and “fix” their problems before they are able to truly “join” the academy by enrolling in required composition courses (641-642). For example, while many of the earliest international students were assumed to come to the U.S. fully prepared for college writing, they often ended up placed into preparatory schools with young children to improve their English to a level that the university was comfortable with. Later, most institutions developed special English language courses (such as Michigan’s ELI), which later bore separate “tracks” of credit-bearing composition courses for those student who could not get up to linguistic standards (644-647). This meant that throughout their college education, there were many stopping points in which students were separated and contained as they worked to fit the dominant linguistic goals of their institution.

Ultimately, Matsuda argues that such containment policies work to continue the idea that we should have one simple image of what a student should sound like in a composition classroom, pushing all others into separate courses, such as ESL or basic writing, without actually distinguishing the various different issues they may have with writing, which is a huge disservice to these students (648). While he does not advocate for removing placement practices which students may prefer (649), Matsuda does want us, as educators, to remember that further training to work with such diverse populations as well as recognition of the differences in these populations is crucial for quality teaching and learning (637-638).

As I stated earlier, what these pieces show is that my investigation from my study of the ESL literature basically ring true – that the fields divided because they saw distinct professional interests that the other side was ultimately reluctant to address. The unfortunate thing is that there clearly was a time (before the late 1960s) in which the fields overlapped in a significant way and that there were practitioners interested in studying both disciplines as overlapping in significant and meaningful elements. This continued division does appear to offer a significant disadvantage to students and faculty alike, as Matsuda so powerfully gets at this week, setting up unrealistic expectations for both groups to the determent of students. While I think he’s correct that removing the distinction between these disciplines is entirely counterproductive, without further overlap, our students can suffer and faculty will continue to have mistaken ideas about who and what their students are and should be.

Matsuda does point out, however, that there are some composition scholars and journals taking about these issues, and that is what I would like to know more about, and where I will pick up next week. Questions I would like to answer include: who in composition is taking about these issues (other than Matsuda, of course)? What are they saying? What steps, if any, has the field taken since 2006, when Matsuda’s later piece was written? Do we see any changes in graduate or teacher preparation? My next stop will be the Journal of Second Language Writing and I will see where the work takes me from there.

Works Cited

Matsuda, Paul Kei. “Composition Studies and ESL Writing: A Disciplinary Division of Labor.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 50, no. 4, 1999, pp. 699-721.

Matsuda, Paul Kei. “The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition.” College English, vol. 68, no. 6, 2006, pp. 637-651.

TESOL History – divisions and overlaps

This week I finally made some breakthroughs with my research as far as finding more information on the history of ESL education and how the field has looked for the last several decades in the U.S. However, despite finding many interesting articles this week, I think it has opened up new questions and complexities I will have to deal with down the road.

In “The Formation and Development of TESOL: A Brief History” by Phebe Xu Gray, she notes that the teaching of English has been around since “the founding of this country” but that it was not until the 1960s that Teaching English of Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) became a recognized profession. Gray notes that “[t]he assumption [prior to the 1960s] was that anybody who speaks English could teach English,” and most universities had few teachers who were there to work specifically with foreign students.” This seems apparent from a 1967 article in the inaugural edition of the TESOL Quarterly in which there are a series of job applications posted for ESOL teachers, and nearly all of them require “[l]ittle or no training in linguistics or ESOL methodology” (Light 61). According to Gray, most of the teachers on university campuses who did work with ESL speakers were there to study something else, such as linguistics, literature, journalism, and creative writing. However, with the increasing influx of foreign students, it was clear that qualifications to teach these students were becoming necessary. In 1966, the professional organization Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Language was created, and it was the first time that those who wanted to specifically teach speakers of other languages were permanently brought together.

By 1975, national standard guidelines for Certification and Professional Preparation of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages in the U.S. were ratified. This included preparation including courses in linguistic and grammar, psycho and sociolinguistics, culture, and society. Teachers were recommended to also take pedagogical courses in human growth and development, learning theory, and curriculum development, and understand another language as well as complete a practicum. Gray concludes by stating that TESOL has continued to develop and be “influenced by political and social factors” that will change how the field is taught and students developed.

Paul Kei Matsuda and Tony Silva add nuance to this history in their introduction to the book Landmark Essays on ESL Writing (**note, I used a Google book intro chapter, but I am getting the physical text from the library, and will fill in correct in-text citations when it arrives). They note that since the development of TESOL in the 1960s, the field separated substantially from composition studies, which they label as a major limitation between the “’disciplinary division of labor’” which has “not been easy to reconcile” despite the strong need to do so.

They also develop a brief history of the TESOL field and how it has shifted over time. Before the 1960s, most TESOL involved mastery of applied linguistics, through “pattern drills” with little emphasis on writing. By the late 1960s and early 1970s repetition and correcting grammar was on its way out, while “invention, revision, and formative feedback, ” also known as a process approach, became the new trend, and the field of composition scholarship was dipped into to help this group improve their writing.

By the 1980s, process was still central, but so was a sentence-based approach, in which it was necessary to teach both types of text analysis for comprehensive language growth. Matsuda and Silva note that this decade also saw the development of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural research, such as examining discourse grammar. This was also a decade in which ESL teaching was no longer seen as simply remedial, but also acknowledged the importance of teaching of English for Specific Purposes, and, at the college Teaching for Academic Purposes.

Despite continuing to draw heavily from composition studies in the 1990s, the field also found that some techniques simply weren’t applicable to ESL writers. At this time, the field broke further from composition by acknowledging the “distinct characteristics of second language writing and writers” which couldn’t be helped by L1 composition theory. At this time, the field developed more disciplinary infrastructure, including journals, conferences, and bibliographies, of their own. This disciplinary break from composition still exists.

In addition to what I discovered from the two readings this week, I also had an informal conversation with some of my co-workers in the ESL department. It appears that while some came out of masters for TESOL programs, most who have PhDs came from some sort of linguistics program, whether that be applied, sociolinguistics, or another related field. Therefore, the reading this week and these conversations tell me a few things about the field. First, the reason there may be no set standard curriculum or pedagogical consistency as far as I can discover in their journals is because people are coming into the profession from a variety of teaching and learning fields. As early as fifty years ago, there was little to no training at all for people who wanted to teach ESL – if you could speak it, you could teach it. Coming from that perspective, while many advancements have been made on what should be done, if there is no standard on how it should be done (as in what programs are best to train these practitioners) some ambiguity could remain between these disparate parts.

Additionally, while we see that the field has, at times, drawn heavily from composition theory, and the two fields seem to have taken a similar social turn which focuses on both empowering teachers and learners to acknowledge and work in ways best for them, there still is, as Matsuda and Silva point out, a distinct gap in the field that is placed there because these practitioners recognize that there are different learning needs that cannot be addressed by composition scholarship alone. Some of these overlaps I have noticed when I’ve been doing the reading for previous weeks, but these differences also merit more investigation.

For now, I plan to take a break from writing about ESL and shift my search to composition and discover more about when they started taking about speakers of other languages, as well as what methods and methodologies they used to work with these writers. I expect, now more than ever, to find significant differences that reflect the stark diversion of these two fields.

Works Cited

Gray, Phebe Xu. “The Formation and Development of TESOL: A Brief History.” International Education, vol. 27, 1997, http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.odu.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=2&sid=d561380b-c307-4433-a9e2-e6fa1296b70a%40sessionmgr4010&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=507597464&db=eue. Accessed 1 Mar. 2018.

Light, Richard. “English for Speakers of Other Languages: Program Administration by the U.S. Office of Education.” TESOL Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 1, 1967, pp. 55-61.

Matsuda, Paul Kei, and Tony Silva, ed. “Introduction.” Landmark Essays on ESL Writing, vol. 17, Routeledge, 2001, pp. ____(coming soon).