ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW (ABOUT TEACHING) I LEARNED IN THE WRITING CENTER

(with apologies to Robert Fulghum)

Lesson #1. Writers need to be active participants in their own learning

My writing center work has taught me that Stephen North didn’t get the quote quite right when he said, “our job is to produce better writers, not better writing.”  The grammatical problem with this sentence is that the subject doing the “producing” is still the tutor and/or the writing center.  For a tutoring session to work and learning to happen, both tutor and writer have to be involved. In order to improve, a writer has to write and think and write some more.  A tutor can be involved in this process, but they cannot be the sole actor in it.  We all have had sessions like this—where the student pushes the paper across the table at us or demands, “Tell me what to write,” and the fundamental problem with those moments is that if one gives in, nothing changes.  

First Day of Class - Thinking About the Process

In my developmental English classes (focused on academic reading and writing) the last few semesters, I've done the following activity on the first day and each semester it guides more and more of what I do the rest of the semester.

I give my students a handout with three questions:

• What is something you’ve learned how to do well? (For example, a sport, a hobby, any sort of skill, etc.) 
• What do you remember about your first attempts to do this activity? How did you feel as a beginner? 
• If I wanted to get good at doing this activity, what advice would you give me? 

I give them about 10 minutes to write and then ask every single person in the class to share one response they put down to each of the last two questions--how they felt as a beginner and what advice do they have now for a someone who wants to "master" what they're good at.

Here's what my morning class came up with:

I think it can be helpful for students to connect the learning they're going to do in my class (and how sometimes they are going to be frustrated and overwhelmed as well as excited and interested) with learning they've already done. Not only does it start them off thinking about a prior success but It also reminds them of how it felt to be a "novice" at something*. 

After class the first day, I typed up the list of suggestions my students came up with, their advice, and it's a list we're going to come back to at various points in the semester, hopefully to add to.



*On a related note, one of the best things I've ever done for myself as a teacher was take guitar lessons. As a total beginner, I found myself experiencing the highs and lows of attempting to master a new skill and many of the things that popped into my head and came out of my mouth as I practiced (or didn't practice) sounded an awful lot like what I heard my students say.

You Must Read This Book!

Integrating Multilingual Students into College Classrooms - Practical Advice for Faculty: Johnnie Johnson Hafernik and Fredel M. Wiant

Overview

In this slim volume, Johnnie Johnson Hafernik and Fredel M. Wiant have created a clear and practical guide for faculty across the curriculum who are interested in helping the multilingual students in their classes succeed.  An added bonus is that most of the practical suggestions that Hafernik and Wiant provide would help support the learning of all students in a classroom, not just those negotiating between multiple languages. 

The book is divided into two sections: the first section has two chapters that focus on “The Context” while the second section contains six chapters that focus on “Understanding and Addressing Language Skills.”  In the first chapter, “Our Students,” Hafernik & Wiant discuss types of multilingual students—creating categories and then problematizing them.  They also focus on the need for faculty to both understand the nature of the language differences these students bring (for example, no amount of hard work will magically turn these students into native speakers!) but also see these language differences as a resource and opportunity and not simply a problem. 

In the second chapter, “Constructing Classrooms Where Students Can Succeed,” Hafernik & Wiant pose a series of important questions that instructors need to ask themselves including, “How can we integrate multilingual students into the academy, help them learn, and increase their chance of success?” (26).  In order to begin to answer these questions, Hafernik & Wiant discuss what they see as four fundamentals of second language acquisition (SLA) that apply especially to an academic context:

1) Languages are dynamic and connected to their contexts and their learners (26-27).

2) Identity plays an important role in language acquisition (27-29).

3) Everyday language and academic language are very different (29-30).

4) Multilingual students do not become “native” speakers. A few courses will not perfect students’ English (30-31).

They then offer some general advice for faculty on how to create productive classrooms for their multilingual students. They include both suggestions that focus on ways instructors can think about their students as well as suggestions that focus on how instructors can help their students become “members of the academy” (36) and “insiders in their disciplines” (38). 

In the second section of the book, entitled “Understanding and Addressing Language Skills,” each of the next five chapters focuses on a different skill: speaking, listening, reading, writing, and working in groups.  The last chapter in this section deals with issues of assessment. The skills chapters are all organized in a similar way. First, Hafernik & Wiant discuss the complex nature of the skill in academic contexts.  For example, they break down the skill of speaking into “formal academic speaking tasks,” “semi-formal academic speaking tasks,” and “informal tasks” (53).  Then, they offer a list of “practical tips” for helping students with the skill—often breaking those lists down to address the different types of speaking or reading or writing needed in a classroom situation.

Reflection/Response

The Book I Wish I Had Written

In mid-February, I did a workshop for some English, Psychology, and ESL faculty at Elgin Community College about “Supporting Multilingual Writers” and though I had this book on my to-read list, I hadn’t yet read it.  I wish I had because my ideas are very much in sync with those of Hafernik & Wiant, and they said much of what I wanted and tried to say in my presentation but even better.  It was also clear that they’ve read a lot of the scholars I’ve read-both in TESOL and Composition Studies.

This makes sense since Hafernik’s training is in TESOL and Linguistics and Wiant’s background is in Rhetoric, Composition, and Communication.  Their collaboration developed as their two departments, ESL and English, began to work together at University of San Francisco and the end result was the formation of a single department of “Rhetoric and Language.”   They suggest that even where a common space or department isn’t possible, “creating community” across disciplines to address issues of concern, such as supporting multilingual students, can benefit both students and faculty (2).  This stood out to me because one of the things I want to do is to begin conversations on my campus about the needs of multilingual students and the important role that all faculty play in helping them develop and succeed as learners and members of the academy.

Five Key Principles

One of many parts of the book that stood out to me was the list of five principles or “common understandings” (3) that Hafernik & Wiant outline in the introduction and return to in their Epilogue.  Here is the list from the end of the book:

1. Multilingualism is positive and should be encouraged.
2. Emerging English proficiency and limited awareness of US academic norms do not mean limited intelligence or limited academic ability.
3. Compartmentalizing courses or marginalizing multilingual students is counterproductive for all members of the academy
4. Labels such as ‘remedial’ or ‘developmental’ to describe multilingual speakers are seductive and misleading.
5. All faculty can and should assist multilingual students in improving their English proficiency and their knowledge of ‘how to be’ a member of the academy. (134)

These ideas are ones that underlie many, if not most, of the suggestions they give to faculty and these are ideas I believe in strongly as well.  In many ways, the first four statements all connect to the idea that difference is not deficit.  It can be way too easy to focus on what students lack—advanced vocabulary, the ability to deploy articles correctly, expertise in a certain type of academic writing—and miss the resources they bring by being functional (if not fluent) in more than one language.  Even well-meaning instructors can sometimes interpret lack of experience as lack of ability.  Hafernik & Wiant would argue, like many of the theorists I’ve read, that multilingual students need exposure to and practice with rigorous academic practices, but they may need language support while doing so. 

The fifth point is basically why Hafernik & Wiant wrote this book.  They believe that all faculty have a role to play in multilingual students’ development.  In chapter two, they argue:

Whose responsibility is it to help students understand the workings of the academy, adjust to it, and become full participating members? The answer is ‘Everyone’s’.  Each of us can ease the transition for students by simply making what we take for granted explicit for students (37).

Hafernik & Wiant have clearly read Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary as they suggest that faculty can play a powerful role in “inviting” multilingual students into the academic community in general as well as to their specific discipline. The fifth understanding is also the one I based my sabbatical research around—that teaching language and academic literacies is everyone’s job—not just the job of the English or ELI teacher.  Becoming part of an academic community is an ongoing process—not something that can be done in one or two steps (or even one course). 

Back to the Importance of Second Language Acquisition

Like Dana Ferris, Hafernik & Wiant bring in concepts from second language acquisition—only the four they focus on (see overview above) have even wider implications for multilingual students.  I could easily spend a blog post reflecting on each one (Yes, I just put that on a sticky note for myself) but for now, I’ll focus on their last point—about how multilingual students do not simply “become” native speakers.  A quote related to this that jumped out at me was this:

Throughout their academic careers, multilingual students, like native English speakers, continue to improve their academic language proficiency and academic skills.  We, as faculty, can help them in this process but can’t assume that students will become native English speakers (31).

This may be a tough idea for many faculty to wrap their head around because they see difference solely as deficit—an absence instead of a presence.  I’ve heard faculty mutter, “How did this student get out of ESL?” when the writer’s text showed that he was perfectly able to make important academic writing moves—create a thesis, support an argument, etc. but still struggled with prepositions and the occasional word order.  Again, the problem is focusing solely on what the student can’t yet do and ignoring what they can.

Final Thoughts

Now I have two books that I think every faculty member should read—no matter what they teach:  John Bean’s Engaging Ideas and Hafernik & Wiant’s Integrating Multilingual Students Into College Classrooms.  Go out and buy yourself a copy now!

TESOL Day #2 - A long overdue Recap

TESOL Convention - Toronto - Friday, March 27, 2015

Here are highlights from the four sessions I attended on the second day of TESOL.

Transitioning to College Writing: Language Use and Sentence Level Skills

This workshop involved a series of presenters, all who focused on the issue of supporting students' linguistics needs as they develop as college writers.

Ditlev Larson from Winona State University used the experiences of three students (from his larger study of freshman L2 writers) to highlight the gap between the way language issues are addressed in high school writing classes and the language expectations in college. All three students stressed that they felt unprepared to meet the new and more sophisticated linguistic demands of their college classes. Larson suggested that the concern over "deficit thinking" in high school and even college writing classes has led many teachers to avoid focusing on sentence-level issues, but he asked, "Are we doing students a disservice by not focusing at all on sentence-level issues? If the expectation is there, where and when should it be taught?"

Dana Ferris discussed how her institution, University of California-Davis, has begun to incorporate language development into their FYC (first year composition) program.  Ferris began with the challenges the FYC program faced--an extremely diverse student population, a teaching staff not trained in ESL, a packed syllabus, and a broad range of student needs.  Ferris and her colleagues wondered, "How can we have a more integrated, organized approach to language?"  The answer was adding "guided self-study" to the curriculum.  Students could pursue one of three options:  Self-Directed Vocabulary Journal, Grammar-Mechanics Self-Study, or Style Analysis Journal.  The materials for each of these options were provided (and didn't have to be developed by the teachers) and the students did the work outside of class.  Ferris discussed how this Language Development Program (LDP) has evolved over the last three years and she also shared student feedback.

Best Practices for Community Colleges and US-LM Students - Part One

Kibler, Amanda K., George C. Bunch, and Ann K. Endris.  “Community College Practices for U.S-Educated Language-Minority Students: A Resource-Oriented Framework.”  Bilingual Research Journal 34.2 (2011): 201-222.

Brief  Summary

In this article, Kibler et al. call for community colleges to rethink the way they work with US-educated linguistic minority students—moving from a deficit model to a resource approach that builds on the language and literacy knowledge students already have and focuses on integration versus separation, “creating the kinds of opportunities that students need to further expand their academic language and literacy repertoires, acknowledging that these repertoires are developed in the authentic contexts in which they are used” (205).  They outline four areas that colleges need to address in order to create a “resource-oriented” framework:

• Supporting academic transitions into community colleges.
• Integrating language and academic content.
• Providing accelerated access to college-level, mainstream academic curriculum.
• Promoting informed student decision-making.
• (206)

Kibler et al. discuss the principles behind addressing each of these areas from a “resource” perspective and give examples of innovative ways community colleges could and do attempt to tackle these issues in order to more effectively meet the needs of US LM students. 

Myth Busters Round 2 - Vocabulary Edition

Overview

Read this book!

In Vocabulary Myths-Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching, Keith Folse debunks a series of myths that many L2 teachers hold about vocabulary—myths he believes “can be detrimental to our teaching effectiveness, and all of them can certainly hinder our students’ second language vocabulary learning” (160).  These myths include the following eight ideas:

1. In learning another language, vocabulary is not as important as grammar or other areas.
2. Using word lists to learn second language vocabulary is unproductive.
3. Presenting new vocabulary in semantic sets facilitates learning.
4. The use of translations to learn new vocabulary should be discouraged.
5. Guessing words from context is an excellent strategy for learning second language vocabulary.
6. The best vocabulary learners make use of one or two really good specific vocabulary learning strategies.
7. The best dictionary for second language learners is a monolingual dictionary.
8. Teachers, textbooks, and curricula cover second language vocabulary adequately.

Folse focuses a chapter on each of these myths and structures his discussion somewhat similarly for each chapter.

TESOL - Day #1

Thursday, March 26, 2015

One of the best things about TESOL this year was the TESOL app that I put on both my phone and iPad.  I was able to look through and mark sessions I was interested in for all three days before I even left Waukegan.  However, the downside was that when I looked at my agenda (a calendar with all the sessions you picked mapped out), I quickly saw that during some periods there were at least four or five things I was interested in AT THE SAME TIME.  Sigh.

However, I made my choices for Thursday before I started the day:

• Helping Adult ELs Meet Language Demands of College and Careers
• From Theory to Practice in SLW: Crossing Borders, Building Bridges
• Strategies for Countering Discourses of Deficit in L2 Writing

All three of these sessions were the longer workshop format so they were all 105 minutes long versus 45 minutes and that seemed to allow for more information and more time for questions at the end.  Here's a recap of these three sessions.

Helping Adult ELs Meet Language Demands of College and Careers

Though the primary audience for this session was ESL instructors who work with students in adult education and immigrant programs, the information and ideas could easily be scaled up to any developmental English or ELI course because the vocabulary gap exists for many CLC students as they transition into college courses.

Benefits of One-Question Interview Activity

 Each of the three presenters tackled a different level of learner and presented an activity that would help to develop students' language repertoires and move them toward more academic/professional language skills.  Patsy Vinogradov discussed how a volunteer program at a church thrift store, the Alley Shoppe, helped her beginning, low-level-literacy students develop vocabulary and grammar related to sorting and displaying clothes as well as other workplace skills.   Betsy Parrish shared an activity, the one question interview, that asked intermediate level students to collect data about their classmates and both analyze the data and share their findings in writing.  Finally, Susan Finn Miller talked about the importance for upper-level students to learn Tier 2 vocabulary (abstract but not super content specific) and introduced us to the idea of the "Vocabulary Workout."

This was a great session with lots of handouts and interaction.  Not only did each presenter have us do a thinking/talking/writing task connected to each vocabulary activity but they gave us a chart at the beginning that asked us to consider three questions related to each of the activities presented:

1. What is the academic language in the activities?
2. What are other transitions/college and career readiness present in the activities?
3. What could you do to adapt this to your context?

I found myself really excited about both the Vocabulary Workout concept and the "Collecting Classroom Data" activity and have already started to think about how to incorporate these into my English 109 class this fall.

From Theory to Practice in SLW: Crossing Borders, Building Bridges

This workshop had a lot of presenters including Dana Ferris (who I've been reading a lot of) and John Swales, who is a pretty famous linguist known for his work in genre analysis.  Each of the presenters made connections between research in Second Language Writing (SLW) and the classroom.  For example, Gena Bennett gave an overview of corpus-based research (corpora are giant databases of real textual samples that can be analyzed in all sorts of ways) and how they can relate to the teaching of academic writing.  Chris Freak discussed what qualities make an effective EAP (English for Academic Purposes) writing course.  John Swales discussed some research he did on citation using a set of 800 upper-level biology papers that had earned an A or B.

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My two favorite sessions out of this larger workshop both involved presenters I would see again during the conference.  Maria Estela Brisk, who works on using SFL (or Systemic Functional Linguistics) with elementary school ELs, described what a genre-based pedagogy would look like in early grades and the importance of teaching students both the language and the metalanguage they need to know to write different types of texts.

Dana Ferris,  not surprisingly, talked about "Connecting Error Analysis and Error Feedback for L2 Writing" and discussed the classroom implications of what she learned from two major research projects--research that has also generated much of the content of her recent books.  She did a nice job of showing the connection between what her research suggested and classroom principles:

• Research showed that "teacher variables" matter so teachers need to be "prepared and principled."
• Research showed that "learner variables" matter so teachers need to assess their students.
• Research showed that "error types" matter so teachers need to learn about these types.
• Research showed that "the mere presence of feedback" matters so "teachers should provide feedback rich environments."

Overall, I found this workshop gave me a good sense of how SLW research can be connected back to the classroom and I'm especially excited in learning more from Ferris and Brisk.

Strategies for Countering Discourses of Deficit in L2 Writing

This session also had a number of presenters (including Dana Ferris again) but focused on the important task of both identifying "deficit thinking" in relation to second language writers and also developing ways to combat that thinking.

Deficit thinking was defined by the presenters as "a rhetorical construction of students in terms of what they lack or are deficient in" and these constructions "ground decisions in the teaching, assessing, and administering courses for second language writers."

Christine Tardy discussed some of the forms these discourses take but also suggested strategies to combat them. For example, she mentioned how a "discourse of Essentialization" is used to lump students together--as ESL, as a certain nationality, as a visa designation.  One strategy to use against this is for teachers to get to know their students and to explore their diversity as well as notice the connections.  Another dynamic that Tardy pointed out was second language writers being framed as a "problem" that needs to be solved or dealt with.  She suggested that it would be better to see the institutional structures as a problem as well as to reframe students' multilingualism as a powerful resources.

Dana Ferris and Grant Eckstein outlined how deficit models can shape the classroom in terms of text selections, writing assignments, language instruction, and feedback approaches.  They then had us work in pairs to tackle one of three "deficit perspective" quotes and discuss both what problems we saw in the perspective as well as what a better approach might look like.  Finally, other topics discussed by the presenters included how deficit discourse can influence assessment as well as program structures and policies.

This was another strong session that gave me a lot to think about and had a lot of connections to what I do at CLC.

Deficit Thinking and Assessment