Second-Language Writing in the Composition Classroom - Matsuda et al

Matsuda, Paul Kei, Michelle Cox, Jay Jordan, and Christina Ortmeier-Hooper, eds. Second-Language Writing in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Sourcebook. New York: Bedford St. Martin's, 2011.

Starting with the 2009 CCCC Statement on Second-Language Writing and Writers, this book is a collection of articles published originally elsewhere to provide a cross section of issues related to SLW within Composition Studies.  Some of the major trends running through the work is that Western cultural individualism, as manifested through expressivism and process writing, can be inappropriate and even colonizing for second language writers.  Teaching writing as a social (and socialized?) activity can be a more effective and rhetorical approach.  Another important strand is seeing second language writers as a heterogeneous group despite institutional discourses that tend to homogenize them.

Paul Kei Matsuda shows how the labor division for writing pedagogy has been historically split between L1 and L2 writing in Composition Studies and ESOL respectively, and Carol Severino calls for more ideological discussions in L2 as has been more the case among L1 practitioners.  Matsuda calls SLW an inherently interdisciplinary and symbiotic field - especially since it doesn't have its own institutional domain - with its maturity marked by metadisciplinary discourse  (32).  A key moment in the history of SLW, which begins in the 1940s US, is the 1980s with contributions from Discourse Studies where pedagogical views and practices take into account that "writing is much more than an orthographic symbolization of speech; it is, most importantly, a purposeful selection and organization of experience," (Arapoff in Matsuda 25).  Tony Silva likewise points out that "ESL writers come, of course, from many different cultures, rhetorical traditions, and linguistic backgrounds and may bring with them distinct strategies for learning and writing" (Silva 160).  These insights connect SLW to outside ideas of transfer and rhetorical attunement.

Guadalupe Valdés takes issue with the uncritical celebration of diversity and multiculturalism that do not recognize or address differing student needs.  She condenses a large body of work on Bilingual Studies to present useful threshold concepts for SLW teachers, which I have pulled out below:

• Bilingualism is a widespread natural phenomenon across time and space that occurs for different reasons (41).
• Depending on the nature of linguistic contact, individuals' productive and receptive abilities can differ across languages (41).
• In terms of biliteracy, literacy skills acquired in one language transfer successfully to another (42).
• Bilinguals can be elective (choice & additive) or circumstantial (survival & subtractice) (43-44).
• Incipient bilingualism occurs during the acquisition period of a second language (48).
• Continued use of learner-like features is called fossilization (functional bilingualism).  This may lead to contact varieties of English with alternative conventions to standard English (51).
• Learning automatic/conventional phrases, collocations, and idiomaticity is complex, which can lead to an idiomatic accent in writing (53-54). 

Most of these concepts can be applied more broadly to multilingualism, not just bilingualism.  Valdés ultimately holds that teaching incipient vs. functional bilinguals demands greater understanding of students' backgrounds and different teaching approaches.  The institutional separation between mainstream students (including basic writers and speakers of nonstandard varieties of English) and ESL students should include functional bilinguals in mainstream programs and incipient bilinguals in ESL compartmentalizations.

Yuet-Sim D. Chiang and Mary Schmida further show that language can be a synonym for culture, and bilingual identity can be a "traditional cultural affiliation with the heritage language," not necessarily a proficiency in the language.  They define literacy as an act of meaning-making, self-definition, and way of engaging with the world and therefore find that categories available for self-identified bilingual students of mainstream, language minority, or ESL speaker are not sufficient for responding to students' complex realities.  They suggest reorienting labels on English "nativeness" to "how primary English fits their literary and linguistic identity" as well as accommodating - beyond acknowledging - race, culture, and ethnicity in "the sociopolitical constructions of English literacy" (108).

Linda Harklau provides a useful term of representation as a partner concept with identity. Whereas identities are "multiple, fragmentary, subject to change" as well as "locally understood, constantly remade in social relationships, " representations are  "images, archetypes, even stereotypes of identity used to label students" and "seemingly static, commonsense categorical perceptions of identity prevalent in particular sociocultural, historical, and institutional settings" (110-113).  In her study of immigrant students across the high school and college transition, Harklau shows how previously successful students failed to mirror teachers' representations of them when those representations did not recognize or meet the needs of their former and developing identities, and their behavior and achievement was therefore interpreted negatively by teachers with consequences for their grades.

In a direct correlation with Harklau, Chiang and Schmida, Awad El Karim M. Ibrahim writes in his ethnography of performance on African immigrant students in Canada that the "social imaginary was directly implicated in how and with whom they identified, which in turn influenced what they linguistically and culturally learned as well as how they learned it" (138).  Using Anderson, he defines the social imaginary as "a discursive space or a representation in which [individuals] are already constructed, imagined, and positioned" and further draws on Foucault to say that "although social subjects may count their desires and choices as their own, these choices are disciplined by the social conditions under which the subjects live" (140).  He talks about antecedent signifiers of identity in previous contexts and the process of re-translating the self to a new setting.

He also shows that in the face of negative societal representations, acts of positive identification also take place over time with both of these processes at the subconscious level.  Performative acts of identification through accessing and learning patterns and codes do not require master and fluency.  He ultimately argues that "What is learned linguistically is not and shot not be dissociable from the political, the social, and the culture. [...] Because language is never neutral, learning it cannot and should not be either. [...] Wittingly or unwittingly, schools sanction certain identities an accept their linguistic norm by doing nothing more than assuming them to be the norm; we as teachers should remember that these identities are reaced, classed, sexualized, and gendered" (151).  At the very least, teachers need to make space and recognize diversity of identities and create opportunities for social critique.

Tony Silva takes up the thread with "On the Ethical Treatment of ESL Writers" by suggesting four ways of respecting ESL writers.  First, they need to be understood as a heterogeneous group with different traditions and strategies they bring to learning and writing along with recognition that revision will probably not be intuitive.  They should also be provided suitable learning contexts in which they can choose mainstream, BW, ESL, or accommodating writing classes based on abilities and preferences.  They should be provided with appropriate instruction in which teachers facilitate, rather than control student writing so that students can choose their own topics and that teachers' own positions shouldn't determine or become the curriculum.  Evaluations should also be fair and recognize that "ESL writers' rhetorical differences may be manifestations of their cultural backgrounds and not cognitive or educational deficiencies" (163).  This points to the importance of teachers adopting a rhetorically attuned manner of evaluating student work.

Vai Ramanathan and Dwight Atkinson draw attention to the "metaphorical notion of voice" and related social practices with the underlying view that "as individuals, we all have essentially private and isolated inner selves, which we give outward expression" (167).  However, they also point out that many people around the world may have conventions based on views that are not so individualistic with such overt and assertive linguistic practices based on the countercultural 1960's and 70's in the US.  Two alternative approaches to "voice" than an expressivism problematic cross-culturally is Ede's "situational voice" related to classical rhetoric and Bakhtin's "heteroglossia" related to social constructionism.  The individualistic focus of voice has implications for how educators approach critical thinking and textual ownership, but they must be viewed relative to the context.

In explaining critical writing, A. Suresh Canagarajah discusses three approaches to teaching SLW.  The first is the conversion approach, which moves students from indigenous to English-based discourses.  The second is the crossing model, which develops the ability of switching discourses based on context.  The third is the negotiation model, which involves creating alternate discourses and literacies.  These three approaches map fairly well onto Horner's identified approaches to teaching literacy.  In terms of English as an imperialistic language, he also says that teachers may adopt a separatist (cynical & deterministic) or universalist (complacent & romantic) orientation.  A third orientation can be using English as "a resource for oppositional and critical purposes" (226).  Some of his main suggestions for what teachers should pass on to students for critical writing are listed below:

• Do not treat communication rules as innocent or indisputable, but negotiate them.
• Treat all knowledge as "interested."
• Explore your identity, consciousness, and values reflexively while constructing texts.
• Interrogate the dominant conception of reality.
• Interrogate language for how it represents its own values and suppresses divergent messages.

In "Should We Invite Students to Write in Home Languages? Complicating the Yes/No Debate," the various contributing authors identify several variables to consider.  These are included below:

• home language or home dialect? 
• kind of writing?
• audience?
• political or psychological context (possible stigmatization/identity)?
• learning goals?
• student/teacher trust?
• language used for writing?
• process - exploratory, final versions (literal translation or global revision)?
• choice of student, teacher, or institution?
• teacher's beliefs/convictions?

Basically, the invitation should be offered with both respect and awareness.

Joy Reid and Barbara Kroll likewise offer a list of characteristics related to writing task design.  Basically, the task should "measure student skills and [...] provide a learning opportunity for the writers" (268).  More specifically, tasks should be contextualized & authentic, accessible in content, engaging, and include appropriate evaluation criteria (269).  Ann Johns promotes a socioliterate approach (SA) with the understanding that texts are socially constructed, rather than autonomous, so that "students acquire a literacy strategy repertoire and develop the confidence that enables them to approach and negotiate a variety of literacy tasks in many environments" (290).  Her approach relates to transfer and genre studies, and the main goals of SA are listed below:

• tap into and apply background knowledge (genre related) for analysis and critique of texts
• revise genre theories (centripetal forces for textual contentions & centrifugal forces for changes)
• engage literacy strategies for approaching tasks (assess, expand, revise)
• examine texts tasks, roles, and contexts
• develop textual metalanguage

Ultimately, Johns advocates for an "outward-looking" class with SA that focuses on context and influences of a text while remembering the "student as a social being" (300).

In terms of evaluation and assessment, Rober E. Land Jr. and Catherine Whitley show that "[NNS readers] can accommodate to more kinds of rhetorical patterns that can NS readers" and propose a pluralistic rhetoric that would "allow [students] to adapt to and value writing that employs varying rhetorical organizations (333).  I would again connect this to Rebecca Lorimer Leonard's
 idea of rhetorical attunement and replace the labels of NNS and NS with readers and writers of translingual or monolingual dispositions.  Land and Whitley show that the ability to suspend judgement (similar to the "let it pass" principle) can allow for recognition of organization different from reader expectations.  They further suggest that Standard Written English features not be automatically added and other features be deleted or modified.

Harkening back to Canagarajah's chapter on orientations to English writing, Carol Severino advises teachers during the feedback process to take different sociopolitical stances at different times for different purposes and contexts, providing a continuum to guide such a practice.

Interestingly, she addresses the choice of researching her own responses to student work by referencing Geertz's opportunity for "thick" description and highlights the interplay between macropolitics and micropolitics in teacher feedback that sends messages about acculturation to students.

As Ramanathan and Atkinson already adressed in regards to textual ownership, Pat Currie draws on Pennycook to show how "plagiarism is ideological" and traces the progress of one university student using plagiarism as a survival strategy.  This relates directly to the idea of "patch writing" as a stage of development as mentioned in the CCCC Statement.  She suggests teaching students ethnographic techniques to understand disciplinary communities, focusing on genres, article introductions, and conceptual activities for examples.  I would also add to this including opportunities for writer authority and expertise in assignment design and prompts.

In the final chapter, Dana Ferris and Barrie Roberts present their research findings on the explicitness of error feedback.  Significant findings include the following:

• no significant differences in editing success between coded feedback and underlined errors
• editing was more successful in "treatable" (patterned) errors than "untreatable" (idiomatic)
• no-feedback students most successfully found and corrected word choice errors

Although they focused on student errors and accuracy, they also include the assumption that students should receive feedback on their ideas and rhetorical strategies.