Contrastive Rhetoric

This week I learned that Contrastive Rhetoric (also described as Intercultural Rhetoric) refers to comparing and contrasting different aspects of writing and literacy between cultures and applying those ideas to teaching writing (at least, I hope that's a fair definition!). This line of inquiry is based on ideas of thought and language, but it is often manifested through more discrete text analysis.

Despite the problems with Kaplan's ideas, I appreciate that he brought these differences to the attention of writing scholars. He started quite a bit of inquiry that seems incredibly useful for L2 scholars. I was first introduced to these cultural differences in a video aimed at writing center tutors or composition teachers where international students described their ideas about how academic writing in the US was different than their experience in their home countries. I still remember the details of some of those stories, although I won't bore you with the details here. The point is that this video was eye-opening for me, so I anticipate that these findings from Contrastive Rhetoric will be eye-opening for many writing instructors. We often don't realize our own ethnocentric cultural biases in teaching. Knowledge about differences will help us avoid assumptions about someone's intelligence or even writing capabilities that may be fueled by cultural differences in organization, proof, directness, etc.

Now, as is the tradition of academia, I would like to point out the largest problem that I see with Contrastive Rhetoric (or at least the problem with the somewhat dated scholarship that set the foundation for this line of inquiry). I find it extremely problematic that the basis for American English composing was based on "school essays." These essays seem to be a mythical construction of US education. For instance, topic sentences are a source of inquiry and comparison for some published work in Contrastive Rhetoric, and it's true that American schools often teach the value of topic sentences. However, Richard Braddock found that only 13% of experienced writers ever use topic sentences (see citation below). Thus using conventions such as these for the basis of comparing American writing extremely misleading. Who is to say how far other cultures may be from our academic conventions when studies are based on these ideals? Academic discourse is not one particular genre; rather, there are multiple discourses and multiple genres in any given discourse. I recognize that Casanave acknowledges this problem and that recent scholarship analyzes other genres, but I fear that too many instructors are still stuck in this "academic discourse convention" mindset.

This problem supports the value of a genre-based approach to teaching writing. Teaching students how to adjust to different writing scenarios seems much more useful than teaching them conventions of particular, constructed genres that might not help them in the future. How many L2 students are looking at education with the end purpose of writing an academic essay versus gaining competency in other workplace settings or some other purpose altogether?

All of that said, I am FASCINATED with text analysis such as move analysis found in ESP approaches. I love the classification and "figuring out" what is happening in different types of texts. What I am struggling with right now is how to value both a genre studies and the results of text analysis. Ideas?

Braddock, Richard. “The Frequency and Placement of Topic Sentences in Expository Prose.” Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. 2^nd Ed. Ed. Victor Villanueva. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2003. 189-203. Print.

Link

Here's a link to a blog about teaching English in Afghanistan. Has some interesting commentary on L1/L2 literacy.

http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/

Project Idea

The best idea I have at the moment is to explore the implications for L2 students in the current genre studies approach to teaching composition. Although a genre studies approach to second language literacy has been around for (I think) 30 years or so, this approach has been focused within English for Specific Purposes, which lays out conventions for academic and workplace settings. Since the most recent adaptation of the genre studies approach to composition involves students exploring genres, rather than having conventions told to them, I doubt that much scholarship has investigated what that means for L2 learners.

My current plan for working on this issue is 1) reviewing what scholarship has explored the intersection of L2 learners and genre studies, 2) understanding the current student-driven, metacognitive application of genre studies, 3) understanding the unique needs of L2 learnesr, and then 4) connecting all of that in order to make some smart comments upon how to adjust the genre studies approach to meet the needs of L2 learners. Whew, that sounds like a tall order for one project! Anyone have suggestions for narrowing the scope?

To Correct or Not to Correct? The Error Correction Debate in L2 Literacy

I will bring a handout of the following as well.

Here are some summaries, followed by extensive discussion questions.

Summary of Ferris:

Ferris claims that research on whether grammar correction is effective or ineffective for improving L2 student writing is inconclusive. The foundation for Bell’s work is as a response to John Truscott’s 1996 argument that error correction is not effective, and possibly harmful, for L2 writing improvement. In contrast, Bell argues that existing research are too widely varied, inconsistent, and conflicting to be relied upon. She claims that the only conclusions we can draw are that “existing research predicts (but does not conclusively prove) positive effects for written error correction (50). This is partly because “adult second language acquirers in particular need their errors made salient and explicit to them so that they can avoid fossilization and continue developing linguistic competence” (54). This might also be because L2 learners want grammar correction, and regardless of actual effectiveness, students’ concerns about this might impact their ultimate success (55). Ultimately, much more research is needed.

Summary of Bell:

In order to investigate how L1 literacy skills transfer to learning a foreign language, Bell conducted a case study on herself by learning Chinese (Cantonese). She took a class that focused on oral competencies and writing in transcribed Roman form, and worked with a private tutor, Cindy, to learn the Chinese orthography. Bell succeeded in the oral-based class, but became frustrated and stressed learning the orthography. She writes, “I had gone into the study with certain expectations of myself as a learner based on fairly successful school experiences” (694). Yet she felt like a failure in learning the Chinese characters, and grew tired of the feedback she received from her tutor, which focused on repeated mantras of “losing your concentration” and “lacking balance” (694).

The disconnect came from Bell’s focus on reading competency and Cindy’s focus on writing perfection. Cindy said, “Calligraphy or penmanship—isn’t important in English. It’s not the writing, it’s the knowing and the recognizing that’s important. But in Chinese, it’s the writing art that is as much a part of literacy as the reading” (696). In Chinese, “form and content were inseparable,” whereas content is valued over form in American English (697). Other cultural differences were that Bell valued speed while Cindy valued accuracy, and Bell valued engagement and asking questions while Cindy was used to pupils learning quietly (697-8).

Discussion Questions - Theory:

1. How are writing teachers to proceed when research results on the effectiveness are mixed and conflicting?

2. To me, the greatest argument for error correction is the “placebo effect” on students’ motivations, attitudes, and outlooks if they receive the desired correction. Is this enough of a reason to go against our own pedagogies?

3. Where do you stand on the fluency versus accuracy debate as described by Casanave (70)? Is a happy medium desirable and/or possible?

4. Some of these issues are similar to issues surrounding L1 and dialect speakers. In 1985, Richard Hartwell, for instance, wrote a well-known article about the ineffectiveness of explicit grammar instruction that applies to all students. He outlined five categories of grammar, and claims that people mostly learn grammar through the first category:

a. Grammar 1 is an “internalized system of rules” learned through language use (111),

b. Grammar 2 is descriptive linguistics (114),

c. Grammar 3 is usage (not grammar at all) (110),

d. Grammar 4 is schoolroom grammar, or prescriptive rules for instruction (119), and

e. Grammar 5 is stylistic grammar (124).

Given these parameters, are L2 students different from L1 students in that they don’t learn from G1, but need G4? Why would that be? Is there anything about language transfer, fossilization, different cultural literacies, etc., that makes that necessary? How does this connect to the genre-studies approach (see next question)?

5. What does a genre approach mean for this debate? Hyland, for instance, argues that “explicit rules and conventions should not be taught as formalities to students but that students themselves should explore the textual forms and functions within the genres of their own fields” (Casanave 83). Writers learn by participating in the context of the writing situation, rather than “explicit instruction” (83). Do you think this would be effective? How do you think L2 learners would react?

6. Bell found a difference in American English and Chinese (Cantonese) literacy in that in English, form is separated from content with a prioritization on “knowing and recognizing,” while for her Chinese tutor Cindy, “form and content were inseparable” (697).

a. Could this cultural focus on form explain some L2 learners’ insistence upon perfect grammar over content? Should we acculturate students to our ideas that content and critical thinking skills more valuable than form?

b. What other sorts of cultural differences and learning styles affect people with high L1 literacies to become frustrated with their L2 learning?

Praxis

7. How do we best proceed with error correction that is productive at teaching students how to fish, so to speak, rather than editing their work? Has anyone here used error logs?

8. The recommendations that Ferris details on page 59 are quite time consuming. Do you have any recommendations for busy teachers with few resources for training?

Sources in addition to today’s readings:

Hartwell, Patrick. “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar.” College English 47.2 (1985): 105-127. JSTOR. Web. 28 Oct. 2009.

Link to Quick Guide

This Quick Guide for working with ELL learners might be interesting for us to discuss in light of this and next week's readings.

http://mason.gmu.edu/~ereid1/teachers/tchguideESL.htm

L2 Student Characteristics and Post-Process

The readings for Tuesday this week give us a picture of the types of students that are L2 learners. I am grateful to Reid for pointing out differences between two types of L2 learners, even though there are certainly many more than two types. Often times we lump students together without considering differences in their background. The idea that some students are quite culturally competent but not highly literate and that other students are highly literate without being culturally aware is helpful for teachers to understand in order to adjust and meet the needs of a variety of students.

Ferris brings to my attention to increasing number of late-arriving resident immigrant students, and she points out that there is not much research about teaching this student population (5). Ferris brings up the difficulty of teachers addressing the needs of these students. How do you all think that non-specialist writing teachers can meet the needs of these students with little training and limited resources?

Regarding process and post-process pedagogy in teaching writing to second language learners, Matsuda's article is particularly interesting to me because he complicates the typical ideas about process and post-process. Specifically, he walks through scholarship in composition to show that the traditional ways of discussing the process movement are oversimplified. The dominant view is that process pedagogy emerged in the 1960s as a response to current-traditional pedagogy (67). However, Matsuda shows that process ideas were circulating before then and he also shows that current-traditional pedagogy was created by the process rhetoric. Likewise, second language writing pedagogy gained steam in response to the audiolingual approach (75). Matsuda thus shows how history is created through discourse, and he makes me realize that while there is value in naming and describing pedagogies, movements are overlapping and complicated.

Matsuda also encourages us to consider post-process not as a rejection of process, but rather as moving beyond the dominance of process to include other goals and practices in writing (78-9). For class discussion, we might consider what the pluses and minuses are for opposing the (created?) audiolingual approach in second language pedagogy and what has emerged as a result.

Second language literacy autobiography

I studied Spanish in middle school, high school, and college. I chose to learn Spanish in seventh grade because I felt like it was practical and because my paternal grandmother is Mexican. Plus, I got a C in the quarter of Japanese I was forced to take.

The one time I was able to try speaking to my grandmother in Spanish, I was in eighth grade and had not yet learned past preterite forms. I remember sitting in a McDonalds on one of her visits to Illinois, and I tested my tongue in Spanish. She replied, “¿Que Dijiste?” (What did you say?). She kept repeating that phrase, but since I didn’t know that conjugated verb, that was the extent of our conversation. At the time, I thought she saw saying something complicated, but soon after I realized it was just a form of the verb decir (which I actually did know).

I had the opportunity to practice my Spanish when I traveled to Mexico in August 2007. I signed up with a tour group so I could visit a number of places without having to navigate the country solo. We started in Mexico City and visited six places on the way to Playa Del Carmen in about three weeks. At first, it was difficult to remember my years of Spanish from school. But I quickly remembered enough to feel comfortable in restaurants and stores, particularly since I was needed to translate for my traveling companions, who thought that saying something in English louder to the waiter would help him understand. It was frustrating at times when I couldn’t express myself or understand someone, but the ability to communicate even on a basic level was remarkably helpful. I could read signs, and ask for directions (even though Mexicans say everything is “around the corner”). Some Mexicans were complimentary about my language skills, like the tour guide on a lake excursion, but I think they just appreciated that I had some ability and tried. There were high-school age girls working at McDonalds who laughed at my Spanish, but I wasn’t too concerned. I just plodded on, grateful that I could at least get around.

Aside from that trip and a few others, I have had limited reasons to use my Spanish, so my memory is faulty and I am far from fluent. In fact, the way that I learned Spanish mostly consisted of drills, so I was probably never fluent in conversation or in writing. I could recite grammar rules and vocabulary, but I was never too quick on my feet and never did a substantial amount of reading or writing. Overall, I'm grateful for the experience that I had learning Spanish and have always wanted to be able to speak it better.