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

Far More Than a Lonely Cactus

Read this!

Leki, Ilona.  Undergraduates in a Second Language: Challenges and Complexities of Academic Literacy Development.  New York City: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007.

The title of this post came from a phrase that Ilona Leki borrows from another scholar (Atkinson, 1999) to discuss how a language learner was once seen as “lonely cactus” but now the view is much more complex.  Exploring that complexity is exactly what Leki is after in Undergraduates in a Second Language as she describes the results and implications of a longitudinal ethnographic study she conducted with four multilingual students.  This book not only gives the reader some helpful insights into how four learners negotiated their undergraduate educations, but what Leki learned about their experiences has some important implications for both first-year writing programs and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) efforts. 

Myth Busters – Second Language Writing Edition

Read this!!!

Reid, Joy, Ed.  Writing Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.  Print.

Overview

            In this collection of articles edited by Joy Reid, each author tackles a myth related to teaching writing, especially teaching writing to multilingual (or L2) students. The myths deconstructed in this book are the following:

• Myth 1 - Teaching vocabulary is not the writing teacher’s job.
• Myth 2 – Teaching citation is someone else’s job
• Myth 3 – Where grammar is concerned, one size fits all.
• Myth 4 – Make your academic writing assertive and certain.
• Myth 5 – Students must learn to correct all their writing errors.
• Myth 6 – Corpus-based research is too complicated to be useful for writing teachers.
• Myth 7 – Academic writing courses should focus on paragraph and essay development.
• Myth 8 – International and US resident ESL writers cannot be taught in the same class.
• Myth 9 – Students’ myths about academic writing and teaching

Each chapter, except the last, is organized into three parts.  The first section, entitled “In the Real World,” is where the authors introduce the myth and explain or illustrate the problems with it.  Then, in “What the Research Says and Shows,” the authors discuss empirical research that supports why the myth is a myth.  Finally, in the last section, “What We Can Do,” the authors give concrete, practical advice about how to work with the issue in the classroom.

            Here’s one example of how a chapter plays out. In Chapter One, Keith Folse addresses the myth that writing teachers shouldn’t have to teach vocabulary.  He begins with describing his own students’ struggles with researched writing and suggests that this often is more related to vocabulary than to issues of plagiarism (intended or unintended).  He then brings in research to show how vocabulary “plays a critical role in successful writing” (4) including both studies that look at what qualities of an essay influence how a rater assesses it as well as what qualities are emphasized on grading rubrics.  He then offers eight suggestions for teachers to consider as they attempt to integrate vocabulary teaching into their classroom.

Brief response

            There are so many things I found helpful about this anthology.  The first was that each article was so clearly organized. Though I don’t think a lockstep approach like this works for every scholarly anthology, it makes sense here.  We’re introduced to the myth and the problems with it, we’re presented with an overview of the research, and then the author or authors gives us a list of suggestions and/or things to think about. 

            The second thing that stood out to me was how concrete yet flexible the suggestions in each chapter were.   Though the main audience for this text is teachers in L2 writing classrooms, many of the ideas apply to any teacher who teaches writing to a diverse student population.  I found myself writing notes about how the ideas presented might apply to my classroom, my writing center, and/or my institution.

            Personally, I found every chapter helpful but if my colleagues in the English department could only read a couple chapters, I would point them to these:

• Pat Byrd and John Bunting’s argument against a one size fits all approach to grammar (Myth #3);
• Dana Ferris’s take down of the idea that students should write error-free prose (Myth #5); and
• Joy Reid’s discussion of the myths that students have about academic writing (and how teachers contribute to them) (Myth #9)

As soon as I picked these three, I thought, “But what about the chapter on vocabulary or the one about citation or the one on using hedges in academic writing?”  So, really, I think anyone who teaches writing could benefit from reading this whole darn book.  And, when you’re done, I want to talk with you about it.

Teachers Need to Learn What They May Have Acquired

Insight #3 from reading Dana Ferris's Treatment of Error in Second Language Student Writing:

One of my favorite moments in the Ferris book is when she says this:

Being a fairly competent user of the English language does not in and of itself prepare teachers to diagnose and respond to student error and to explain grammatical concepts in English (48).

Her words made me do a happy dance around my office and then made me realize that this sentence applies to me also. Just because I researched lots of grammar constructions in my IEP (Intensive English Program) teaching days doesn’t mean I don’t have work to do now. 

So, basically what Ferris is saying is that if teachers really want to help their multilingual students improve language-wise, they will have to hit the books to learn consciously some of the language knowledge that they acquired unconsciously (see my first blog post where I talk about the difference between acquisition and learning). 

It is Important for Writing Teachers and Tutors (and even Students) to Understand Some Key Principles of Second Language Acquisition (SLA)

Insight #2 from reading Dana Ferris's Treatment of Error in Second Language Student Writing:

During my doctoral program, I remember reading a book that was titled something along the lines of Academic Writing as a Second Language. I just spent a few minutes on Google (trying to get the exact title and author) and wasn’t able to track it down, so I might have the title wrong.  However, one of the main arguments of this text was that writing, particularly academic writing, was no one’s first language.  This idea is one that has stuck with me for quite some time and I use this concept when I talk with my students (in any level writing class), and I also use it in presentations to students about college writing.  As I often think, no one expects to become fluent in Spanish after a few weeks of Spanish 1 or even a few semesters.  Yet, someone students are expected to be fluent in academic writing after just a class or two.  I guess what I’m saying is the idea of language acquisition, especially second language acquisition, is a rich metaphor to use when thinking of literacy learning of any kind.

Linguistic Accuracy is Important but It’s Only One of Many Things Multilingual Writers Need to Learn

Insight #1 from reading Dana Ferris's Treatment of Error in Second Language Student Writing:

Dana Ferris argues:

While we should not neglect attention to student accuracy and clarity in writing, we also should not give it MORE attention than it deserves.  Accuracy concerns should at all times be carefully balanced with development of students’ ideas and rhetorical strategies as well as consideration of the (in) effectiveness of their own writing processes (47).

This isn’t news to me but it helps to have Dana Ferris, an L2 writing scholar, emphasize the balance that writing teachers need to strike with multilingual writers between helping their students improve their knowledge of English but also their ability to negotiate rhetorical aspects of writing—not to mention the actual writing process.  

Dana Ferris is God or, at least, Extremely Helpful

Because L2* students, in addition to being developing writers, are still in the process of acquiring the L2 lexicon and morphological and syntactic systems, they need distinct and additional intervention from their writing teachers to make up these deficits and develop strategies for finding, correcting, and avoiding errors (Ferris 4).

Error correction should not be seen as the means to eradicate all student errors but as the means to encourage gradual but consistent improvement in accuracy over time, acquisition and application of linguistic knowledge, and development of effective self-editing strategies (Ferris 74).

Only when instructors consider the needs, knowledge, and prior experience of students; make careful decisions about the goals and mechanics of error correction; and embed error feedback in a larger context of developing knowledge and building strategies that will improve student writing will such feedback have the desired effects on our students (Ferris 76).

*L2 = stands for second language versus L1 or first language

I’m reading a number of books by Dana Ferris at the moment and I’m finding her both very thoughtful and practical in terms of her approach to L2 writing in general and to error feedback specifically.  The above quotes are some of my favorites from Dana Ferris’s 2002 book, Treatment of Error in Second Language Student Writing.  This book is an extremely accessible text aimed at teachers of multilingual writers—both those who work with them in L2 writing classrooms and those who work with them in more mixed settings.  Though her focus is teachers, I’m interested in thinking about how some of her insights might shape tutor development in the writing center.

Overview:

Ferris begins this book by talking about how for many years grammar instruction/error correction was the “dirty little secret” in L2 writing classrooms because teachers struggled to balance key L1 process approach principles with L2 writers linguistic accuracy issues—the end result being that accuracy issues were often not given much emphasis by teachers or teachers felt vaguely guilty when they spent class time dealing with them.  Ferris claims that her own classroom-based “need to understand what might help university ESL writers improve the linguistic accuracy of their texts” (xii) shaped her research agenda over the last 20 years and what she’s learned from this research underlies a lot of her practical suggestions in the book.

         
Ferris sets four (4) goals for teachers who read this text.  She hopes they gain a better understanding of how to:

1. Adequately prepare themselves to respond to grammar errors and provide instruction;
2. Accurately assess students’ needs for error correction and grammar instruction;
3. Provide written feedback on student papers that not only helps students to “fix” problems in current texts but will lead to long-term improvement in accuracy and writing style;
4. Teach mini-lessons that help writers grasp key terms and rules needed for writing and to develop effective strategies for editing their own work both out of class and under time pressure (2).

Ferris works toward these goals by first, exploring why error treatment is important for L2 writers and how L2 writers issues may differ from L1 writers.  She gives some background about the grammar instruction/error correction debate in second language writing but concludes that this book is based around the assumption that “most teachers—and certainly their students!—nonetheless believe in the potential for error correction, grammar instruction, and editing-strategy training to have positive effects on student writers’ overall development” (9).

With this assumption in mind, Ferris introduces scholarly perspectives on error correction in L2 writing in Chapter 2 and organizes her discussion around four main research questions that have a number of sub-questions.  For example, while exploring the question of “What are the effects of teacher error correction on student writing?” Ferris discusses research that focuses on everything from adequacy of teacher feedback to what degree student writers use this feedback to the different ways this feedback can be given.

            
In Chapter 3, Ferris discusses the important topic of how L2 writing teachers need to be prepared (or prepare themselves) for helping writers with their linguistic needs.  Ferris outlines four (4) principles that she thinks are key to this process:

• Principle 1.  Teachers of ESL writing need to study aspects of grammar that are particularly problematic for nonnative speakers of English (41).
• Principle 2. Teachers need practice in recognizing and identifying errors in student writing (43).
• Principle 3.  Teachers need practice in developing lessons and teaching grammar points to their ESL writing students (43).
• Principle 4.  Teachers need to understand the principles of second language acquisition and of composition theory (46).

Ferris discusses each of these principles in depth and provides examples of ways to put these principles into action from the MA-TESOL program she teaches in.

In Chapters 4 and 5, Ferris gets even more practical and discusses specific issues teachers need to consider about what, when, and how to give error feedback as well as other ways teachers can help student writers deal with error, beyond focusing on a specific paper.  For example, Ferris discusses approaches teachers can use to help writers understand the importance of editing, to give students instruction in and experience with self-editing strategies, as well as to provide other classroom opportunities for student writers to develop their knowledge and skills.

Finally, in the Appendices section, Ferris provides examples of materials and worksheets one can use both to help teachers and students develop their linguistic knowledge.

Quick Evaluation:

I think this book is a must-read for any teacher who works with multilingual writers.  Though it doesn’t provide any quick fixes, it provides some solid principles and ideas that I think most writing teachers could benefit from thinking about.  I will talk more about WHY I think this is an important book for you to read in my next post.  Stay tuned.

Sabbatical Scoop

Purpose:

 The purpose of my sabbatical is to explore new ways of supporting the development of multilingual students as readers and writers at the College of Lake County.  As Faculty Coordinator of the Writing Center and as an English instructor who teaches both in the Developmental English and the ELI (English Language Instruction) programs, I have seen firsthand the complexity of the multilingual student population at the college and the diversity of their linguistic and literacy needs.  These are needs that can rarely be met by the classroom experience alone.  That is one of the reasons that the Writing Center is seeing more and more multilingual student writers every semester—both those enrolled in ELI or ESL courses and those in college-level coursework. 

With this in mind, I plan to research best practices and explore innovations in supporting the literacy and linguistic development needs of multilingual writers across the curriculum outside of the classroom—in the writing center, through additional programming, and/or through materials/resources.

Learners & Acquisitions - The Current Purpose of this Blog

I struggled for weeks to come up with a snappy name for this blog--a place where I plan to both report and reflect on my sabbatical reading and research over the next four months.  This is what I came up with:  Learners & Acquisitions.

Why this name?  In James Paul Gee's article, "What is Literacy?" he borrows a few concepts from Stephen Krashen and makes a distinction between Learning and Acquisition:

Acquisition is a process of acquiring something subconsciously by exposure to models and a process of trial and error, without a process of formal teaching.  It happens in natural settings which are meaningful and functional in the sense that the acquirer knows that he needs to acquire the thing he is exposed to in order to function and the acquirer in fact wants to so function.
  

Learning is a process that involves conscious knowledge gained through teaching, though not necessarily from someone officially designated a teacher.  This teaching involves explanation and analysis, that is, breaking down the thing to be learned into its analytic parts.  It inherently involves attaining, along with the matter being taught, some degree of meta-knowledge about the matter.

As a teacher of language and literacy and as a Writing Center professional, I think a lot about these two processes and how they interact--for me, my students, and my tutors.  For example, as a native English speaker I acquired most of my knowledge about how English works, but in my training to teach ESL, I had to consciously "learn" the rules so I could develop lesson plans and create clear explanations.  As a person who grew up in a literacy rich home environment--reading constantly and writing for myself a lot--I acquired quite a bit of knowledge about how texts worked.  This knowledge helped me connect to more formal lessons in my middle and high school English classes.  Did this make me smarter than students who struggled in these classes? No, it just showed that I had had more exposure.  Acquisition has everything to do with exposure and exposure is something that is not distributed equally in the U.S. educational system. This inequality is made salient to me every day in my work as a community college teacher.