To end the semester, I wanted to wrap up what I’ve discovered about the connections and overlaps (or lack thereof) between ESL and composition and also think about what further questions remain for future work. Overall, I think the most important discoveries I’ve made are the following:

1. The split between ESL and composition is large, though only a few decades old. This divide can be seen somewhat in the things that the fields value. For example, ESL puts more of an emphasis on grammar and usage while composition does not.

Several examples of this can be seen in writers emphasizing the importance of grammar for ESL students. Damien McDevitt, for example, talked about working on “error correction” with ESL students and forming simpler sentences that are made more complex through correct grammatical forms. Likewise, Judith Oster suggests that grammatical usage is process that takes time to develop beyond ESL courses, but one that ESL students must continue to work on throughout their writing experiences in college. Likewise, Caroline Vickers and Estela Ene, who teach a containment course for freshmen composition students stress that they must teach grammatical skills for their ESL students that are not emphasized in “regular” composition courses.

Despite this emphasis in the ESL teaching world, the world “grammar” nearly never comes up in a search of the journal College English. This shows that at least beginning in the 1980s, this is not a skill that is as valued for composition students.

The split in this skill can likely be traced back to the divisions of the fields, as early as the 1970s, when TESOL became standardized and training preparation started to develop that was separate from English, where the attitude had previously been “if you speak it, you can teach it” (Gray). This continued into the 1990s when it was thought that although some teaching techniques could come from composition studies, the unique needs of ESL learners required different methods as well (Matsuda and Silva).

Clearly, these two fields separated because of a perceived need in the types of challenges they felt their students were facing. Despite pulling somewhat from each other, distinct journals and methods continued to be advocated and created. However, this leaves further difficulties in finding overlaps between these courses and fields that would help students better scaffold between them.

2. These differences are also seen in part because of the inconsistent training backgrounds of teachers, particularly ESL teachers who come from backgrounds as varied as linguistics, TESOL, composition, and writing studies. Scaffolding between courses can and should be expected to be difficult when teachers with such varied backgrounds are teaching varied courses.

Matsuda and Silva point out, for example, that ESL teachers are being trained in various fields of study. Though many have some kind of linguistics backgrounds, others are simply graduate students studying things as varied as creative writing, literature, or composition themselves. Though this is true in composition as well, more and more teachers are coming into composition with rhetoric and composition degrees and less in literature or creative writing than before.

Such training discrepancies can be seen in the ultimate learning outcomes of these courses. Terry Santos notes, for example, ESL teachers still concern themselves more with product than composition’s process and this is the result of the pedagogical values emphasized in applied linguistics, in which many of their teachers are trained. Clearly, the educational values of each discipline are going to be further reflected in their course and student outcomes.

Though training is somewhat inconsistent, some teachers do advocate for further cross-training between the two fields. For example, Desmond Allison calls for further cross-departmental communication, including setting aside time to talk about the work teachers in other fields, including composition, are doing to help better help students succeed at tasks in those classrooms. Other authors have advocated for such teaching for transfer approaches as well (James). Such work might make ESL students in particular better able to handle the many rigors of college study.

3. Despite these differences, the social turn strongly influenced both fields and strong overlaps in the ways that we think about respect for language and respect for our students has clearly been shown consistently between the two fields.

Though ESL may have taken slightly longer to get there, it was only by a little bit. Canagarajah notes that by the 1990s the ESL field was concerned with communities of practice, identity theory, collaboration, and asking teachers to acknowledge and contextualize their values and beliefs (23-24). Likewise, Crandall and Christison see more value placed in ESL on sociocultural perspectives by the early 2000s. McKay also talks about ideology as something “imbued in everything that teachers do that cannot be extracted from the job (66) and finds teaching with the use of such social practice and understanding as crucial to the job. Though Santos pushes back upon these social values, he is the only author to do so in all of the pieces from this semester. He wants further value placed on clear writing rather than ideological concerns. He appears to be in the minority.

Likewise, composition strongly values social and ideological considerations for student success. Matsuda in “The Myth” argues that we simply can’t assume linguistic homogeneity in our students and must empower teachers to work with diverse language and learning needs and empower students to find their voices within the academy. Akbari and Horner both stress the importance of students deserving not only rights to their own language but also respect for being multilingual speakers afforded value for that talent and skill. While power dynamics often discourage such language play and value in the classroom, both argue that we must help dismantle such systems of oppression for students and more generally within the academy.

Clearly, the overlaps here are most powerful. Though both fields talk about the social turn in their own ways, they are ultimately advocating for the same types of empowerment for students.

4. Finally, problems with our research might result in some of the difficulties we currently have with encompassing both of these groups more seamlessly. We lack truly niche/overlapping journals, we lack more qualitative studies and replication studies, and we’ve perhaps relied too heavily on just a few, strong voices.

While there are some journals that suggest they are niche such as Journal of Second Language Writing clear pedagogical interest towards ESL courses can be seen in a fairly extensive search of the articles found there. While some journals like Teaching English at the Two Year College attempt some overlaps as well because they are dealing with these divergent communities, none focus on the nexus in a clear way. It could be that further research and scholarship is needed at these intersections to keep moving these students forward.

Likewise, of the research we do have, very few quantitative studies have been done, with over 90 percent of all journal studies being qualitative in nature (Loewen et al). Though most college teachers have training in a variety of research methods, we’re often clearly boxing ourselves into particular types of studies. Additionally, as Porte and Richards point out, we are terrible at replication studies that would better help us see how past work affects new populations. This leaves a significant area ripe for study – how can past composition studies be implemented on ESL students, or on the intersection of these two populations? Without replication studies, we do not have answers.

Finally, the bit of intersecting material I have found comes almost entirely from a few strong, loud voices, particularly that of Paul Kei Matsuda. Though he is surely a “legend” in the field, if too much of his work is being read or being drawn upon by the small number of other scholars in the field, this could be a potential disservice to new ways of thinking and examining these populations. More voices are needed.

From here, I think the main question I’ve developed is “where do we go from here?” While so much has been done, there are still great discrepancies between the fields that must be filled. Finding places for these niche studies and unique populations must come next. I also still continue to question in what ways the methods and methodologies used to help and study these groups are different. Why is a method used for one population different from that used for another? If we see grammar training as the big differentiation between these populations, how do we help classrooms full of mixed student populations? This is the big place that I see for the types of niche studies I am referring to. Unless we figure out how to better scaffold between ESL and composition or how to help very diverse classrooms, struggles and frustrations will continue. This is one reason I have set out to study with my dissertation what I have set out to study. I think there is so much yet to look at and discover, and I am excited to see where these questions and this process takes me over the next several years.

Works Cited

Akbari, Ramin. “Transforming Lives: Introducing Critical Pedagogy into ELT Classrooms.” ELT Journal, vol. 62, no. 3, 2008, pp. 276-283.

Allison, Desmond. “Training Learners to Prepare Short Written Answers.” ELT Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, 1986, pp. 27-32.

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.

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.

Horner, Bruce. “’Students’ Right,’ English Only, and Re-Imagining the Politics of Language.” College English, vol. 63, no. 6, 2001, pp. 741-758.

James, Mark A. “Teaching for Transfer in ELT.” ELT Journal, vol. 60, no. 2, 2006, pp. 151-159.

Loewen, Shawn et al. “Statistical Literacy Among Applied Linguists and Second Language Acquisition Researchers.” TESOL Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 2., 2014, pp. 360-388.

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

Matsuda, Paul Kei, and Tony Silva, ed. “Introduction.” Landmark Essays on ESL Writing, vol. 17, Routeledge, 2001, pp. xiii-xxv.

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

McKay, Sandra Lee. “Examining L2 Composition Ideology: A Look at Literacy Education.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 2, no. 1, 1993, pp. 65-81.

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

Porte, Graeme, and Keith Richards. “Focus Article: Replication in Second Language Writing Research.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 21, 2012, pp. 284-293.

Santos, Terry. “Ideology in Composition: L1 and ESL.” Journal of Second Language Writing, vol. 1, no. 1, 1992, pp. 1-15.

Vickers, Caroline H., and Estela Ene. “Grammatical Accuracy and Learner Autonomy in Advanced Writing.” ELT Journal, vol. 60, no. 2, 2006, pp. 109-116.

After two weeks of attempting a grammar study, I decided to look at College English and examine two articles, one from the 1980s and one from the 2000s, that both looked at writing studies and asked the discipline to re-frame the discussion around “writing differences” in a way that empowered teachers and students to see writing differences not only as deficiencies. The two articles ultimately approached this topic in very different, but important ways.

First, I read Mike Rose’s “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University,” from 1985. Here, he argues that throughout the history of writing program development at the university, the overarching mindset has been “remediation” in which students are often judged to be poor writers with “problems” that can ultimately be “fixed,” with remedial efforts “phased out once the literacy crisis is solved” (341). Rose notes that this type of thinking leads to the belief that many college students with linguistic differences (which he defines as having different upbringings, belonging to different classes, having different language backgrounds, etc.) are inherently “illiterate” (353) and just need to be taught correct grammar, usage, and mechanics (343). Rose notes that such a way of thinking about writing is wrongheaded simply because it puts English studies into the category of a “skill,” rather than a discipline, which he calls a “kiss of death” (347) because, again, it suggests that quick fixes can be implemented and such programs eventually dismantled (351).

Rose instead desires to shift the thinking about student deficits in writing away from the idea that our students with different linguistic backgrounds need remediation or that they are simply illiterate towards thinking of our students as lacking “knowledge of the achievements of a tradition that are not at home with the ways we academics write about them” (353). He acknowledges that, yes, many of our students are “not adequately prepared to take on the demands of university work” but that instead teachers need to orient students into academic discourse communities, inviting students into the academy, moving away from concerns about “error” to those that “encourages the full play of language activity” that we often demand from our graduate students and ourselves (357-358). He finishes by stating that such a change can only occur if educators and programs are open to the idea of removing the word “remediation” from our vocabulary.

I saw a lot of Bartholomae here (whom he does acknowledge) in his suggestion to allow students to throw off the shackles of “remediation” and instead asking teachers to invite them into the academy. While this article does not address ESL writers specifically, through his suggestion that we get rid of remediation even for those students with “different” linguistic backgrounds suggests that this article is written with a perspective towards removing stigmas from the variety of writers including ESL students. This influence can be seen, too, in the movement away from grammar that was noted last week in College English after the 1980s. While the movement towards accepting student writers into the academy wherever they are from is crucial, the lumping together of so many students done not only by Rose but, clearly, by all of the writers over these several decades could ultimately be a deficit. It might be one of the major reasons I am not finding work that reflects on the movement of writers from ESL departments into English ones. If essentially all such difference is being lumped together with the idea that we must remove labels, which is hugely important in giving these students the respect and autonomy they deserve, we might also be doing a disservice to the field, as clearly it means that ESL and composition are now completely separate in a way that does not acknowledge any overlap or potential for overlap or cross-communication or cross-study. I soon hope to start looking into how these fields diverged (or if/when they diverged) to see if articles and ideas such as Rose’s lead to any type of fracture between these groups, or if these fractures always existed.

I followed this article with A. Suresh Canagarajah’s “Toward a Writing Pedagogy of Shuttling Between Languages: Learning from Multilingual Writers” from 2006. Here, he challenges the idea that most writing instructors have about multilingual students, which is that they do not know how to use western writing practices when composing in English (589). Instead, he argues that most writers who speak multiple languages are negotiating between the various discourses they have experience with to “achieve their communicative objectives” (590). He highlights writing samples from the same writer in the same genre for different audiences – one for a local publication in his native language; one for a local publication in English; and one for a foreign publication (591). What Canagarajah discovers is that this writer has made decisions about his writing and what to include even when that means bucking the linguistic traditions of the audience group when it suits his need. For example, the thesis of this author is often implied rather than stated (594) and he reduces or removes the literature review almost entirely from his work (598). Cangarajah argues that this writer might actually be “nudging the reader to shift to his discursive preference, even has he shifts to theirs” (598).

Ultimately, Cangarajah argues that such negotiations in this writer’s work show that there is not only one way to write that is acceptable in English and multilingual writers can display their work in “diverse contexts in order to achieve their interests” (601-602). Pedagogically, he would like to see more teachers not simply dismissing such difference in writing as an error, but instead requests that we teach students how to rhetorically negotiate things such as audience to help them create work that will be favorable in the given contexts in which they write. He also wants to see teachers accept the languages students come into the classroom with and treat these differences as a benefit rather than a problem (602-603).

Like Rose’s article, Canagarajah implores teachers to invite students into the academy without judgment of their past experiences with writing, inviting them in as full members of the community. While Rose fails to acknowledge the types of differences that might be seen in one single English class, Canagarajah smartly narrows down to a sample population of multilingual students. However, Canagarajah’s weakness is that his case study is based upon an expert in the field rather than an undergraduate student. Finding ways to help undergraduates navigating many different language backgrounds, along with helping the variety of other students in their classroom and giving all of them equal autonomy might certainly be easier said than done.

However, what both of the articles this week show is that both decades of writers are allowing for and asking teachers to plan for the types of differences we see between writers in our classrooms. Both acknowledge and position these differences as positions of power and empowerment for students. I believe this is one of the most fundamental shifts in the field of composition, and one that, as I stated earlier, has shifted us farther away from the ESL field, separating entirely how the fields view what their goals for their students are. In many ways it is good for us to empower students in this way, but it also has not seemed to reduce the hand-wringing among our own colleagues and across the discipline about how students “cannot write” when they leave our classes.

What the study of College English has shown, in particular, is that much of what is published around this topic is fundamentally theoretical. We see with Rose and Canagarajah that they provide what we should be doing much more than how we should be doing it. This was true with Barwashi’s piece from several weeks ago as well. He argued in favor of advocating that students challenge the predominant discourses at college and university to situate themselves as players in situations of power. However, he also failed to offer practical advice not only for how to take on these many power-struggles, but how to get the rest of the college on board. For as much as “writing across the curriculum” has taken over, most teachers in other disciplines want students to be able to write in more prescriptive or “western” ways. I think this is where we can and should see nice overlap between ESL and composition, but we simply don’t. It does seem that the fields are massively fractured across both of these decades. I will continue to look into this split in upcoming weeks.

Works Cited

Canagarajah, A. Suresh. “Toward a Writing Pedagogy of Shuttling Between Languages: Learning From Multilingual Writers.” College English, vol. 68, no. 6, 2006, pp. 589-604.

Rose, Mike. “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University. College English, vol. 47, no. 4, 1985, pp. 341-359.

Because I looked at two articles on grammar in the classroom from the 1980s last week, I hoped to find out how this conversation evolved in the 2000s and whether or not grammar was still valued as part of these disciplines (particularly in composition after the social turn) or if less emphasis was being placed upon it by this decade.

My search in the ELT Journal showed this topic was still fairly important in ESL field. First, in “Grammatical Accuracy and Learner Autonomy in Advanced Writing” by Caroline H. Vickers and Estela Ene, from 2006, they attempt a study in which advanced ESL composition students (which is considered a credit-bearing college-level course at the unnamed Southwest university) are tested on their “grammatical gains when engaging in an autonomous self-correction task that directs learners attention to form explicitly” (111). They note that previous literature has shown that developmentally ready students will be able to successfully reformulate texts and correct their errors, but only with the help of a native English speaker (110). However, Vickers and Ene hypothesize that by only comparing a text containing the “typographically enhanced target form,” as in one without the help of the native English speaker, the gains in grammar accuracy will be the same (111). This reduces some of the labor of assistance from a native English speaker, allowing students and teachers to rely on a text to help improve student writing alone.

Vickers and Ene set up their study by asking students to correct the past hypothetical conditional form (“If I’d had money last week, I would have gone shopping,” for example), one they believe important for academic writing, by using a 400-word reading passage written by a native English speaker. They discover that after teaching the passage, a post-test showed significantly higher scores than during a pre-test, with additional tests five weeks later that show the learning has “stuck” (113). They determine that “explicit self-correction” was effective for student improvements in grammatical accuracy.

One of the most interesting things about this particular study is that it was done in a class that was meant for ESL students who were separated from the general population of other freshmen composition students, but they were taking the composition course for the same credits as their peers. This would suggest, then, that a containment course of this variety focused on working on grammatical skills that the native speaking English students almost certainly did not, therefore the values and goals of the two classes were somewhat different. What this means in difference of ultimate writing output for each of these two groups is unclear.

This piece is also intriguing because Vickers and Ene mention the importance of learning this grammatical form because it will be used in other college level work. I think this is the first essay in which I’ve encountered any of the writers acknowledging the cross-disciplinary nature of their work. Though Vickers and Ene don’t mention in what way(s) this differs from the training in a traditional composition course (therefore we don’t know what they might be “missing” that those students are being taught), their training in this particular course is set up in a way that it will benefit them across the curriculum.

As with the articles from the 1980s, its clear that grammatical accuracy and grammatical forms are being valued in ESL, and this piece clearly shows that the need for such education in ESL is crucial in a way that it may not be for a native speaker. It would be interesting to continue the scope of this study to see how learning such grammatical forms does or does not help in future writing tasks, and if it helps them to “keep up” with their native peers in further writing challenges.

Unfortunately, College English was a total bust in regards to this topic. I would suggest that this is the result of grammar not being particularly trendy during this decade. A quick search of the journal for the years in question, using the keyword “grammar” brings up some of the following topics in the listed articles instead (not once was grammar listed as a topic): cultural diversity, gendered discourse, feminism, political rhetoric, African American studies, international students, queer studies, cultural studies, modern rhetoric, and middle class, just to name a few. A subsequent search for grammar in the WPA Journal from this decade brought me to a similar dead-end. The fact that the “topic” of grammar does not come up once in any of the articles or article titles in these two journals during this decade is very telling.

As a concession, I decided to dive into Mike Duncan’s “Whatever Happened to the Paragraph?” from College English. This is closest to the sort of prescriptive grammar I was hoping to analyze this week. In the piece, Duncan outlines the extensive history of teaching paragraph studies from as early as 1875, with competing scholars arguing either in favor of more prescriptive, descriptive, or cognitive forms of teaching paragraph writing. While he notes that most textbooks have dropped off from teaching paragraph writing entirely, those that do follow a prescriptive model that is at odds with the types of descriptive writing we often allow our students to create based upon the move towards functionalism in writing studies (471), as well as the fact that composition has moved on to “fresher, more progressive topics” (487). However, Duncan believes that despite the “trends” moving away from paragraph writing, it is the duty of composition to “reclaim” paragraph theory (472).

Duncan finishes his argument by incorporating both historical and modern approaches to teaching paragraph writing that he believes should be recovered by the discipline. He advocates first for new terminology to explain the relationships between the paragraph and the essay; he also proposes that new concepts such as “motion,” “motive,” “flow,” and “rhythm” are incorporated into the teaching of “prose rhythm;” third, he asks textbook writers to consider a variety of approaches to writing paragraphs, not just descriptive ones; and finally, he asks for more studies to be undertaken on the best methods for paragraph writing (489-490).

Although this article is not about grammar, Duncan clearly indicates greater focus on the global rather than the local, as well as incorporating social concerns that were in fashion in writing studies during this decade. I think this can be mirrored clearly by the lack of papers addressing writing style, grammar, paragraphs, and other such techniques. What I find so particularly interesting about this is that as the number of ELLs was undoubtedly increasing over the course of these decades, and with teachers decrying the challenges of dealing with so many linguistic issues, the scholarship in composition did not seem to address this need. While studying college-level paragraph writing is certainly an important bit of scholarship, because it does not address the diverse needs of different populations (rather sticking to a prescriptive vs. descriptive mode default), it fails to take into account the many social aspects of teaching writing that Duncan himself alludes that the field has adjusted to. Therefore, if the field has taken an interest in those many keywords I noted earlier – such as feminism, disability, queer studies, and international students, the lack of thinking through how writing a paragraph might intersect with the needs of these various, diverse groups is stark. I think this reading shows me that, at least with my brief survey of these decades, there is still a large knowledge gap between these two fields (perhaps including greater emphasis on the intersecting social) that is waiting to be filled.

Works Cited

Duncan, Mike. “Whatever Happened to the Paragraph?” College English, vol. 69, no. 5, 2007, pp. 470-495.

Vickers, Caroline H., and Estela Ene. “Grammatical Accuracy and Learner Autonomy in Advanced Writing.” ELT Journal, vol. 60, no. 2, 2006, pp. 109-116.