Category Archives: Overlaps

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.

ESL/Composition Overlaps in Journal of Second Language Writing

I wanted to continue to look at the Journal of Second Language Writing this week to see how it develops over time and perhaps shifts its focus towards issues related specifically to teacher preparation for composition instructors working with ESL writers. I choose to look 20 years after the issues from last week because I though that would be a sufficient amount of time for the journal to develop into its niche. I therefore looked at the early 2010s for this week, but found that much of what I was looking for never materialized. While the journal does a good job of looking at the development of L2 writers, I am still not seeing a significant overlap with composition as a discipline. Much of what is here relates to writing across the disciplines and on topics such as error correction – useful for sure, but maybe not for my study. However, I found a few articles that I think are useful in looking at those issues, so I have chosen two articles that seem to align most closely with that goal of discovery. However, I feel I will have to move on from this journal next week to see what other types of specialized journals I can find that might talk more about how we are preparing teachers in the composition field specifically to work with L2 writers, since this journal fits loosely, but has clearly changed somewhat in its goal since the early 1990s.

In the first article, “Writing Teachers’ Perceptions of the Presence and Needs of Second Language Writers: An Institutional Case Study,” Matsuda et al undertake a study of the attitudes of writing teachers at a Southwestern university with a large multilingual population. What this study sought to discover is the ways in which credit-bearing composition teachers were dealing with L2 students and in what ways they thought students could or should be helped. This particular university offered both mainstream and multilingual sections of first year composition, with students being given multiple avenues (including placement tests, SAT scores, personal choice) for placement. The teachers at this university were also diverse, with training from bachelors degrees (T.A.s) through PhDs in fields such as rhetoric, linguistics, creative writing, and TESOL (71).

What Matsuda et al. discovered is that a majority of teachers (77 percent) had some preparation in working with multilingual writers and most (67 percent) felt comfortable working with them, a net positive (though they suggest this could be related to those who decided to respond to their survey) (71-72). Despite these feelings of general preparation, most teachers also believed it was crucial for students to be correctly placed for them to be successful in college, and that they also had “certain expectations about students’ language proficiency before they can be enrolled in first-year composition courses” (76). Likewise, teachers found these students often more difficult to work with, more time consuming, and found their biggest problems were related to grammar and mechanical issues (77). They also suggested that the objectives of this university, drawn heavily from the WPA Outcomes Statement of 2000, which focused “largely on rhetorical issues rather than language issues” put L2 students at a disadvantage because they were less able to focus on the types of needs of this population (78). Finally, many teachers believed that placement procedures at the university should be improved to help make sure that students ended up in the “correct” classes, implying that some may not want to work with students who do not speak English as a first language (80-81).

What Matsuda et al. note about these findings is that there are a “wide range of perspectives, attitudes, and experiences” of working with L2 learners, though most are positive.” However, they believe that more training is necessary not only at the graduate level, but also in-service training must be offered to “cut across the L1/L2 divide,” with more being done by not only this university but likely many others to bridge these knowledge gaps to be sure students are set up for success (82).

What was so interesting about this is the ways in which Matsuda keeps bringing up these issues, but change is slow and incremental. This survey shows that while many teachers recognize these language differences, many others are still ready to contain or separate students with someone they feel is better equipped to handle these student issues. It seems in some ways like the wheels are spinning but the bike isn’t moving forward – the problems of 20 years ago (or even 40 or 50 years ago) are becoming more urgent, yet only small changes seem to be made. In particular, this article is also really interesting in the context of last week’s “ESL Composition Program Administration in the United States.” The similarities between the problems these two articles present demonstrate this lag in moving forward distinctly. Some of the issues Williams brought up in that article include the wide array of teacher training and degrees within the single field, and sheltered course that eventually lead to L2 students in mainstream courses with a sink-or-swim approach in which they receive no further help with L2 issues and have teachers who are unprepared or unwilling to help them further. Despite being written 20 years apart, the similarities are resonant.

One very interesting development, however, is the emphasis at the Southwestern university Mastuda et al. study, which uses the WPA Outcomes regarding rhetorical teaching rather than grammar teaching. By the 2000s, particularly with the social turn in composition, the focus on rhetoric rather than an applied linguistics model of teaching writing is, I think, at many institutions almost universal. This again shows why more bridges need to be built between ESL and composition courses, because these difficult adjustments in thinking and scholarship cannot be made in one semester (or even two) without revision from both divisions. Neither could or should give up what they do and emphasize in their courses, but some adjustments may need to be made to smooth this transition and help students prepare for the types of work they will expect in both writing and outside coursework.

The second article I read was quite different in thinking about writing with a greater emphasis on writing across the disciplines. In What Our Students Tell Us: Perceptions of Three Multilingual Students on their Academic Writing in First Year” by Morton et al, they highlight an Australian university that encompasses first year writing as an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course in which students write as part of their undergraduate degrees, meaning that students in business will learn to write much differently from those in science or liberal arts (as the three students the study highlights shows) (2).

What the study finds is that while all three struggle with writing tasks that are varied according to their programs of study, ultimately all are able to find mechanisms in which to be successful. Fei, the business student, finds that writing is social, in which she finds that writing is a process upon which receiving lots of feedback from many people is useful. Fei also finds it helpful in some cases to write in a mix of Mandarin and English as she works towards improving all of her work in English (4-5). Kevin, the scientist finds that he has little improvement in his writing because his science EAP course does not ask him to write extensively at all, though he did find benefits in reading the work of other students (6). Laura, the liberal arts student, works to find her own authentic academic identity and voice, which she succeeds at doing as she reads and learns more about her discipline, feeling more a member of the academy and that group and her place within it. Laura also found great help in receiving feedback from professors and other experts (7).

What Morton et al. conclude is that “disciplinary values and beliefs, embodied in different types of assessment practices can have [a strong influence] on shaping students’ perspectives on academic writing.” They also note that for many nonnative speakers, “spaces and practices outside the academy” are important for writing development, such as Fei speaking and writing in Mandarin online or in her assignments, and Laura speaking about her homework with her husband (9).

While this article was useful in the sense that it articulated ways in which nonnative speakers come around to using English academically, such as the use of multilingual modes for thinking about and writing about their work, much of what was highlighted here is actually, I would assume, similar to the types of strategies even native speakers would use for learning English. For example, Fei notes that her high school work in Australia (she spent a year finishing high school there) did not prepare her for the challenges of her work in university. One would assume that even native speaking English students might experience a “culture shock” in some aspects of new, complex writing tasks. These students would also likely find coping mechanisms for improving their ways of thinking and expressing themselves in English. Therefore, it would be interesting to replicate this study using native speakers to see if the results were any different.

I do think this article is useful, however, in the sense that it tells us that all nonnative students can ultimately be successful in college writing given the tools, the space, and the feedback to do so. While we did not hear from the teachers in this article as we did in Matsuda’s piece, hearing from students is just as valuable in thinking about how we can bridge the divides between ESL and English: by providing spaces for multilingual writing to be appropriate; for providing meaningful and substantive feedback from both teachers and students; and to temper expectations to what we know students have learned before entering our classroom. Though this certainly does not exactly replicate a good model for composition with multilingual students, it does suggest that putting time and effort in with these students, while allowing them the time to develop, can help them succeed in ways that are meaningful to them and to their future career development.

Works Cited

Matsuda et al. “Writing Teachers’ Perceptions of the Presence and Needs of Second Language Writers: An Institutional Case Study.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 22, 2013, pp. 68-86.

Morton et al. “What Our Students Tell Us: Perceptions of Three Multilingual Students on their Academic Writing in First Year.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 30, no 1, 2015, pp. 1-13.