Genre Approach

The readings assigned from this week have been of great importance to me as a teacher of English. Due to the contextual features of the place I come from, the teaching of writing is subject of little study or research. Therefore, I was totally unaware of the rationale governing my teaching practices when it came to writing.  I now understand that my personal second language writing teaching experience is permeated by aspects of both the process and genre approaches (particularly applying an oversimplified version of ESP model).  Around four years ago, when I was teaching at Universidad Nacional, I worked as a facilitator, trying to help my students develop their own writing style, but yet pushing them to fit their texts to the textual structures of particular genres of English writing. Today I have learnt I had no idea what I was doing. (Some of those students are still my friends, I do not know if I will ever look them in their faces again).  

Due to my very little knowledge on these matters, (it’s the first time I ever hear of such terms), it is very hard (and I guess irresponsible) of me to take a critical standpoint. I believe I need to really understand what these approaches are about. However, from my experience as a learner and teacher, there are some impressions/questions I would like to share/ask:

I must warn the readers that this may be very basic questions, whose answers may probably be taken for granted from a graduate student. In such case, I beg your forgiveness, but, in this occasion I prefer to go by every good teacher’s advice: ‘the only silly is question is the one you don’t ask’.  

1.       Why is it that Hyland and Johns (and from what I have noticed, everyone in the class) take for granted that the process approach is mainly cognitive and egocentric, and that it excludes social aspects of meaning construction and negotiation?

2.       Is it too crazy to think of an approach that integrates aspects from both the genre approach and the process approach?

3.       How can you avoid falling into the use of the Sidney School of genre descriptions as simple rigid templates (as Johns puts it), particularly when some students may prefer this for the sake of simplicity and rapidness?  This, of course, is to be understood in the framework of educational systems that lack spatial and time resources.

4.       I am personally very biased in favor of favoring critical literacy skills in my classrooms. Yet, I struggle to decide how it is that you actually do this. I would love any insights on this, or probably accounts on my classmates’ experiences.

On Leki’s chapter: Curriculum and Instruction

The issue of actual instructional praxis and the effect of theories of second language (writing) has on it has been going over my mind for the last few years. Sometimes curriculum design and implementation seem to move in different directions.  This is in part due to teachers’ misunderstanding or little knowledge of the underlying theoretical assumptions of curricula. Other times, the reason of this is the adoption of theories that do not match the contexts where they are applied. That is, we favor pedagogies that promote the recognition of identities, shared or individual, and yet we resort to theories that ignore our realities.

As Leki mentions it (p.78) the adoption of standards, the underlying assumptions of these standards, issues of voice and identity, the type of literacy being promoted and the washback effects high-stake proficiency tests have on curricula design and classroom practices (among others) are all phenomena that need to be addressed by researchers and scholars in EFL settings.  I expect to start exploring some of these concerns in my exploratory study this semester. 

Plagiarism, the L2 classroom and the internet

La poesía no pertenece a quien la escribe sino a quien la necesita.  

I would like to use this blog entry to comment on the articles by Block and Pecorari and to muse a little bit on Autumn’s question.

Out of these two readings, my attention was mainly drawn to the idea that cases of plagiarism may be a window for educating our students rather than for incriminating them. I guess that is what I mean last class when I said ‘there’s much more to plagiarism than penalizing’. However, I have to affirm that when Pecorari says (p. 241) ‘…when plagiarism is unintentional, a productive response is to educate about, rather than punish…’, I do not agree entirely. I think plagiarism is an opportunity for reflection even when it is intentional. I really do not see the point in ruining a student’s reputation and career prospect for a mistake of this kind. Obviously, if it is a repeated action, there is no point in reflecting about it, but if it is the first time, I would rather sit down and discuss with the student the reasons why he/she did it.  I believe this would be a very good chance to help the student understand the implications of borrowing other’s flow of argumentation and the ideology behind it. I believe the student and I as a teacher can gain much more from that than from just starting some sort of disciplinary procedure.

In relation to Autumn’s question, I believe that these issues can actually be brought in the L2 classroom. Actually, bringing these issues up in the classroom would be a fantastic idea. Not only because it would help students grasp the concept of plagiarism as understood in ‘Western cultures’, but also because it would provide room to discuss the tenets of the capitalistic worldview. And, after all, learning a language is much more than figuring out how to put pieces of a system together. Understanding and getting to know the cultures behind the language is probably the most exciting part. Therefore, the significance of individuality, the right to accumulate capital (even if this is tangible or not), the desire to compete and outshine others (dear American classmates: please forgive me if this is too biased and oversimplified)  are all issues that can help students from other cultures understand not only the language but the dominant ideology of countries like the US. I believe that this approach is more sensitive than just telling our students ‘do this because that’s how they do it’.

Finally, in relation with Block’s article and his elaboration on the effect of the internet over the ownership of texts, I must say that, although I do not know much about how this is changing and where this is going, I think IT IS changing in a way. Here, Autumn’s question from her last blog entry,  about the possibility of adopting more ‘Eastern views’ (whatever that might mean) comes into play. We have been hearing for a while about the advocators of freeware, people who give up their property rights in order to share their work with thousands of users. Although one might debate the purpose behind this, it is clear that the concept of ownership is being revisited. Also, a project like Wikipedia, which was predicted to be a failure by many people when it was created, has become an unprecedented success. Many said nobody would give up their time to share their knowledge for free, and time has clearly proved them wrong. Additionally, even though many people question the validity of such a project, studies have been conducted to compare its reliability in comparison to prestigious sources such as the Encyclopedia Britannica showing the there are no significant differences in this respect. However, I do not intend to claim that this happening because of the influence of China, or any Eastern cultures. I prefer to say that the collaborative era is bringing about changes in what is understood by owning a text. And these changes seem not to have an origin in the core of capitalism (this is probably too naïve on my part).  It seems to me that what is becoming important is not the ‘ideas’ you own, but what you do with those ideas.  

Whose idea is it anyway?

Though, I very much enjoyed these weeks’ readings, it is impossible for me to post this entry without wondering how it is that Pennycook (p. 1) managed to steal my idea of plagiarism being a notion that belongs to a particular vision of the world that should not be generalized and taken for granted in all cultures worldwide. After making this statement, I would like to provide evidence to prove that this idea is mine. The first time I ‘conceived’ this idea in my mind was during a visit to an exotic part of Colombia where I stayed at an indigenous settlement. Through informal conversations I got to understand a little bit about their worldview and beliefs. Their language did not have a written form; therefore, their ancestral history was only transmitted from the elderly to the young in the form of spoken narratives. These narratives were not subject of any dispute or debate; they should be accepted as they were. When asked how these stories have come to existence, the mamo (the spiritual leader of the community) asserted they were not the property of any human being. They made up the essence of their people and, though these stories presented some variation depending on who was narrating them (there was a lot of variation depending on the oratory of the teller and other factors), nobody could claim ownership over those words. In modern words, those stories were not copyrighted. Unlike the world I came from, the concept of property over ideas did not exist.

Coming back to my initial point, I am now considering the need to write a book (or a journal article) every time I visit an indigenous community. Or, every time I have think of a profound, elaborated idea.

Apparently, Pennycook took advantage of this, and was not satisfied by taking only one idea away from me.  I also found out that he fragrantly decided to plagiarize my belief that there is not a single idea that has not been ever thought, or at least, that no idea is entirely original. Everyone resorts to other people’s ideas to formulate their own. Sometimes these regain validity; sometimes they are more pertinent, sometimes they are structured in different ways. But yet, they are the same idea. Somehow Pennycook managed to steal this thought from me, and used a fancy quotation by Goethe to justify his so-called academic crime (for which he himself cynically gives it a name)

One idea that he could not steal from me (or probably he did?) was that plagiarism is an individual decision, conscious or unconscious, but still individual. And that if we are to agree that plagiarism is a bad practice in academic writing we have to provide our students with the criterion they need to make much more informed decisions when writing. It is not only a matter of warning them, but of helping them understand the implications of not citing authorized scholars (as much as your ideas may be yours and no one else’s), of how to correctly include these references. These matters are much more important when teaching L2 writing, since sometimes L2 learning implies the understanding and apprehension of certain cultural values alien to our own.

However, and to my own misery, Pennycook closes his article by stealing another of my ideas. Due to the fact that learning a second language implies learning a set of cultural conventions and rules, and that in second language learning, learners many times borrow other’s identities and ideas (or other’s words according to Pennycook) plagiarism issues must be approached with an empathetic attitude in the first place. Applying straightforward (or dogmatic as he puts it – but I can swear I thought of this first) institutional rules or adopting strictly normative attitudes towards learners who go through struggle to understand what plagiarism is, may not bring  the best outcomes.

Like these, many of Pennycook’s ideas are actually mine! I thought of them first! Why would he steal them from me? I can swear I never read them anywhere! They just came to my mind naturally! What can I do to get my ideas back? I know what you may be thinking by now, you probably think I stole these ideas to write this text, but that is not true! I swear! I have never stolen anything from anyone!!!!

Wait, I think the title of this entry sounds pretty much familiar to me...  Have I seen it anywhere? Let me think…

The diverse character of voice and the big question

How do you come to have a ‘voice’ in your writing? This is without doubt a very difficult question to answer, probably, impossible. However, if I was to decide where to start, I would probably resort to Bakhtin’s construct of heteroglossia for a start.

To me, defining voice is a very difficult thing to do, even after these readings. So, in order to make things easier, as I write these words, I try to think of the most ‘remarkable’ voice I could think of, the most unique, the one that I could not forget. This makes things much easier for me. Having briefly revisited Bakhtin’s proposal, I can only think of Dostoyevsky. But I don’t want to bore you off by pondering over nineteenth century Russian literature. I just want to exemplify how a master voice is built up of different voices. Dostoyevki’s voice is a whole that finds its parts in Raskolnikov’s monologues, Prince Myshkin’s speeches or the memoirs of the Underground Man. When reading these masterpieces, one is easily confused because it seems that the character’s voice is meshing with the narrator’s and the other way round. It is difficult to determine who is ‘populating’ whose voice. This way, Dostoyevski’s voice could not exist without any of these voices, it would simply not be. Ok, so much for Russian literature.

My point is that I don’t know what voice is, but I suspect that it is not as individualistic as Bowden (1995) presents it. It may be related to the ‘inner self’, but this inner self is, I believe, at the same time, influenced by outer others, outer voices. However, and coming back to my example on Dostoyevski, I believe that the construction of a voice, as of a novel, may be an individualistic decision, may be a deliberate act of mixing voices. It relies on the level of awareness you have about the voices that govern your thoughts, the ideologies behind you deepest beliefs. This awareness may help you control your voice, use it to your advantage and in certain domains. Otherwise, you may have a voice, but you may not govern it. This will generally result in alienation.

After these preliminary impressions, I am attracted by the idea of a ‘situational’ use of voice. In accordance with the testimonies provided by Hirvela and Becher I think developing a voice in a foreign language could/must be a deliberate act. A ‘dress you can wear when you need to’. How do you do that? That is the big question.

Writing Across Borders

A very important aspect for reflection that derives from watching this documentary is the wide variety of challenges that international students face when coming to the US. Depending on where they come from, they will find difficulty in understanding certain requirements, conventions, or procedures of what is expected from them in writing academic papers. This also poses a great challenge to teachers. For assessing purposes, Tony Silva proposes setting a standard of what would be accepted (good enough) so that all students are treated with justice. I believe however that by doing this you are putting aside those students who will not settle for good enough, but who want to make the most out of their potential. By this, I by no ways mean that all students’ work should be assessed equally.  Each student’s paper should be assessed on the light of its potential and an ongoing exchange of feedback and advisory. I prefer to go by the narrator final remark that a teacher should feel empathy for his/her students and try to predict the problems they may encounter. Nonetheless, I believe that this must not be done at the expense of other students. No matter how daunting a job may seem, a teacher’s work should be to address each student needs and to maximize their full potential. Probably this is a naïve, unrealistic statement, but if this goal is never in our perspective, we will most certainly never achieve it.

From a more personal perspective, I experience this very often. As Deborah Haley puts it, this not only happens when students are faced with a writing task. It also happens when thoughtful opinions are required in the middle of an ongoing, heated debate. Often times I find myself trying to organize my ideas in English, just to find out that when I am ready to express them, the debate has moved to another topic. Other times, when I try to rush to speak, so I don’t miss the opportunity to share my ideas, I end up saying things that do not entirely fit what I was thinking. It is without doubt a very big challenge to all International students, but I also believe that it is part of the challenge you accept when studying abroad. I am convinced that when you travel to another country you must have an open mind to learn and understand other’s opinions, ideas and values. I see this as no different task. However, the educational system and academia must be knowledgeable of the difficulty that this represents and the cultural richness and openness that can be gained from adopting inclusive practices in classrooms with ESL students. 

A couple of links

Guys,

In case anyone is interested, here's the links to the documents I have talked about in class:

Estándares Basicos de Competencia en Lengua Extranjera: Inglés

This one is basically the standards for teachers and students at the primary and secondary level. It's a guide to help teachers develop curricula, study plans, instructional materials and the like. Schools must not meet these standards as of yet. They should do so in ten years (the standards were published in 2006).

Libro de trabajo

This one is the book we used in the training sessions we conducted all over the country so teachers learned about the standards and started implementing them in their classrooms and schools.

If anyone would like to get more information about it, please let me know, I will be more than happy to share additional documents.

Ideas for my final project

Ideas for my final project

I have to admit I still do not think I am ready to make a decision about the topic of my final project. Anyway, here’s a few ideas that interest me as of now:

1.       A review of the literature in Second Language Literacy for EFL settings.

a.       Pros:

                                                               i.      It would help me expand my knowledge of the field.

                                                             ii.      I believe there is a lot of potential for it my country. Particularly for pre-service teachers.

                                                            iii.      I would enjoy it. J

b.      Cons:

                                                               i.      I would not know where to start. L

2.       A case study on error correction (I would have to narrow it a bit, I know)

a.       Pros:

                                                               i.      I could work with my girlfriend.

                                                             ii.      I could do some research (which I would love to)

                                                            iii.      My girlfriend could benefit from it.

b.      Cons:

                                                               i.      The personal attachment would hinder validity.

                                                             ii.      I would require a lot of mentoring.

                                                            iii.      My girlfriend would hate me  and lose all respect for me if the hypothesis proved wrong. J

3.       A case study on my own writing learning process as a writer.

a.       No pros no cons. I just don’t know how to do it and if that could work.

4.       A review of the literature of language testing.

a.       Pros:

                                                               i.      It would be an important source of reflection for my career.

                                                             ii.      It would help me understand the role of testing in the ELT sector.

b.      Cons:

                                                               i.      I could probably end up hating myself for past decisions.

                                                             ii.      My former boss would probably hate me too.

                                                            iii.      I could not get my previous job when I get back to Colombia. (Probably I would not want to)

Anyway, please forgive the lack of formality in this entry. I guess that just reflects the clarity I have about the project.

                                           

Questions on the implementation of a Contrastive Rhetoric approach.

In favor as I am of any kind of inclusive approach, after reading the texts by Casanave and Connor, I could not help thinking of the difficulty of implementing a revised version of the CR approach for Second Language Writing. Here are some of the questions, for which I hope we can find some answers.

How can you avoid considering students’ background and native language in Second Language Learning settings? How could a need analysis ignore these aspects?

Yet, how can one account for contrastive approach in learning new rethoric styles when one is very likely ignorant of students’ native language and cultural background?

How can one aspire to have a profound knowledge of students ‘cultural patterns’ in order to be able to implement a contrastive approach? Particularly in settings where students from different origins are grouped together?

How can you avoid simplistic overgeneralizations like Hinds’ (see Casanave 33) when attempting to implement CR?

In relation to Casanave’s proposal of an Investigative Pedagogical Approach:

Provided the difficulty for the teacher to become acquainted with foreign cultural patterns and languages, is it realistic to rely completely on the part of SLL’s? Will they be conscious of the cultural patterns governing their writing practices?

How could you ‘break down students stereotypes of their L1 and L2 and help them come to a more complex understanding of how their L1 rhetoric creates meaning’ as Casanave puts it, in instructional settings constrained in terms of time and space as ours?

Analyzing students L1 writing samples seems possible in EFL settings where the instructor is highly competent in the native language of the students, but, how do you go about this in ESL setting with diverse populations?

Could mini-research projects, discourse analysis of comparable texts, surveys, and interviews give the instructor a clear picture of intercultural differences? If so, how do you envision the implementation of these?

For the bigger picture, what would the implementation of an Investigative Pedagogical Approach, as proposed by Casanave, imply for curriculum design at universities, colleges, schools?