[Teaching_Composition] NEW MODULE

[Kathy Fitch]

Most interesting thing an ESL student ever said to me:  "I think about Math
in Korean; I think about girls in English."  There's a bit of wisdom with
many layers to it!  At the time, he was writing an essay in which he was
examining how his place in languages made him feel constantly torn.  His
parents spoke exclusively in their native language at home.  They clearly
wanted--and even pressured--him to be fluent in English in order to be a
high achiever in school.  (They were pushing him toward a medical career.
He wanted to be an artist.)  Well, he *was* amazingly fluent in American
English, but he was also amazingly fluent in (and very comfortable with)
American culture, an outcome his parents weren't very happy about at all.
They apparently believed that if they only forced him to hang onto fluency
in Korean, he might also come to think of girls (and marriage, and family,
and all of their various values surrounding such things) in Korean, too.

Like many ESL writers I've worked with, he had a very interesting approach
to drafting, often writing in alternating layers of English and Korean, the
placement and length of the shifts depending on what he was trying to say,
how complicated it was, and how comfortable he was expressing it in English.
(Thus, the comment above.)  Often, he would run the Korean patches past me,
trying to get a sense of ways he might express the idea in English.
Sometimes, the sheer act of trying to explain it out loud in English helped
him discover a path toward writing it.  Other times, he would simply try to
translate from the Korean into English when he revised, but usually that
turned out to be more awkward. 

I've had other students who always tried to come at writing from that angle,
too, though--drafting totally in the language most comfortable for them, and
then trying to translate (or transliterate, really, which isn't quite the
same thing at all).  I wonder how much of the syntactical awkwardness we
wonder what to do with stems from that approach.  The main block to
composing directly in English seemed to be the feeling this forced them into
simple--or what they reported sensing as *simplistic*--constructions, but my
experience has been that if you can get students composing in English right
from the beginning (even with some patching or layering, which is not only
progress, but a pretty smart technique for keeping the writing moving along
past troublesome spots, I think), without worrying too much about sounding
too simple, their confidence and ease develops more quickly, because then
they are truly being writing students as opposed to translators.  Then, you
get to push toward the next step of encouraging appreciation for productive
error--the thing untried goes unlearned.

Kathy