Dangers and Promise of the L2 Metaphor in WAC

Matsuda, Paul Kei and Jeffrey Jablonski. “Beyond the L2 Metaphor: Towards a Mutually Transformative Model of ESL/WAC Collaboration.” Academic Writing 1 (2000): n. pag. Rpt. in Writing across the Curriculum: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Terry Myers Zawacki and Paul M. Rogers. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012. 441-47, Print.

Even though this article is quite brief, Matsuda and Jablonski explore a worthwhile consideration regarding the relationship of WAC and ESL. They take up a common metaphor in WAC/WID: learning to write in different disciplines is like learning a new language. While this view of learning communicative practices in different disciplines and contexts has encouraged WAC scholars to develop their understanding of L2 practices, they argue this perspective may often be used without considering its effects on L2 students. As they claim, this view may simplify L2 learning and exclude these students and their needs in WAC programs. To remedy this, they advocate a closer connection of WAC and ESL instructors.

They begin by examining how the L2 metaphor has been used in composition studies, including Mina Shaughnessy’s work with basic writers. Shaughnessy’s work—and later work by other scholars—helped to establish that connection between work in ESL and in composition. The key benefit of the metaphor has been helping instructors in the disciplines recognize that their discourse is unique and that students may need helping understanding and using that discourse effectively. But as noted above, they also argue that the use of this metaphor has not reached its potential. The borrowing of L2 matters in composition studies has often been in the narrow form of error. It also fails to recognize the ethnic and cultural differences L2 students face, as well as the double difficulty they have in learning a new language and a new disciplinary language. These lapses suggest a separation of WAC and ESL (Matsuda’s notion of the division of labor) and cause missed opportunities for these fields to influence each other’s practices.

Fostering such a “mutually transformative” influence is their goal here. They argue that as the fields borrow knowledge from each other, they must recognize that the borrowing can and should change how they approach instruction. In the case of WAC borrowing from ESL, WAC scholars and teachers should recognize that the ideas they bring over should not just be for the benefit of the L1 students. Furthermore, they must understand that, though ESL courses may be separate from their own, the students who go through these programs will still face issues in WAC courses. Finally, they suggest a more collaborative approach of these programs from the outset. The programs, in other words, might consider joint efforts as opposed to working in isolation.

In spite of its brevity, this article superbly reminds us that we must consider the full implications of how we use any theories or practices in our classroom. In addition and more immediate to my concerns, I appreciate that the authors argue for a more meaningful collaboration between WAC initiatives and ESL writing programs on a campus to help keep visible the needs of L2 students as they move from their initial courses into later courses requiring different writing skills and strategies. Such collaborative efforts have the potential to bring faculty together in a common purpose of success for all students.

Collaborating beyond Peer Review

Storch, Neomy. “Collaborative Writing: Product, Process, and Students’ Reflections.” Journal of Second Language Writing 14 (2005): 153-73. Print.

As the academic and professional worlds students are entering become more collaborative in nature, writing instructors who offer students collaborative opportunities are likely providing them with necessary tools for their future work. Storch argues in this article that collaboration goes beyond providing students with useful tools; collaboration helps students produce better work.

She draws on the Vygotskyan roots of collaboration in education to argue that peers can play a role in scaffolding learning. These benefits, however, are underutilized. Typically, collaboration in the writing process is limited to peer review. Not only does this come late in the writing process, but, as she notes, peer review often emphasizes the final product and superficial matters. On the other hand, she also points to research that highlights the benefits of collaborative writing at earlier stages of the writing process. These earlier incorporations lead to a sense of shared responsibility (co-authoring) and fuller considerations of more meaningful issues (such as content and effectiveness).

While she agrees with these benefits, she also notes that the studies were often limited to surveys of students instead of interviews and often focused on group work generally as opposed to collaborative writing specifically. In her study, then, she tape recorded students working in pairs (she allowed them to self-select pair or individual work to reduce ethical conflicts of forcing students into group projects). She then interviewed the students who worked in pairs for their feelings about the usefulness/effectiveness of the collaborative task. Finally, she examined the texts produced by the pairs in relation to those produced by individuals to evaluate their accuracy (mostly grammatical correctness) and complexity (referring to use of more complex sentence structures). Using these three threads of information, she ultimately concluded that students in pairs produced more effective texts and valued collaborative writing, though they did have a few concerns about the process, stemming mostly from fears of hurting others’ feelings, concerns about one’s own English proficiency, and views of writing as an individual activity.

This study, then, mostly supports perspectives many writing teachers have: collaborative writing can be beneficial for students’ learning. I did have one main reservation about her methods. This was a timed, in-class activity, and she was making several judgments about the effectiveness of collaborative writing based on how they engaged in the writing process. While process is undoubtedly a part of in-class work, I think we might have better insight into the effectiveness of collaborative writing from a longer, multi-draft assignment, which she does recognize at the end. Nonetheless, I think Storch provides some evidence as to the value of collaborative writing and about the value of giving L2 students “the opportunity to give and receive immediate feedback on language” (168). Finally, she also reminds us that to implement such pedagogical practices effectively, we must prepare students for this work—something she admits was lacking in her own practices—and we must construct assignments that respect their ability to choose for themselves if they want to work alone or collaboratively.

The Institutional Depths of Monolingualism

Shuck, Gail. “Combating Monolingualism: A Novice Administrator’s Challenge.” WPA 30.1-2 (2006): 59-82. Print.

Shuck’s article begins by recognizing that the increase in numbers of L2 students in universities has led to the hiring of more second-language experts in universities. Yet beneath an apparent understanding of the needs of L2 students, monolingualism—or the notion of “the ideal speaker is [. . .] a monolingual native speaker of a prestige variety of English” (59)—is still pervasive and deeply engrained in the university structures and curriculum. Moreover, she claims that even the structures that seem to support and advance linguistic diversity play a part in perpetuating monolingualism.

To illustrate this, she examines the nature of her own position at Boise State University. She was hired to run the English program that supports L2 students. What she discovered was an L2 system that practiced Matsuda’s “linguistic containment” and isolated L2 students for a few classes and then thrust them into mainstream courses with the assumption that those few preparatory classes had “remediated” all of their “problems.” Placement in these preparatory courses was largely determined by placement exams. Often, academic assessment staff told students who had any hint of an accent to take the ESL placement tests regardless of their own sense of their English skills. And these exams were rated by staff that had little to no training in any form of writing assessment, let alone L2 writing assessment. She further discovered that her very presence on campus seemed to remove from other faculty the sense of responsibility to assist L2 students’ language development. Since she was the “ESL person,” some faculty felt she shouldered the responsibility for these students and their language development. In addition, because she was attached to the English department, faculty viewed L2 language development as the English department’s purview.

Despite these rather depressing discoveries about the depths of monolingualism, Shuck concludes the article by offering as exemplars two strategies she implemented to resolve some of these issues. The first includes “unmarking” L2 students in an administrative sense. Her attempts to do this consist of revising placement practices, making preparatory classes “credit-bearing and requirement-fulfilling” (69), changing the nature of preparatory courses, and adding cross-cultural sections of writing classes. The second strategy involves faculty development, starting with the composition instruction staff. She expands this strategy to other departments by conducting workshops and using a liaison program that dedicates one faculty member in a given department as the L2 point person for that department. She also makes public “the strengths and struggles that multilingual students bring to our classrooms” (72) by publishing multilingual student work and holding a public conference consisting of that work. While these changes do not reverse completely monolingualism, they do illustrate ways writing program administrators may begin to challenge it.

Assessing Assessment

Weigle, Sara Cushing. “Teaching Writing Teachers about Assessment.” Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007): 194-209. Print.

Although assessing writing is a key part of writing instruction, Weigle argues in this article that writing instructors often receive limited or no formal instruction in writing assessment practices. As a result, teachers may feel understanding assessment is not a vital part of their classroom practices and their construction of writing assignments. But as Weigle attempts to demonstrate, careful attention to assessment principles can result in more effective learning objectives and assignments and can offer students clearer paths to success in a given course.

Weigle’s piece is a bit of a primer in assessment principles. She provides general definitions of terms like reliability, validity, and practicality as they relate to constructing effective assessment tools. She also examines strategies for developing effective writing exams. Within her discussion of writing exams, she makes an especially valuable observation about objectives: Too often, the objectives writing instructors place in their syllabi do not offer clear criteria for meeting those objectives. Her example is a version of something many instructors likely place in their syllabi: “students will learn the basics of academic writing” (196). Without providing particular ways students might reach such vague objectives, instructors will have a difficult time assessing student progress. She asserts that clarifying these objectives result in improved assignment design, assessment choices, and rubric creation.

Another practice Weigle discusses in this piece, one that I have been reluctant to apply in my own practices, is the use of timed writing assignments. She claims these not only reflect real writing practices our students will likely have to endure (essay exams in other classes, exit exams, the GRE or TOFEL exams), but they also allow instructors to evaluate L2 students’ progress. Timed writing exercises call for a more automatized use of language, which may help students develop some more “natural” linguistic skills in the target language, and don’t allow students to rely on other support structures that may be hindering their development such as the overuse of tutors.

While this article’s focus on L2 students wasn’t as explicit as its placement in this journal might have suggested, it highlights the need to create clear and specific goals for our students as well as providing them with realistic and varied writing activities. Such practices certainly benefit L2 students in giving them multiple ways to practice their writing skills and making explicit the goals of the course and its assignments. But these are also reasonable considerations to make for all students. Furthermore, this article offered a number of possible exercises one could use in a workshop setting to help writing instructors engage with assessment-related issues (clarifying vague objectives, writing assignment specifications, etc.). For someone who has avoided assessment matters, like me, this provides some useful inroads into what seems like daunting territory.

Adapting, Theoretically

DePalma, Michael-John, and Jeffrey M. Ringer. “Toward a Theory of Adaptive Transfer: Expanding Disciplinary Discussions of ‘Transfer’ in Second-Language Writing and Composition Studies.” Journal of Second Language Writing 20 (2011): 134-47. Print.

Discussions about the possibilities of writing/rhetorical skills to transfer from one context to another are common in both L2 and WAC contexts. DePalma and Ringer argue in this article that the discussions about transfer, as they are commonly framed, focus too narrowly on students’ abilities to reuse what they have learned about writing. Instead, they offer “adaptive transfer” as a theory that broadens the scope of transfer discussions to include how students alter those writing practices to fit new and different contexts.

In developing this theory and its potential applicability, the authors first trace earlier discussions of transfer in both L2 and FYC contexts, highlighting the limitations of these discussions. They note a lack of consensus about even the possibility of transfer, citing studies that show both its possibility and its impossibility. What causes this inconsistency is a matter of definition. Often, in writing contexts, transfer is deemed as occurring when “a writing skill taught in one context is consistently [. . . ] manifested as students move into other settings” (137, emphasis in original). This limited view of transfer limits the role of the author and suggests a great deal of stability in rhetorical situations across various contexts.

Because of the narrow views of transfer in English studies and related fields, DePalma and Ringer look to experimental psychology and education to add some greater depth to transfer. In these fields, they find views that emphasized adaptation and alteration. This leads them to a different way of thinking about transfer that they call adaptive transfer, or “the conscious or intuitive process of applying or reshaping learned writing knowledge in new and potentially unfamiliar writing situations” (141). Because it focuses on the dynamic ways in which writers reuse and reshape various writing skills/strategies, adaptive transfer allows instructors and researchers to consider how writers are trying to use and/or change their previous knowledge and experiences in new situations rather than focusing more so on what skills they fail to apply “consistently.”

They see a number of benefits in this theory, ranging from FYC curricular decisions to genre instruction. I also see some potential for the ideas presented here to be useful tools in helping writing instructors work with faculty from other disciplines to develop L2 writing strategies that allow for generic and rhetorical flexibility, negotiation of meaning, and attention to individual needs regarding writing. While I am not entirely sure how “new” their theory is (I see a few echoes of Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” as well as the New London Group’s multiliteracies pedagogy here), I do agree that it may indeed make us reconsider previous notions of transfer.

Using Genre Models to Improve Process Pedagogy

Hyland, Ken. “Genre-based Pedagogies: A Social Response to Process.” Journal of Second Language Writing 12.1 (2003): 17-29. Print.

Since their development in the 1970s and 1980s, process pedagogies have been central to composition classrooms, especially first-year composition. Many (if not most) composition instructors, myself included, rely on some versions of process theory in their classrooms. Hyland’s article argues that the reliance on process pedagogies may actually be constraining the development of L2 writers. He bases this claim on what he sees as five deficiencies of process-based pedagogies, especially in relation to L2 writers.

• Process pedagogies remove writing tasks from their context and emphasize “the writer as an isolated individual struggling to express personal meanings” (18). Discussing matters of process, he says, may lead us to how writers do what they do, but not why.
• The role of the teacher is less active until the feedback stage. And while teachers may give excellent feedback on rhetorical matters, this suggests to students that these matters are related to revising/editing as opposed to initial construction of a text.
• Process pedagogies teach implicitly and favor those who already understand the conventions of the discourse they are “learning,” typically white, middle-class L1 students.
• Culturally-specific knowledge is valued by process pedagogies, especially that knowledge related to voice, critical thinking, peer review, and notions of plagiarism. Hyland cites Ramanathan and Atkinson regarding these concerns (see my blog posting on their article).
• Focusing on process can isolate students from the social and political power inherent in the discourses they are learning, as process focuses almost solely on the individual’s growth.

What Hyland argues for is a genre-based approach to teaching writing for the benefit of L2 (and really all) students. Such approaches put language use in its social context by examining how discourse communities develop and use genres, exploring their rhetorical features, and analyzing their social and political nature. By considering language in these social contexts, instructors need not eliminate process elements of their pedagogies; rather, Hyland tells us, adding genre-based approaches allow us to provide more realistic writing instruction.

I found Hyland’s arguments about the value of genre-based approaches to writing instruction quite compelling. Genre models rely on scaffolding, the social contexts of writing, and the role of rhetoric—all of which I value in my own classes. I did have two minor quibbles with Hyland. First, I felt some of his characterizations of process pedagogies, while not wholly inaccurate, were perhaps a bit broad. Most process practices, as he explained them, seemed to fall into the individualistic, voice-oriented models, which is maybe a little reductivist. My second concern was that he might have addressed more specifically the significance of genre models for L2 students. This was implied, of course, but some more specific thoughts on this would have solidified his claims all the more. Otherwise, his article helped me think about how I use process in my classroom and how genre theory might make those practices more valuable for my students.

Bridges Too Few

Phillips, Talinn, Candace Stewart, and Robert D. Stewart. “Geography Lessons, Bridge-Building, and Second Language Writers.” WPA 30.1-2 (2006). 83-100. Print.

Talinn, Stewart, and Stewart rely on the metaphor of bridge-building to examine what faculty with limited power over the curriculum in their departments can do to improve instruction of L2 students. In their metaphor, L2 students need numerous bridges in their education, whether to “mainstream” writing courses or courses in other departments across the campus. They recognize, though, that building such bridges, while quite necessary, requires a number of resources that may not be available to all programs and those who may wish to build those bridges may not have the institutional clout to do so. The authors discuss their efforts to create these bridges in spite of such constraints. They note the local nature of their efforts; however, their struggles with lacking resources and power from the institution are a familiar fact of life for many faculty, and their solutions provide some starting points for faculty in similar positions.

The authors all worked in various capacities in their institution’s writing center. For them, this provided a natural locus to begin their bridge building. While separate from the English department, this writing center had a relationship of sorts with the department though that relationship was an “uneven” one, to use their term (91). They also note the interdisciplinary nature of the work in the writing center and its ability “to help move second language writing out of the disciplinary and institutional margins” (89). They recommend using composition pedagogies within the writing center to begin some bridge-building with the English department, making new (and future) faculty aware of the needs and concerns of L2 students, and conducting workshops that include faculty from across the campus.

Overall, their recommendations seemed useful (if occasionally a bit obvious). I did take issue with some elements of one of their examples. In this, they noted the success of one of the writing center’s tutees. This student received competent tutoring twice a week for eleven weeks and was receiving considerable support for her efforts in her class. While certainly a positive and admirable example, it may not be an especially representative one. It did, however, show how the bridge between the writing center and the classroom was an essential part of this student’s success. I did find the workshop they conducted with faculty across campus a potentially useful tool, although they did note its success was partially because of a strong WAC program at their institution, something not all institutions have. This workshop was small but its agenda of addressing faculty experiences and providing them with various strategies seemed an effective way to begin the conversation with faculty in various departments about the needs of L2 students. Certainly, the more faculty know about these needs, the more bridges we can build for our students, giving them greater opportunities for success in writing and communication in other classes.

Instructional Re-Design

Preto-Bay, Ana Maria, and Kristine Hansen. “Preparing for the Tipping Point: Designing Writing Programs to Meet the Needs of the Changing Population.” WPA 30.1-2 (2006): 37-57. Print.

In this article from a special edition of WPA dedicated to L2 matters, Preto-Bay and Hansen argue that the demographics of colleges and universities have changed enough to warrant if not systemic change at least a careful reconsideration of composition curriculum and pedagogical practices. To illustrate the change in student populations, they discuss the inadequacy of terminology for students of diverse backgrounds. They examine “international” and “multicultural” labels that fail to accurately describe students of various socioeconomic backgrounds, immigrants whose families have been in the country for various amounts of time, and refugees whose educational backgrounds may be significantly different than those of the students typically labeled “international.” And, as they note, these increasingly diverse populations are not isolated to particular parts of the country, making addressing the changing demographics a concern for faculty in English departments across the country.

More concerning than the inadequacies of some labels for them are pedagogical inadequacies. For Preto-Bay and Hansen, “[o]ne or two ESL specialists on any given college campus can no longer answer all the questions that puzzle mainstream composition teachers, not only about those we have traditionally labeled L2 students […] but also about the increasing numbers of other culturally and linguistically diverse students” (40). Instead, the entire curriculum must change to meet the needs of these students. They use systems theory to explain that if a key element of a system (the student population of an educational system, for example) changes, the system must change to address that change. To address these changes, they argue for education of new teachers to include significant attention to linguistic and cultural diversity, new textbooks and resources that highlight effective pedagogical practices for such diversity, for a more rhetorically and communication oriented pedagogy (as opposed to cultural studies or expressivist approaches for example), and for local considerations about the best place to locate the writing program—whether the writing program is best suited as a part of the English department or in its own department, depending on its ability to control its own interests.

In many ways, Preto-Bay and Hansen’s article is quite sweeping in its scope, covering a number of complex pedagogical and political issues relatively quickly. However, given their call for significant systemic change in composition curriculum, such broad strokes are necessary to lay the foundation for those changes, to illustrate the breadth and depth of such changes. Of course, the feasibility of such changes is the main limitation here. Such changes would require significant investments of time and money that some departments may not be able to afford. But, we must also consider this in terms of our students: if these changes will truly benefit them, shouldn’t we make those investments?