Teaching for Transfer – which discipline cares?

One of my goals for this semester is to look into the teacher and graduate preparation for ESL instructors from the 1980s on. The purpose of this is to see in what ways it might differ from the preparation for composition instructors, which, I believe, might tell me something about the divide in these fields. While I’ve found a few promising histories, I first wanted to think about one important way in which the fields might overlap – teaching for transfer (TFT). The concept of TFT started becoming a “buzzword” in the 2000s as far as I can tell, though authors have written about this issue previous to that decade. TFT is the concept of teaching students to apply what they have learned and read outside of the classroom, often in other classes. For example, most teachers hope that the research skills students learn in a writing class could be transferred and used in other college courses. Because this is often easier said than done, the concept of TFT emphasizes a retraining in thinking to help students apply these concepts more effectively in other places. I wanted to see overlaps n this concept specifically because TFT in itself is about overlap. If each of these disciplines disregards the need for TFT, this might tell me something about what each of these disciplines finds to be important to teach and why.

Ironically, although I undertook a fairly rigorous search of College English for keywords such as “transfer” “TFT” and other similar “buzzwords,” I could not find anything in the journal that talked about this concept specifically. In the ELT Journal I was able to find several articles related to transferability, and so I have chosen two of those articles this week.

First, I read “Training Learners to Prepare Short Written Answers” by Desmond Allison from 1986. Here, he argues that it is the job of the ESL teacher to prepare students for the communication tasks they will encounter in other classes, because they will otherwise face great difficulties in meeting these writing challenges (27). While he does acknowledge that reading assignments based on practicing the work students will face in other classes is important, he advocates for written assignments which set a “different kind of ‘comprehension’ task” (28). For example, students have to decide things such as whether or not they will have to find outside research to complete the task, and they will have to set up the answer in a way that makes sense to the reader (29).

Allison notes how important it is for cross-departmental communication to be in place to facilitate the best preparation for students. He suggests setting aside ample time to talk to colleagues about texts they use and the communication they expect in their classrooms (27). He then provides a possible framework for creating a lesson that would work with these other teachers to help students learn to succeed in other tasks. First, there is the “presentation stage” in which students talk about what makes for a “good” short answer. This should include comments from colleagues so the teacher can understand what is desired in other disciplines. Then, in the practice stage, the teacher provides handouts of previous student work for the current students to analyze and discuss, deciding what the writing is doing well and what it isn’t (30). Finally, in the production stage, the students write based on a prompt from another subject, and the teacher grades them according to information from the teacher of that given subject. Allison mentions that this is crucial – the teacher “will need detailed guidance from the subject teacher” for this to be successful (31). Ultimately, the goal of this three-step process is for students to learn and to see how important writing across disciplines is, and how they can apply what they do in the ESL classroom to other college work (31).

Although this article does not talk about the cross-communication between ESL and composition, nor does it use the concept of TFT specifically, this seems to be a good early example of thinking about writing as a concept that needs to be used across a variety of fields. In fact, as this article highlights, even fields such as science use a lot of writing and require certain stylistic choices that are important to understand before even entering these courses. By seeking to foster good working relationships between departments and asking for input from other teachers, clearly Allison encourages a relationship that is not about us vs. them, but about working together for the common goal of education. It is clear that in many ways, the ESL field both did and does attempt to find ground upon which to help students develop beyond their own subject matter and in ways that suggest success is important for their continuing education, rather than suggesting English is simply a basic life skill. This seems like an important development.

Next, I read “Teaching for Transfer in ELT” by Mark A. James, from 2006. In this piece, he provides a bit more of the pedagogical and educational psychology background on TFT and highlights why it is necessary for good ELT teaching. He states that if students are unable to perform tasks that are different from what is learned in class, “then education is deemed to have failed” (151). He articulates two forms of TFT which are low-road transfer, an “unconscious process that is triggered when a situation that one is perceived as similar to a previous situation in which learning occurred,” such as moving from playing a six string guitar to a twelve string guitar, and high-road transfer, “a conscious process that can occur between two situations that lack obvious similarities” such as moving from playing a guitar to playing a piano (152).

He then highlights good ways to achieve both low- and high-road transfer. For low-road, he suggests setting expectations that knowledge in one class will be used in another; matching, which is using authentic materials that students might encounter outside of the classroom, in particular using things that students will encounter in college rather just basic academic studies of English; simulating and role-playing; modeling, which involves bringing in target language and work from other courses, such as business courses; and problem-based learning such as asking students to create something or identify differences in lists so they can get exposure to target language and learn how to use it to solve the given problem (153-155). For high-road transfer, he suggests asking students to anticipate and predict; asking students to look at examples of target language and “deriving language rules themselves;” using analogies such as asking students to identify how writing in English is similar to writing a technical report; parallel problem solving, which is solving problems that are “in different areas but have similar structure” and metacognitive reflection, including setting goals and evaluating outcomes (155-157). Though James notes that many teachers are already including such practices in the ESL classroom, transfer cannot be “assumed” and “needs to be addressed explicitly and consistently” so students have the best possible outcomes (158).

This article seems to encompass and expand on the article from 1986. While James, too, advocates for working with the materials from other disciplines, he also includes well-documented reasons for including other explicit transfer strategies in the ESL classroom. One thing this article does fail to acknowledge is in what ways, if any, this might differ from the work that students would or could do in a regular composition course (an answer I’ve been seeking all semester), but perhaps it is not the job of this author to do so. Because he is writing about writing, however, it would be a nice addition. Though he does not explicitly make these disciplinary connections, he does suggest strategies that seem like ones that could be used across both the ESL and composition discipline.

When comparing these readings to previous weeks, one of the most interesting things of note is how different they are than the other work that has been done so far. For example, neither of these articles dealt either explicitly with teaching of specific grammar or writing forms, nor deal with the “social” aspects of empowering students as members of the academy or analyzing power structures. Instead, these both dealt more specifically with being sure that the writing students do ends up being applicable to their “real” lives and continuing studies. This seems so important but so far has been mostly overlooked. If we fail to teach students real-world applications for what we are teaching them, as James points out, we’ve failed as teachers completely. I will be curious to see in what ways each of these disciplines seems to value real-world applications and how that relates to teacher training and the ethos of the discipline.

Ultimately, I am again disappointed that I didn’t find anything in College English about what I believe to be an important concept in the field. This is particularly disappointing because clearly the ESL/TOEFL field is talking about these issues and making them at least a small priority. I am not yet sure how this will be reflected in the work over the next couple of weeks in thinking about teacher preparation, but the findings would suggest that while ESL courses see themselves as a stepping-stone to other coursework or “lifework,” composition may see itself as somewhat removed from other departments and areas of study – a true disservice to our students. While my initial hypothesis at the start of this semester was that ESL courses and the ESL field were more insular and may not be preparing students for the work of composition and other coursework, it actually might be the other way around. I will try to make more sense of this as I start my look at field histories next.

Works Cited

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

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

Fractures in the Fields

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.

Grammar in the 2000s – big changes in composition

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.

Grammar and clear writing in the 1980s

Because College English has a decided lack of ESL issues, I chose two texts this week that I hoped had a common thread in discussing grammar. I chose one text from College English and one from the ELT Journal, both from the 1980s to see what they said about grammar use in the writing and ESL classroom and I hope next week to examine if any texts from the 2000s address grammar, given the popularity of “Hartwell’s “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar,” which, in the mid-1980s, became a popular call to avoid teaching grammar at all.

I started with College English. In Thomas Friedmann’s “Teaching Error, Nurturing Confusion: Grammar Tests, Tests, and Teachers in the Developmental English Class,” he argues in favor of asking or requiring students not to “fix” errors that they find in grammar workbooks or in their own writing, but instead to model and write the correct spelling, grammatical element, or sentence as a way of better correcting the “rule” that has been broken for future writing tasks. He starts out by noting that most developmental English students simply don’t have the models in their head to correctly fix a sentence or pick the one correct spelling out of a list of five words, stating that “developmental students have not acquired the correct image” (391), and that asking them to fix their work only reinforces all of the wrong possibilities that also exist in their minds.

Friedmann notes that such learning is at its core psychological, noting that “similar items confuse,” and instead of teaching the difference between there/their or to/too, one shouldn’t teach the similar item but instead teach the singular item in context, such as teaching “there, here, and where” as a bunch (394-95). He provides similar examples for how to teach apostrophes, language rules (such as foot/feet rather than feets), and spelling. He also argues that students must be required to write out the whole corrected sentence or word, as simply adding in a letter or “corrected” word into a longer sentence does not actually break the negative pattern that is already been engrained (398). Friedmann ends by noting that in the humanities “ambiguity is applauded” but that in teaching grammar, ambiguity must be cast out for the betterment of our students (399).

While this article does not directly address ESL students, it might be meaningful to think of many of them as developmental writers. At least at my institution, NOVA, a significant portion (a sizeable majority) of all developmental composition students come from the ESL classroom. But because this article does not address the various needs of different developmental populations, it is hard to put into context the differing needs of these two distinct groups and how to best help them individually. This is particularly true because Friedmann notes that if any given student is not having problems in one particular grammar area, the teacher should avoid confusing these students by teaching them to correct errors. This may be difficult in a classroom in which an ESL student has trouble with a particular part of grammar usage while most of the native developmental students do not. Clarifying how to help the many populations that inhabit the same classroom seems like it would have been important in the 1980s and yet this is not addressed.

Additionally, like last week’s College English articles, this one also does not contain outside sources or references to follow to shore up pedagogically sound methods. I am increasingly frustrated that these articles do not appear to be based in any particular research method or built upon other best practices of teaching pedagogy. Therefore, it is impossible to know if this advice is based upon method or methodology that may reach into the ESL pedagogical world or not.

The second article was also from the 1980s in the ELT Journal. “How to Cope With Spaghetti Writing” by Damien McDevitt defines “spaghetti writing” as that with “long incoherent sentences” and “subordinate clauses searching for a main one” (19). He states that simply telling students to write in simpler sentences will end up with them being accused of writing “baby English” and those trying to master the language will not be helped by this accusation (19). McDevitt then provides a series of exercises that teachers can work through with students to help in areas such as creating compound or complex sentences, expanding and linking sentences together through questions such as when and why, and error correction (20-21). McDevitt concludes by noting that such exercises will not make ESL writing perfect but will help students “review their own writing in a more critical and systematic manner” (22) with the certain hope of improvement.

There are some interesting connections between this and Friedmann’s article. From both perspectives, grammar has much to do with clarity of writing, and errors must be corrected to make for clearer sentences. Interestingly, though both talk about essay writing as a place for needed improvement, both talk about correction down to the sentence level rather than word level. Though McDevitt does stress some “error correction” which Freidmann shuns, they both talk about modeling good forms and working with students to take simpler sentences and make them more complex with correct grammatical forms. Neither, however, talks about how this will fit into the overall coherence of a longer essay, or why such grammatically correct language is important for the forms of writing students will be doing in college or elsewhere. Again, like our other articles, both suggest similar activities and ideas, but don’t differentiate between the two different populations they are working with (ESL vs. “developmental”). Ultimately, this suggests a lack of understanding on what the purpose of grammar instruction is in an ESL classroom versus a developmental English class. An ESL course could be teaching students basic communication skills while developmental English suggests a student who is college-minded and –bound. If the purpose of these courses is different, how should grammar instruction be tailored to each of these populations? Whether or not these articles can or should address this complex question is unclear, but it is one that has been weighing on my mind for several years of study in these cross-disciplines.

There were some additional interesting connections between the other works I’ve read this semester. The most interesting connection was with Oster’s College English article. “The ESL Composition Course and the Idea of a University.” In this article, she argues that while students are ready for the rigors of challenging their beliefs in college English, those coming out of ESL often aren’t ready for the language challenges themselves. While she acknowledges that student writing improves over the course of several semesters, she’s skeptical of their abilities in grammar and clear writing. I think this speaks to a common perception of college English teachers that students should come prepared to their classroom to write in Standard Written English (SWE), yet most, and this includes our native speaking students, do not (or lack at minimum some deficiencies). Because both authors today, as well as Oster, seem to take up the banner that improving grammatical usage is a process that takes time and is one that can go beyond ESL to composition, I then wonder when and how our disciplines decide when a student is ready and in what way they are ready to pass our classes and to take on the rigors of other college work. Is there a gatekeeper level of written accuracy that we need to hold students to, or does each institution or teacher have different ideas about this? If we maintain that students have the ability to think, but scarcely the ability to write, what does composition (and ESL for that matter) value most as a discipline, and why? If we ultimately value too many things, such skills cannot be taught in the matter of a single semester or even two, as most college composition sequences are set up.

Works Cited

Friedmann, Thomas. “Teaching Error, Nurturing Confusion: Grammar Tests, Tests, and Teachers in the Developmental English Class.” College English, vol. 45, no. 4, 1983, pp. 390-399.

Hartwell, Patricia. “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar.” College English, vol. 47, no. 2, 1985, pp. 105-127.

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

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

Big changes, bigger questions in College English

This week, I began my preliminary search of College English. By examining past issues from the 1980s, I noticed some patterns that were of interest. It is clear that during this decade the primary focus was on literature. There was a dedicated section of poetry in each journal and while some issues of composition are mentioned, much of the work focused on the teaching of literature courses. While there were some articles on social issues, particularly on feminism, disability, and cultural differences, there was little to nothing specifically on linguistic differences. I found only one article with a title that uses the acronym ESL or something similar.

Likewise, the 2000s search was surprisingly devoid of ESL issues other than a special issue in 2006 that focused on linguistic differences (such differences go beyond the bounds of nonnative speakers of English alone). This decade made a big change in content mostly related to the social turn, focusing even more on feminism, disability, and now genre theory. The focus was also on composition rather than literature, and the poetry section was gone.

I was disappointed by the extreme lack of ESL and language issues throughout both of these decades. I was almost certain in the 2000s I’d find many articles related to this population. I will have to look through additional bibliographies or see what else I can find that relates as closely as I can to these language differences for this journal to be a part of this semester’s search and examination.

Because of the difficulty I had in searching for ESL-related topics, the articles I picked for this week didn’t have any substantial initial connection like last week’s. Instead, I picked out two that appeared to discuss students with clear linguistic differences in college composition.

The first ended up being quite different from my initial expectations. “The ESL Composition Course and the Idea of a University” by Judith Oster (1985) focused on building up student confidence for those who are often from cultures where it is “unthinkable to challenge what the teacher says” (67). Oster sees this challenge as one in which students are trained to not only examine an issue from one side, but to see the complexity of a cultural issue from both perspectives. Many students, she says, start out believing an issue has one “truth” but through training, students come to learn “about life in America” and to correct “amazing misconceptions” about our culture and history (72). Through a sequence of two or three semester courses, Oster says, they should be taught and learn how to challenge their own first judgments and thoughts about a particular topic. Essentially, Oster focuses upon a class in which critical thinking skills are the primary teaching and learning goal.

While this article primarily focuses on this critical thinking approach as a practical matter, Oster also makes many passing references to student’s abilities in grammar, syntax, and language use often disparagingly. While she notes that most ESL students are ready for the rigors of college English, they are “not as well prepared” as their native speaking classmates (67), profiling students such as “Omar,” whom she follows over three semesters to examine how his writing changes. In early semesters, his writing presents difficulties in many areas such as word choice, clarity, transitions, and mechanics, (69-70), but in later semester she states that his “mechanics and sentence structure have continued to improve” (71). This focus is particularly interesting because Oster does not offer any advice on how to deal with such issues, seemingly dismissing language differences as less important to the overall goal of college English while still diminishing the quality of the writing. For example she later states that another student had English that “was not yet ready for such a topic, nor was his logic, but as a person he was ready” to write about a complex Dostoevsky passage (75).

While this article had a fairly modern approach towards focusing on critical thinking over grammar and syntax, the continual reminders that her ESL students were deficient in linguistic areas was somewhat distracting from her overall goal of providing practical guidelines for preparing students for the critical thinking they will have to take up in all of their college work. Additionally, her lack of acknowledgement about other ESL courses they may have taken fails to shed light on what previous preparation these students have for college English. She also fails to have any works cited or bibliography at the end of the article, which is frustrating as a researcher, as I am not sure where she drew her methods or methodology and upon what work she might be building. Therefore, I have no sense of how this might connect to the study of best practices for teaching ESL students in the college.

My second article from College English was part of the special issue on working with writers with language differences. “Taking Up Language Differences in Composition” by Anis Bawarshi talks about “uptake” and its relation to genre theory. With uptake, Bawarshi examines how language ultimately “coordinate[s] forms of social action” and can situate roles of power and who is included or excluded from social actions (653). Bawarshi calls for teachers to be more aware of the types of uptake that control our classrooms and in which our students live so we can “be more attentive and hospitable to language differences” and also that we must invite students to interrogate these “dominant designs” so we can explore alternate uptakes to those that are dominant (654).

In addition to understanding, using various uptakes, and challenging those that are predominant, Bawarshi also calls for recognizing that what uptakes often “promise” as the benefits of acquiring standard English and what they actually deliver can be quite different, and to not consider this as an issue of reproduction of power (a la “the myth of linguistic homogeneity”) is a disservice to all of our nonnative students (656).

These pieces do have some overlap in that both focus on critical thinking as a site for better teaching for our nonnative students, but that is where the similarities end. Bawarshi, 20 years later, articulates how genre theory must be taught from a perspective of the power dynamics that standard English users often use to their advantage over those that speak other forms of English. While Oster challenges teachers to focus on critical thinking for their students, this does not take a backseat to forcing them to fit into the linguistically homogeneous categories that were beginning to be dismantled with the social turn. These two articles, in that sense, mimic quite clearly the pre- and post-social turn theory of language difference. While Oster believes that language differences can and should be fixed slowly, over time, Bawarshi wants students to understand at a bare minimum how the production of standard English furthers the effort to marginalize them, while allowing for alternative forms of uptake to be equally powerful.

Because both of these articles are about power and learning to think, they do not say much about the development of the English language or what students are arriving with before they enter the college composition classroom – are they building upon skills from previous ESL classes? We know these students are not coming into our classroom with no previous English knowledge, so one thing these authors could address would be what types of experiences and linguistic backgrounds are they arriving in class with? How are these different or the same as their native speaking peers? Are the practical methods described in both of these pieces in any way different from what might be taught to native students? And if so, how? I think one of the biggest struggles I’ve had in examining the connections between nonnative students in the English classroom is the how/why we are treating them differently, or if what is good for one group is good for the other. And if that is the case, why does this field of inquiry even exist? In particular because one of the articles from the ELT Journal last week also discussed genre theory, clearly the two fields are drawing from some of the same knowledge and pedagogical pools, but through what training and how/why do these overlaps exist? I will continue to dig next week.

Works Cited

Bawarshi, Anis. “Taking Up Langauge Differences in Composition.” College English, vol. 68, no. 6, 2006, pp. 652-656.

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

ELT Journal “Approaches”

For my first foray into a historical look at the intersection of ESL and composition scholarship, I decided to begin with the ELT Journal exclusively, looking at one article from the 1980s and one from the 2000s that approached writing teaching in some way to see how the approaches differed between these decades. The first thing that I did was to look though each issue of the journal from these decades to see what types of conversations were taking place. While searching, I noticed some immediate patterns that will surely come up during the course of this semester, such as the focus on peer review and teacher written corrective feedback that dominated the 2000s with little to no mention of these methods during the 1980s. Something that I found disappointing was that both decades had little (dare I say no) emphasis on preparing students for other writing tasks outside of the ESL classroom. I hope that my quick search based on titles alone actually hides some gems that focus in this preparation.

Once I had skimmed and scanned these two decades, I wanted some sort of coherence for my first two chosen articles, so I selected two that focused on “approaches.” I wanted to see what different approaches researchers emphasized in these two decades, and how they either differed or remained the same.

The first article I read was “A Quantitative vs. a Qualitative Approach to the Teaching of English Composition” by Behrooz Azabdaftari from 1981. Here, Azabdaftari defines qualitative approaches as the use of teaching techniques that emphasize the quality of the writing rather than the quantity. He defines quality as encouraging “primarily correct responses” in which a controlled choice based on a student’s abilities is emphasized (411). Azabdaftari then discusses authors who have advocated for qualitative writing techniques with success, including R.J. Owens, who noted that quantity in writing at the ESL stage is pointless because any effort to write by these students is “concealed translation and the more he is required to write, the more he produces mistakes” (411). In general, Azabdaftari finds that “many … language teachers” believe that controlled composition is necessary for quality writing at this stage (412).

On the other hand, he also notes that some experts believe that quantitative techniques – simply getting students to learn to write by writing – is best. One expert, D. Wolfe, believes that simply teaching drills and exercises never gives students a chance to work with the writing itself (412). Azabdaftari himself seems conflicted with this method, noting that many studies have shown that the act of writing to teach writing has mostly “contradictory results” (413). He believes that quantitative techniques can be best for native speakers because of their knowledge of the language rules, but nonnative speakers simply need some kind of qualitative teaching (414). He concludes by stating that composition practice will be more “more rewarding” when taught in “minimal steps” that advance within strict boundaries of their capabilities (414).

The second article I read was published in 2000. Called “A Process Genre Approach to Teaching Writing,” authors Richard Badger and Goodith White discuss the growing movement towards teaching genre in writing courses that had begun during the 1990s. They first articulate previous approaches, including the product approach and the process approach. The product approach is about “linguistic knowledge with attention focused on the appropriate use of vocabulary, syntax, and cohesive devices” (153), and is primarily concerned with structure of language and imitation of work provided by the teacher (154). The process approach is about the writing process including planning, drafting, and peer review with less emphasis on grammar and structure. Badger and White note that this style emphasizes writing development rather that conscious learning of writing skills (154). Finally, they explore the genre approach, which is about teaching the social context and situations in which texts are written as well as the analysis of these situations (155-56).

Ultimately Bader and White advocate a “process genre approach” in which all three methods are combined. First, teachers “replicate the situation as closely as possible” and allow students to identify the social context; then they use the process method to write what they know, share with each other, and re-draft and proofread (158). The authors believe this approach is best to combine both the “old” ways of thinking about writing with the newer emphasis on genre theory.

Despite being written 20 years apart, the overlaps between the concepts and ideas in these two articles are fascinating. What Badger and White call a product approach seems to mimic many of the ideas of Azabdaftari’s qualitative approach, in which teaching writing is about correct language rather than a free flow of ideas. Likewise, his quantitative approach overlaps some with Badger and White’s process approach, in which they acknowledge that second language writers may develop such writing skills rather than “learn” them (154). What Badger and White add is the genre approach, which was something that began to develop as part of the social turn, when compositionists and writing instructors began to think about alternate discourse communities and power. This is likely why such a consideration is not made in the article from 1981. In general, these two articles present an interesting model of thinking through how things “change” over time – incrementally. While some of the ideas and strategies remained fundamental to the field, others were added and changed based upon the social situation of the day.

It was also striking how much both of these articles emphasized many of the writing skills, techniques, and knowledge that college composition values, despite having ESL instructors as the intended audience. There was some discussion of grammar and modeling, particularly with those parts emphasizing student’s need to write “correctly,” but overall the emphasis was more geared towards the rhetorical aspects of writing than I expected. I was disappointed, however, that while these ideas are present, neither article acknowledges that the emphasis on this writing knowledge could be useful in other courses, particularly in a college composition course. I would suggest that all research, particularly for those experts writing about working with English language learners, in which such knowledge built at this level will affect all of the student’s subsequent learning, should acknowledge ways in which learning about process, product, genre, qualitative, quantitative, and other such methods will have implications for all learning and writing these students will complete in the future. I will be curious to see if these trends continue as I dive further into this journal over the course of the semester.

Works Cited

Azabdaftari, Behrooz. “A Quantitative vs. a Qualitative Approach to the Teaching of English Composition.” ELT Journal, vol. 35, no 4, 1981, pp. 411–415.

Badger, Richard, and Goodith White “A Process Genre Approach to Teaching Writing.” ELT Journal, vol. 54, no. 2, 2000, pp. 153-160.