[Teaching_Composition] NEW MODULE

[Suzanne Blum Malley]

This conversation has been great to follow,--there is so much I want to
chime in on that I don't even know where to start. I agree with Chris'
evaluation of the US English only movement as short-sighted (ridiculous,
even?) and the positive possibilities of what greater linguistic diversity
has to offer (not detract from) the English language.

On another note - I want to echo what Kate said about her response to the
ways in which her linguistically diverse students phrase things. I'm not a
poet, but I often find myself reading the words of my students and thinking,
"Wow -- that's not a typical usage/structure  but it's really beautiful."
So, Kate,  you're not alone and I find myself hoping that as writing
teachers we can really begin to examine what drives our response stop and
fix when we encounter those things in the writing of linguistically diverse
students. Is our underlying assumption as we approach their writing that it
will be wrong? Do we stop in the same way with our other students, or is our
assumption, when confronted with "interesting" language use, that that usage
is intentional?

And, on even another note -- I have to come back to what someone said (and
now I can't find the email, so please let me know if I imagined this) about
first-year writing courses for NNES at his/her institution being taught out
of foreign language departments and not in the Writing Program. Wow! How do
they decide which students take the FL section and which students take
first-year writing (in my experience the line is never as neat as the
packages we'd like to put students in). Is the course shared in terms of
understanding what writing is and how is can/should be taught? Are the
goals/curriculum the same? I'm fascinated by this because it gets to the
heart of why I'm asking these questions about the linguistically diverse
writing classroom -- why would writing teachers not be able to work with
NNES?

Thanks and have a great day!
Suzanne


On 10/12/06 7:32 AM, "Russ Hunt" <hunt@stu.ca> wrote:

> I've spent a little time working in Europe, with the sort of people
> Chris and others have expressed their awe of (which I entirely share:
> my best German friend's home is effortlessly trilingual, and all the
> now grown kids speak at least a couple of others besides French,
> German and English -- his middle daughter, for instance, married an
> Italian and lives outside Reggio Emelia). The discussion about strange
> idioms in English raises for me my humiliation when, at conferences
> where everybody but the North Americans speak a half dozen languages,
> the conference lingua franca is English and (some of) the native
> speakers of English use their command of all those English shibboleths
> to dominate the conversation and marginalize those struggling with
> arbitrary preposition customs and syntactic practices.
> 
> I've seen the same thing when articles published by non-native
> speakers are dismissed because they don't control those shibboleths.
> So when one of my students writes, as she did last week, "the article
> that I have did research on is about," I struggle to ignore the verb
> and take what she has to say seriously, because she, like my
> colleagues in Germany and the Netherlands, is not a native speaker of
> academic English.
> 
> -- Russ
> 
> Russell Hunt
> Department of English
> St. Thomas University
> http://www.stu.ca/~hunt/
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-- Suzanne Blum Malley
Columbia College Chicago
English Department
Director of ESL
Director of the Writing Center (interim)
312-344-8111
sbmalley@colum.edu