Assignment for Monday, November 17

Matsuda discusses, “In response to the gap between the need to prepare ESL students for free composition—or the production of “an original discourse…about some given subject matter”—and the lack of writing pedagogy, ESL specialists attempted to extend the application of existing principles of second language pedagogy (i.e., the oral approach and the audiolingual approach) to the teaching of second language writing.” (19) He goes on to state that free composition exercises were later dismissed and viewed as “naïve traditional views.” What would have happened if those “naïve” views had been more looked at as established and the positive pedagogy outcomes, bonafide? Would the learning’s of ESL student have been more accurate and worth the focus? In a “controlled composition” setting, are students (regardless of ESL affiliation or not) more apt to learn composition studies according to more systematic and strict rules, giving way to less opportunities of individual writing exploration? Are ESL students at a disadvantage when learning this “controlled composition” compared to the writing privileges/freedoms that non ESL students have had their entire life?

In his essay "Dialect Interference" Patrick Hartwell argues that "writing instruction, for all students, ought to be broadly rhetorical, stressing voice, audience and purpose, rather than narrowly grammatical, stressing surface detail and its presumed connection with a spoken standard" (114).  Though he doesn't seem to say so exactly, I took his position as asking that we allow all students to write in their natural dialect whether it be Standard English or Black English Vernacular or any other dialectical variation.  He argues this because he seems to believe that teaching Standard English puts speakers of other dialects at a disadvantage  to students who speak Standard English (102).  While this is certainly true, my problem with his position is that this is not an isolated disadvantage.  Whether we find it to be fair or not, employers in corporations and other businesses and organizations around the United States prefer to hire people who can speak and write in Standard English, at least for the more financially rewarding, higher-status positions that many of our students have come to college in the hope of later obtaining.

I believe this problem is what he was referring to when he quoted D'Eloia as arguing that we must "still accept the teaching of EAE as a cultural responsibility" (102).  He doesn't spell out her concern, however, nor does he ever go on to address it in the rest of his essay.  My question then is, if we follow Hartwell's method and allow our students to write in their dialect, how do we morally account for the fact that we're not giving them the preparation that future employers will very likely expect of them?

The readings for tomorrow's class bring up a two-year old question for me (one that I am still quite concerned about): When will L1 writing start really learning from L2 writing research? Matsuda alludes to this in his article, stating that "some insights from second language studies have been applied to L1 composition studies as a way of addressing the needs of NES basic writers" (24). This is a step in the right direction, but why can't non-basic writers also learn from L2 writing research? Does the field still view L2 writers as deficient in some way, that they are somehow "basic"? Or is there something else going on?

This question also came up in Silva and Leki's article. They provide great historical context for their readers to understand what L2 has taken from composition studies and applied linguistics, but is there anything these fields can take from L2? They mention that applied linguistics might be ahead of composition studies here, so I'm wondering why composition studies is "lagging behind."

While reading Silva and Leki's 2004 article and Matsuda's 2003 chapter, I also kept wondering if these selections would be more effective and reach the audience they need to reach (i.e., the composition field) if they were published in 3Cs instead of The Modern Language Journal and a book written for a L2 interested audience. However, this concern is addressed on page 9 when Silva and Leki write that 3Cs "does not appear to be especially L2 writing friendly" despite the fact that the Statement on Second Language Writing and Writers was published in 3Cs three years before Silva and Leki's article and two years before Matsuda's chapter. Why the unfriendliness? Has it truly gotten better since 2003 and 2004? Why not start to include marginalized voices and research in a field that is, as Silva and Leki write, "left to far left in its politics" (7)?

At the end of his chapter, Matsuda states that “second language writing evolved into an interdisciplinary field of inquiry situated in both composition studies and second language studies simultaneously” (p. 25). He seems to suggest that the disciplinary division of labor that he pointed out earlier has become less divided, but the Macdonald article and the Silva and Leki article suggest otherwise. I’ve also been under the impression that the division still generally exists. I’m still new to composition studies so I can’t say for sure, but the majority of the work I have read on second language writing has been written by people with an ESL/Applied Linguistics background. I’m wondering to what extent, other than exceptions like Paul Matsuda and Tony Silva, compositionists are choosing to specialize in second language writing, for example in their dissertation topics. Do L1 compositionists consider second language writing a domain of composition, or do they feel that they are stepping into Applied Linguists’ territory?

I cannot help but agree with Hartwell’s observation that “written English is not a dialect” (p. 105). Although “dialect” is a notoriously problematic term, the bottom line is that spoken language is a natural, transitory process and written English is a learned and more permanent phenomenon. However, this insistence that written language should be treated differently than spoken language (which I think most would take as a given) ultimately leads to his conclusion that all writing instruction should be broadly rhetorical (p. 114). While again I agree with Hartwell’s basic conclusion, I take issue with the idea that a sound rhetorical approach to composition and a linguistically motivated approach are mutually exclusive (as have many others, including Silva and Matsuda).

Has the notion of dialect interference in writing indeed been discarded, as recommended by Hartwell? If so, can this fact support the teaching of a standard EAE in place of emphasizing SRTOL? Does ignoring the discrepancies between standard written English and the dialects students bring to the classroom further marginalize “non-standard” variants? Although Hartwell's piece was published over twenty years ago, I get the impression that variations of this question have not been addressed to everyone's satisfaction.

In our current selection of readings, the authors build narratives of the development of second language writing instruction. Silva and Leki discuss disciplines’ influence on research; Matsuda briefly mentions certain historical and political factors that influenced L2 research in the United States. He begins his narrative by suggesting the limitations of the field's history and later argues that "historical evidence suggests that L2 writing instruction did not suddenly become an issue in the 1960s" (15). How do these narratives of a field’s development contribute to our understanding of composition instruction that is designed to meet the needs of traditional students and English language learners? Could additional contributions to these narratives be valuable to researchers or would these additions be of little consequence? I’m thinking about potentially influential factors—historical precedence for second language writing instruction, political influence on writing and language instruction policy—that may fit into the overall narratives but are not actually influenced by research.