Curt's post on genre-based writing instruction

Ken Hyland’s book Genre and Second Language Writing maps out a five principle process of organizing a genre-based writing course that is based upon five basic principles. The first principle is the concept of writing as a social activity, which has an intended contextual purpose of communicating to a given audience. This sense purpose applies even if the audience is one’s self as a reader of their own personal journal or diary. By having the writer begin with examining their audience with a purpose in mind, appropriate language usage will be realized. For example: research papers will use different language than classroom project assignments. This leads to the second principle that learning to write is needs orientated. I like that the concept of students achieving their goals even though their goals are ever changing. Even in the English 101 class, the student goals are changing to the needs of each project, but these goals are progressive as well. This is addressed in part by sequencing of writing assignments because the development of writing skills is progressive. A third principle relates to the notion that learning to write requires explicit outcomes and expectations including final expectation by the end of the course. This is referred to as the visible pedagogy which teacher helps the students unpack during crucial times the coursework beginning with the syllabus. This type of writing pedagogy is very interactive in facilitating student comprehension in specific instructor expectations. Fourth, by examining the methods of learning to write as a social activity involving collaborative support based upon a Vygotskian type of scaffolding approach. The fifth principle is that learning to write involves learning to use language. Although this conceptual principle may seem overly obvious, in part this includes the concept of making correct diction choices as well. I really find the aspect of integrating the grammar in the context of texts to be meaningful in a more naturally realistic way than the old “grammar grinds” that were so tedious and boring for students. I have unfortunate memories for middle and high language classes, English as well as other languages being “ground” in such artificially contrived ways. This chapter clearly maps out methods of researching the needs of the writing class beginning with asking a few a few simple questions including: Who are the learners? How do learners learn? Why are learners taking the writing course? And what do learners know about writing? By asking such questions objectively, the instructor can assess on how to best meet the needs of the students within a given class. This objective mapping facilitates the development of overall goals and their smaller supporting objectives. Hyland suggests that teachers should have enough professional autonomy or agency to collect and analyze their own research needed to adapt genre samples to the learning needs of the students. Again, sequencing genres is discussed in greater detail as to different types of sequencing including by topic, families, sets, repertoires, and relations among reading, talking, and writing. Each type of sequencing has pedagogical advantages as well as limitations that must be assessed by the writing instructor. Meanwhile, Ken Hyland’s other book Second Language Writing examines what constitutes effective syllabus design and lesson planning including the basic principles and techniques planning upon how learning goals and objectives are to be best met in serving the needs of the students. I had to keep such parameters in mind when I composed the syllabus for the English 101 section that I am teaching this semester. I find the follow three factors listed by Hyland relevantly pertinent. First, is that it should begin with the needs of the learners and incorporate these, such needs of my current class of English 101 student is to be able to transition successively into college from high school and that includes taking a greater role in the management of their own learning and following through on assignments without daily reminders. In second language learning, the instructor needs to ascertain as to what purposes and goals that the students have in their language learning. Secondly, such a plan should take account of wider curricular goals, both within and outside of language learning, basically how does this course fit within the overall curricular plans of a student’s educational program. Some more basic coursework tends to have students of a more diverse array of career and educational interests whereas as each student progresses, their language learning needs become more finely defined. And third, the syllabus will reflect the teacher’s philosophy of writing, including a view of language and learning. A syllabus may be a useful tool for discussing aspects of a teacher’s philosophy of education with students, which may have an even greater impact upon the effective accomplishment of learning than just simply stating the learning goals and objectives of the given course. I use this as part of an opening for students to get to know “from where I am coming from” and what is to be expected during the course itself. Hyland included figure 3.1 on page 56 cited from (Hutchison and Waters, 1987: 74) that I may use when refining my syllabus for the following semester. So far, I have made changes to courses each semester that I have taught them based upon expectations and the actual results of those expectations. After assessing student needs and balancing them with departmental learning goals, I have developed my syllabus based overall upon a genre driven model, figure 3.5, yet I include key components of a process driven model, figure 3.4, when constructing the major course projects. My students, as well as myself have found this blended model to be the most useful and meaningful for achieving positive learning results within the context of the class. Again, Hyland reminds readers of his texts about how planning lessons are key components focused upon a larger instructional goal or theme within the larger units of work contained within the syllabus itself. Hyland lists detailed elements for an organized lesson plan format that conveys a clear purpose with structured activities that fits within the parameters of the classroom environmental time frame as well as actual physical space. Both the time and space elements of the class need to be considered when mapping out the details of the syllabus for a given class. Other aspect of tailoring learning projects to meeting the interests and learning needs of the students includes structured choices, with each being valid for meet given learning goals. For example, allowing to select their presentation chapters, articles, and weeks for conducting their in class semester presentations. This facilitates the development of a more detailed learning upon chosen topics that may be of a greater interest in meeting deeper learning goals upon specific topics with an assortment of relevant issues studied within the materials of the class. In all, I have found Hyland’s chapters to be quite useful in stimulating ideas in the planning and organization of a genre based writing course.

Curt's post on paths to improvement

Casanave’s third chapter, “Paths to Improvement”, in her textbook, Controversies in Second Language Writing, examines how what became known as process writing emerged as a pedagogy from the writing as a product-oriented versus writing as a process-oriented endeavor. Matsuda in “Process and post-process: A discursive history,” places this opposing writing ideologies in a form of succession in that the process-orientation that was part of a student-centered pedagogy had replaced the product-orientation of a teacher-centered pedagogy, because the development of individual writing competencies is a process that is centered upon the student’s participatory experiences. I have found that to be true in my own writing experiences. Each genre of writing has within it a preconceived idea of what an end product should have as an acceptable example of an article written in that genre. For example, a good cover-letter and resume will be required to conform to set of acceptable formatting within a culture of the writer’s targeted audience. If the product does not fit within these expectations, it will be rejected. The process-orientated model is established to center upon the student’s needs to develop what will become a good resume with an appropriate cover-letter for it given purpose of soliciting the writer’s targeted audience. Since no one has been known to be born knowing how to construct the perfect resumes or basically any other genre of writing upon their first try, writing then had to become a process-oriented endeavor, thus this activity is a recursive cycle. Then researchers have begun to examine writing as an activity endeavor that is as much a part of the relationship with the social environment of the individual writer’s discourse community. Atkinson examines in “L2 writing in the post-process era: Introduction” that the writing process-pedagogy paradigm has shifted to a post-process conceptualization with the act of composition as being considered to be a cultural activity. However, I do see writing as an action that is only affected by culture, but it provides a powerful discourse medium for affecting culture as well. Writers through the use of their writing have made profound sociocultural changes not only through their content, but also through their manner used in presenting that content as well. Looking at text, the long explanatory narrative passages have in many instances given way to using dialogue and constructed examples as a means of conveying meaning. The typical responses against the long passages are that reading such a vast sea for text is usually “boring” or “confusingly unclear” that seems to encourage more lively dialogue in fiction and clearly presented concise examples in non-fiction. As a previous middle and high school teacher, I find that the examinations of rhetorical and compositional methodologies to be both insightful in gaining a greater understanding of the writing endeavor itself as well as to be able to teach this endeavor to others in a meaningful way.

Sarah's post on paths to improvement

I have to start out by writing that I love how many times Casanave asks us, as teachers, to question our assumptions throughout this chapter. For example, she challenges teachers to question what they believe constitutes “writing improvement” and furthermore, what they believe constitutes “good feedback” and how that feedback reifies those believes about improvement. I loved this sentence: “Underlying the responses that teachers make to writing are beliefs, tacit or overt, about what improvement in writing means and what students need to do to improve” (70). I am always about people (myself included) making tacit belief systems more apparent to themselves, despite the fact that this is a very difficult process in a lot of ways (cognitively, emotionally, spiritually, etc.). I want to further reflect on Casanave’s useful chapter by relating one of her points to my previous teaching training. Casanave quotes Raimes, writing: “[t]he issue of what university writing is and what kind of writing ESL students should be doing is a thorny one, and the use of the term real relates to this issue in practice as well as in theory” (78). I wholeheartedly agree with this quotation and Casanave’s broader point in this section of the chapter. Many of the professors who taught the English education courses that I took throughout my Bachelor’s degree focused on the term real, insisting that we must find ways to give our students real-world writing assignments with real audiences. As a twenty year old who remembered writing mostly five-paragraph essays throughout high school, I thought this was revolutionary at the time, and I jumped on the real bandwagon with both feet. Then I was introduced to the genre studies approach and began to realize how vague the concept of “real writing” is. “Real” by whose standards? In what field/discipline? Following what set of cultural and social values? And does this “real” writing even align with the kinds of writing my students will need to do in the future? After reading Atkinson’s article, in particular, I have a much better sense of what “post-process” means—a term that I had heard before, but never understood. Yet, I still feel that I have a vague understanding of this theory in a lot of ways. I understand and support its goals in developing more socially and culturally nuanced views towards writing and writing-as-a-process. But I am confused, first, about how this plays out in the classroom. (I know, this is always my question.) What would post-process theorists have us do with our students to develop this awareness within them? I think I have a sense of what these activities might look like, but in actuality, they develop out of my awareness of a different theory, Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), which I perceive to have similar aims in terms of pedagogical approach. Is this an appropriate conclusion to draw? To what extend are post-process and CHAT connected? And if they’re actually not that similar, then how is post-process different, and what would it have us and our students come to understand? I also just have to add that I’m pretty sure I was taught, especially throughout parts of high school by some teachers, using variations of the process model. And I was totally the kid that Atkinson is describing when he writes: “students often reinscribed the authority that process teachers were trying to vacate, for the very simple reason that they knew their composition processes would eventually result in a product for evaluation, and the canniest among them recognized that sincerity and authenticity of voice were the privileged means of symbolic exchange . . . . If process teachers were reading what they took to be direct and unmediated prose of personal experience, the most successful students were hard at work constructing the authorial persona of self-revelatory personal essays written in a decidedly non-academic style” (7). Lastly, I would like to try to articulate an idea that is pretty vague in my mind right now, but I think, kind of important. After reading Matsuda’s article, I am reminded of the complexities of the process of “defining” a field of study. Every discipline has a history, and that history (including the way that it drives research and enculturates new members) is defined somewhat arbitrarily by lines drawn in the sand, so to speak, separating (sometimes false) “paradigms” and “theories” that in reality, as Matsuda points out, overlap in complicated and important ways. But it seems that the histories of disciplines also intertwine with one another in complicated and important ways. Specifically, right now, I am thinking about the “disciplines” of English Education, Rhetoric and Composition, and Second Language Writing. It is difficult in my mind to even characterize these as three separate fields, for all the reasons I just mentioned, but in reality, they are conceived of as different in some way by scholars who characterize themselves as parts of these fields, and indeed by “outsiders” (like me, I guess) who aren’t necessarily “within” any of these three fields. Yet, as I read the assigned readings for this course, which are supposedly “within” the field of SLW, they read a lot like the things that I have read in my previous work in English ed. and rhet/comp. These readings “feel” the same to me in many ways as the work in these other fields—it almost feels like “review” to me. And we know, of course, that all three of these fields are quite interdisciplinary, indeed, with one another. But, I think, my question is this: how am I to read this work and understand it to be uniquely about second language learners and writers? Especially after reading a chapter like Casanave’s that ultimately offers more questions than “answers,” how can I apply this research and theory specifically to the needs and teaching of students who are learning English? Surely the theories “from other disciplines” (whatever you take that phrase to mean) cannot be unquestioningly applied to SLW, and yet it all “feels” the same to me, and moreover, much of what we have read so far has started to make connections to the SLW classroom, but these applications seem tenuous and, in a lot of ways, to be the same kinds of applications that you might think of for an L1 classroom. Surely these theories, concepts, and paradigms are being (and should be) taken up differently in L2 classrooms, as Matsuda writes, for example, “Yet it [the process approach] hardly reached the status of a paradigm [in the field of SLW]; process pedagogy was by no means whole-heartedly embraced by all L2 writing teachers” (78). But how?

Curt's post on Contrastive Rhetoric

It is interesting to read the correlative counter-arguments put forth by the authors of the three articles pertaining to cultures of contrastive rhetoric. It seems that even nearly forty years since the publication of Kaplan’s (1966) landmark article; “Cultural thought patterns in intercultural education” has sparked discussion that continues to this day. In all, it seems that the greatest issue taken with his research is that he lumped diverse languages into broadly defined generalizable regions that are categorized as much by geography as any other marker of definition (Connor, 2003: 224-225). Connor’s article, “Changing currents in contrastive rhetoric: Implications for teaching and research” explains that although Kaplan’s original article may have attempted to paint a detailed picture with a too broad of a brush by making hasty generalizations, he had in fact opened the door to an entire realm of research possibilities in the field of contrastive rhetoric. Over thirty years later, Connor took that contrastive premise and applied it to the business correspondence of the cover letter and used a sample of a predetermined population to use as empirical evidence that supports a claim of contrastive rhetoric and it effects upon international business correspondence of applications. Connor recommends that applicants must maintain a mindfulness of the formatting expectations of their target audience (Connor, 2003: 235). This reminds us that with any form of communication, it is the recognitions of the needs of the target audience, whoever this audience may be, must remain paramount in crafting the particular language. The authors, Kubota and Lehner, reminds their readers in “Towards critical contrastive rhetoric” that when examining expository discourse patterns, one must be careful not to overuse contrastive dichotomies such as their example of contrasting English as a linear, direct, deductive, and logical language to Japanese as being non-linear, indirect, and inductive language that leaves logical interpretations up to the reader (Kubota & Lehner, 2004: 8). This example demonstrates how other languages, in this case, languages other than English, are otherized in ways that seem to be logical and coherently clear in being useful in communicating ideas. This dichotomy can be seen as a means of perpetuating a linguistic gap between the colonizer and the colonized (Kubota & Lehner, 2004: 9). Also, “Colonialism draws a binary distinction between the logical superior Self and the illogical backward Other, legitimating unequal power relations” (Kubota & Lehner, 2004: 18). By examining the power dynamics in the above statement, one can see how the ridged implementation of a set standard can seem to be capricious and arbitrary, and thus problematic. The authors examine an advocacy of shifting from an assimilationist teaching protocol to having counter-hegemonic pedagogies such as allowing English to be an ever expanding language in the following statement, “English is a language that is added to the ways with words students bring to the classroom rather than a linguistic system meant to supplant their familiar discourses” (Kubota & Lehner, 2004: 21). This bilingual approach to teaching English as a second language allows people to gain access to trade opportunities without losing their own cultural identities. Casanave in “Contrastive rhetoric” note that many ongoing questions still linger in regards to the many issues surrounding the teaching of L2 writing beginning with how to define the issues themselves and how to address such issues when they arise during instruction (Casanave, 2007: 52-53). In addressing such issues, perhaps it would be most prudent to focus primarily upon the needs of the students that a particular teacher within the context of such givens as time, place, and learning situations which are occurring. These variables are continuously changing, which in turn requires teachers to notice emerging patterns of needs, while still taking care not to overgeneralize them, but to focus upon individual learning needs as they arise within their situational context.

Lyudmila's post on Contrastive Rhetoric

I agree with the weaker version of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language influences thought. Moreover, as the author asserts, “if we look primarily at structural and organizational features of comparable texts written in different languages, differences are regularly found” (Casanave 29). If there are differences, then, it seems that there should be some structural aspects of L2 students’ writing that could be called “cultural” patterns of rhetorical organization. Kaplan’s thunder of the article “Cultural Thought Patterns Revisited” (1987) was that his seductively simple ideas together with the famous “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” of linguistic relativity attracted immediate attention and helped people see their own writing and that of L2 writing in new ways (Casanave 37). I agree with Kowal’s critique in regard with Kaplan’s article that natural heteroglossia exhibited by every language prevents any language to exist as a self-contained system, “untinctured by influence from other languages” (38). Regardless the critique of Kaplan’s article, the value of comparative and contrastive text analyses for both research and pedagogy is unmeasurable. Contribution of CR to writing instruction can be tremendously in terms of understanding of the complexities of writing in L1 and L2 and applying that knowledge in classroom. For example, investigation of how different texts use organizational and linguistics features to fit readers’ expectations, a deep understanding of rhetorical differences, and a more complex understanding of how L1 rhetoric creates meaning are just a few examples how introduction to CR issues can raise students’ awareness in this field and help with the writing process. I, myself, think that John Swales’ work on structural features of academic and research genres, “such as ‘moves’ within research article introductions or other sections of research articles and features of other genres such as grant proposal” could help me in my writing process as I still struggle when writing papers for academic discourse. I do not agree with Kubota that CR legitimates the norm as given into which the marginalized are to be acculturated. And that CR together with cultural determinism tends to reinforce a cultural deficit in which certain groups are treated as innately deficient because of their cultural and linguistic background. Rather I consider CR as an empowerment of disadvantaged not their assimilation. Like the Australian genre approach is a movement against liberal humanistic approaches to literacy and is concerned with the social success of disadvantaged (Kubota 13). From my own experience, having acquired the discourse conventions of English academic writing, I feel empowered, not assimilated. I think these attempts to seek clear-cut unambigious difference between English and other given language as Kaplan asserted, in order to solve the writing problems of speakers of other languages who acquire how to function in written English, are very beneficial for L2 students and ESL/EFL teachers.