Course Title: The History of Composition Studies in ESL and ESL Studies in Composition

Description: I plan to look at approximately 20 years of two journals – the ELT Journal and College English for the decades of the 1980s and the 2000s. This is to help to see how the conversation on how to best help ESL students produce written work was happening during the social turn and again two decades later. I will specifically seek writing in the ELT Journal that talks about helping students in ESL classes prepare for composition courses and in College English for how composition instructors were helping (or problems they were noticing) with their ESL writers. I plan to look at this as a historical perspective of ESL writers in composition, something that has been missing from my personal corps of knowledge in the field.

Requirements: I will produce a weekly blog post incorporating at least two sources per week. The writing in these posts will focus on summaries of the articles, new or most interesting things I discovered, and each will build on each other and the work of the previous weeks incorporating and synthesizing ideas to get a better idea of the history of this field of study.