Category Archives: Teacher training

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.

ESL Teacher Training: A First Look

This week I wanted to begin investigating teacher training and pedagogy in the ESL field. I was curious to find out if anything would suggest why the fields are so divergent or if there is overlap of any kind. The two pieces I read provided different perspectives: one was on what the research showed about teacher training, and the other talked about the difference between theory and practice in the classroom, or the difference between teacher training and classroom outcomes. Both are an important part, but an incomplete one, in looking at ESL teacher training. They are, however, a good place to begin.

The first article, “TESOL as a Professional Community: A Half-Century of Pedagogy, Research, and Theory” by Suresh Canagarajah, discusses the development of “significant pedagogical and research domains in TESOL during the 50-year history of TESOL Quarterly” (7). While this study was specifically about a particular journal, Canagarajah suggests that it is a fairly encompassing view of the trends the field went through over the course of 50 years.

What was so interesting about this piece in particular is that the TESOL field, while clearly segregated from English and composition in scholarly activities, had a similar trajectory as far as how the field developed and how practitioners saw themselves. That segregation can be seen when Canagarajah mentions, “there is a need for TESOL to establish its autonomy” from other “older and larger organizations” (7). However, distinct overlaps in what the two fields value remain. For example, as late as the 1960s and 70s, a “modernist” approach to teaching language was most important, in which the assumption was that we all learned languages the same way (whether your native language was Spanish or Arabic) and that “grammar was key to knowing a language” (11).

However, by the 1980s things began to shift, and the modernist approach no longer made sense, because of growing awareness of both technology, diverse communities, and the “knowledge traditions” of other cultures (12). Here, the postmodern approach took over, and “language purity” was challenged, with the field looking at how languages came in contact with other languages and created new grammars and meaning in these various “contact zones” (14). By the mid-1990s, language learning was no longer seen as linear and the social met the cognitive, with an increased focus on emphasizing negotiated social practice to learn grammatical structures “according to [students] own needs and contexts” (16). It was also acknowledged that nonnative speakers simply couldn’t be effectively measured against native speakers with those nonnatives seen as deficient (17). There was also continuing acceptance of the idea that English couldn’t be or shouldn’t be separated from other languages and that learners create and co-construct meaning with their own grammars for the changing communicative need (19).

Canagarajah also argues that the field became “post-method” as of the 1990s, which means that the scholarship acknowledges there is no “best method” for teaching in such diverse contexts in which students have different expectations and teachers their own philosophies (20). Additionally the field now values meaning and rhetorical structure in reading and writing tasks over “sole focus on form,” and multimodality is also a central to the field (21-22). While teacher development was once focused on grammar knowledge and “implementing prescribed methods” teacher development programs now focus on communities of practice, identity theory, collaboration, and are concerned with teaching teachers to acknowledge and contextualize their values and beliefs (23-24). Finally, the field has developed their own research using both qualitative and quantitative approaches and the field is becoming more professionalized. Canagarajah also sees connections and overlaps to other fields in which they are making contributions, such as sociology and anthropology (31-32).

In this study, I see the overlapping social turn that seemed to happen around the 1980s and 1990s in both English and TESOL, where the focus was less on grammar and drills and became about, obviously, the social. Canagarajah gets at that clearly in the study of the literature, which shows a greater emphasis on teaching students to value their power in using English and the ultimate interconnectedness of language systems to each other. What was so fascinating is that he articulates connections and overlaps to fields such as anthropology, but never to English or other writing courses. It’s unclear if this is because he simply failed to make those connections explicit, or if the field of TESOL is so interested in separating its professional identity that it purposely severs these connections. However, this article talks only about what is being published in the field, not what is actually happening in classrooms, which could also reflect different practices than solely what is being published.

The second article I read this week gave some depth to the types of work that ESL teachers do in graduate school, but I felt it was a bit of an incomplete picture. I think I may continue with this work a bit further next week and follow a few more leads to see what else I can find about ESL teacher training. However, some of the insights in “An Overview of Research in English Language Teacher Education and Professional Development” by JoAnn Crandall and MaryAnn Christison were still highly useful in thinking through the differences between theories and practices in professional development.

Crandall and Christison mention, as does Canagarajah’s article, that prior to the 1980s, most teacher training programs emphasized applied linguistic theory, which would focus on things such as grammar. However, by 2000, a change had occurred to a more sociocultural perspective, which “recognized the teacher as one who creates knowledge by bringing prior learning and beliefs to the teacher education program.” This included acknowledging teacher learning as situated in communities of practice and allows teachers the chance to become both “users and producers of theory” in their teaching and learning (4). Likewise, instead of an emphasis on “teacher training” the field now stresses “teacher development” in which learning is a lifelong process. This is reflected in studies which show that for most teachers, even with education in teacher training programs, most teachers have “’surprisingly little change’” during their graduate programs on beliefs such as the importance of teaching grammar, vocabulary, or incorporating new ways of teaching and learning that are outside of their previous teaching and learning experiences. For example, while many teachers were able to incorporate learning strategies they learned during pre-service training, they did not continue with them after their education was over (6-7).

In addition to the importance of previous teaching and learning experiences on their own careers, new teachers often notice “the gap” between what they were taught in their education programs and what the reality of their new positions were, which led them to often have difficulty implementing these taught methods. For example, there was a lack of emphasis on things such as classroom management and working with special needs students or technology. This gap led to a disconnect between theory and practice. In fact, many teachers wished for more practical matters in their teacher education and less theory, which they found “not very helpful” (9-10) Ironically, this flies somewhat in the face of Canagarjah’s work, which suggests that the “post method” turn of the 1990s allowed teachers to acknowledge that there was no “best method” for teaching diverse communities. Crandall and Christison suggest here that some methods other than “do what works best for your communities” must have been taught during graduate training, yet what those methods are is not clear here.

Finally, Crandall and Christison discuss reflective teaching and collaboration as important parts of teacher development after graduate programs are complete. These are ways in which teachers continue to learn and improve their teaching well into their careers. Reflective teaching asks teachers to “confront their own beliefs, values, and assumptions about their teaching, their students, their curriculum, and their practices” and encourages them to consider how to best improve their work and help their students. Such work might involve creating teaching portfolios to best see over time the changes between their classroom learning and the practices they undertake in their classrooms (15-16). This also goes hand-in-hand with collaboration, in which teachers work together in peer review, coaching, and discussion, which reduces loneliness, stress, and improves practice (19). Ultimately, Crandall and Christison acknowledge the gaps between theory and practice taking place in teacher development, but see great hope in research in best providing a fix to help improve student learning outcomes (22).

While this piece was very useful in thinking through the ways in which theory and practice either align or fail to align in teacher training, what isn’t quite clear are the types of theories that are being taught, whether ultimately used or not, and if research is helping to improve such gaps, as Crandall and Christison suggest, what is being valued in that theory, and what types of learning outcomes teachers currently value. This is particularly important because it somewhat contradicts Canagarrajah’s work and makes both feel a bit incomplete. These gaps suggest that I need to dig just a bit deeper, and I will continue reading next week to see what else I can discover about what these theories and further information about preparation in TESOL master’s and PhD programs. Unfortunately, while neither of these pieces has great insight into the division of ESL and composition, I hope more light will be shed next week.

Works Cited

Canagarajah, Suresh. “TESOL as a Professional Community: A Half Century of Pedagogy, Research, and Theory.” TESOL Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 1, 2016, pp. 7-41.

Crandall, JoAnn, and MaryAnn Christison. “An Overview of Research in English Language Teacher Education and Professional Development.” Teacher Education and Professional Development in TESOL: Global Perspectives, edited by JoAnn Crandall and MaryAnn Christison, The International Research Foundation for English Language Education and Routledge, 2016, pp. 3-34.