Bridging the Gap

I would like my final unit plan to focus on the needs of ESL students in their successful transition into academic writing.  The theme of the course would evolve around this particular student population and what skills they require to be successful in academia.  International students come to America with many skills they have acquired in their home countries.  Many of them have used the grammar translation method to learn English so they bring a great knowledge of how the language works, but have little training in the structure of an essay and writing thesis statements.  Even with a good foundation in English grammar ESL learners still have difficulty applying it to the academic writing that is required in our schools.  I believe this student population does not just magically become ready for freshmen composition.  I think these students need to become familiar with the academic writing process both in regards to grammar and style. 

This would be a beginning-of-the-semester unit catered for ESL writers making the transition into academic writing.  I would want this course to introduce ESL students to an academic discourse community and give them a sense of belonging as well as confidence that they can become academic writers.  The orientation of the course would be a mix of expressivist and critical academic discourse.  The goal of the course being to foster ESL students in expressing themselves with their writing and also enabling them to write for an academic audience. 

I would probably want to start the unit with pre-writing heuristics and an autobiography writing assignment leading to a short presentation of the students writing.  I believe this would help build community because many international students want to express who they are and a little bit about their culture.  The readings for this unit would not only focus on the difficulties that ESL students have making the transition into academic writing, but also articles and readings about all novice writers.  I would want the ESL students to feel a part of the academic writing community and see that all new writers have difficulties.  Again my goal would be to give these new writers a sense of confidence and nudge them towards becoming successful academic writers.  These are just a few of my ideas.  I am excited about creating a unit to enable international students to bridge the gap in their transition into academic writing because I truly believe this is a need for ESL students.  

 

Community in the Classroom

In his article Community-Building In The Classroom: A Process, Nicholas Sacra Nevaire talks about the importance of building community in the classroom to help students be intrinsically motivated to learn and feel safe to take risks in their learning environment.  The author goes on a little political rant comparing American culture to that of an Aboriginal society to prove the benefits of community vs. individualism. Nicholas Sacra Nevaire goes on to give a definition of community and why he feels it is needed in the classroom.

What I took away from this article was that by cultivating community in the classroom teachers give their students a safe haven to experiment and learn from their mistakes.  A community classroom will also foster intrinsic motivation.  Both a safe environment to learn in and motivated students will decrease some of the anxiety that students feel.  I am a firm believer in the linguist Stephen Krashen’s theory on anxiety effecting students ability to learn in the classroom.  The Affective Filter Hypothesis (Stephen Krashen 1982) speculated that learners have a filter that affects their ability to learn.  If the student is anxious and not motivated when learning then they will have a high filter which will make it difficult for comprehensible input to reach the brain. If on the other hand the student is comfortable and motivated, then their filter will be low and they will learn.  This is a prime example why community is so important for students in the classroom.  The more comfortable they feel amongst their peers and teacher the better equipped they will be to learn.

I also liked how Nicholas experimented with allowing his students to only ask one question a day and having them rely on their fellow classmates for other answers.  I do not think the one question a day method would work in a composition class because I would want my students to critically think, but I do think it is a good idea to facilitate students in helping each other out with unanswered questions.  I think one of the best ways to learn is to teach what you know to someone else.  Students that do not fully understand will benefit from the help of the classmate that explains things to them and in turn the student explaining will learn from teaching what they know.

I also see the benefit of Nicholas’ suggestion of keeping students together for consecutive semesters.  This enables the community to get to truly develop over time and takes some pressure off of the instructor in having to reestablish a new community every semester.  I believe that our Composition for Multi-lingual Students program here at San Francisco State already practices this community-building idea in its English 201 to 202 track.  I think this is a great idea and I also like the idea of block courses where students can stay in the same groups in classes of similar disciplines.  

Difficulty Reading Salvatori

Difficulty Reading Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition by Mariolina Salvatori

When I first started reading the Salvatori article I once again found myself going back and re-reading portions of the text that I did not understand the first time around.  This is obviously a reading strategy that I use that was made evident through this activity of reading difficult texts.  I found several difficulties I was having getting through the Salvatori acticle.  I did not fully understand the metalanguage or difficult vocabulary the author was using for example Salvatori states, “I began to see that what Coles was indicting was a particularly enervated, atrophied kind of reading” (Salvatori 442). The author goes on to use other vocabulary like gridded and pharmakon that I had troubled making sense of.  I found myself not having the background knowledge for particular terms that Salvatori was using.  Another issue I was having was the author’s introduction of theorists and their theories.  I believe Salvatori just assumes that her reader already has knowledge of these theorists and their theories.  My strategy for getting a deeper reading of this text would be to highlight the difficult metalanguage/vocabulary and try to look up their definitions to derive more meaning from the text.  Another thing I would try and do is do research on the theorists she mentions and see if I can get a better understanding of their theories. Another problem I had was when the author gave definitions of terms in another language.  I am not really sure how I would overcome this type of difficulty other than trying to look up the translations for these words.  Although I found Salvatori’s article slightly difficult to read I understand her argument for enabling students to take deeper reads of the texts they encounter and to not only derive their own arguments, but understand the writers argument as well.

 

Difficulty Reading Faulkner

Difficulty Reading The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

I chose to read some William Faulkner for my difficulty reading because I have heard that he is a difficult read.  I’ve never read any of his novels before.  However, I did pick up As I Lay Dying once and did a little pre-reading of it, but never bought the book or continued.  I thought The Sound and the Fury may be a good text for this assignment so I picked it up at Aardvark books and just started reading. It was hard for me to just dive in because I always like to do a little pre-reading first.  I read the first ten pages of the novel and I would have to say one of the difficulties I was having was the large number of characters being introduced and then the quick time shifts where as a reader I couldn’t tell which characters were in the scene at any given moment.  One reason I think I was having difficulty was because I couldn’t figure out what was happening right from the start.  The author was using the pronoun ‘they’ without introducing who ‘they’ were.  And this ‘they’ were hitting something which gave me the impression they were playing golf.  I used to bartend on a golf course so my golf repertoire helped me a little here if I was correct in my assumption, but I could have been wrong because the author mentioned a caddie which later turned out to be one of the characters names.  There were also moments when the text would become italicized and a character named Luster was mentioned.  Luster seemed to be scolding the narrator and then the author would shift back to un-italicized text and there would be different characters introduced.  It was also hard to figure out what was going on with the main character.  All of the other characters seemed to be treating him like a dog or a child. I also think I was having difficulty with the language of the text.  The characters seemed to be speaking in what seemed like a southern dialect that I am not familiar with.  I noticed that one thing I do when I have a hard time with a text is go back and re-read passages. If I had begun to read this text on my own I would definitely go back and do some pre-reading.  I would read the back of the book and try to get a sense of the main characters.  I would read the authors biography to see if I could gain a little insight to the historical repertoire of the text.  Maybe I would annotate the text by highlighting the characters names so I could keep track.  I know this would continue to be a difficult text to read because looking forward I noticed that the first chapter is 75 pages and the story didn’t seem to be going anywhere in the first 10 pages I had read.  I usually have a hard time putting down a book once I begin.  If it is difficult I just try to read through my difficulties.  I’m sure that is what I would do with this text if I had time to read it.