Many of the points and tips I pulled out from this video were apparent in the readings as well, but they hit me much harder when I watched the video. Listening to the students explaining their situation made me really realize how much of a struggle L2 writing can be, culturally speaking.
Power was one of the issues that stood out most in the video. The Turkish student pointed out that other countries look up to US education, yet we saw that none of the students felt familiar or comfortable with the writing structure and expectations in US universities. With all of our talk about Kaplan’s ethnocentricity, some of Amy’s questions kept ringing in my head: are we only considering English writing linear because that’s our standard? Are we imposing standards on “others”?
I thought Tony Silva’s comment about having to simply decide what’s “good enough” was well-put. I think that wording might not be preferred by a lot of teachers—it sounds something like settling for quality that isn’t as high as possible—but it is true; we have to decide what is sufficient, what we can reasonably ask for and expect from our students—especially in FYC class—and then work to help the students improve that even just a small bit (especially in 101 classes).
The final discussion question from the handout we received gave me a long pause. I had a similar experience recently, so the hypothetical question has true relevance to my teaching. In the 101 class in which I act as a consultant (I run the class two out of five days a week and construct lessons and activities around the instructor’s larger projects; my classes usually address specific problems or concerns that students have brought up), I have one non-native speaker. Though both the instructor and I have taught ESL and spoke to her about it before (to the NNS student’s relief), I know sometimes the lessons are not as clear to her as they are to other students. Fortunately, a native speaker (NS) who sits next to her regularly helps clarify instructions to her and assists her whenever the technology used in the class confuses her.
The class recently finished its first major project, and a few days before the final draft was due, NS approached me after class and asked me if it would be okay if he edited NNS’s paper for, as he put it, “grammar and spelling.” I had to think about the question and took awhile to answer. I basically told him that, although I could see his concern was heartfelt, it would not be good or productive if he just ran over her whole paper in Word and “fixed” everything that didn’t look right. I told him that, if he wanted to help her, he could walk her through some of the common mistakes he saw in her paper and sit down with her to explain how and why—emphasizing that this wasn’t his responsibility at all, and that if NNS needed to see either me or the instructor, we’d gladly sit down with her and do something similar.
NS understood , but I could see his concern—the same concern of the student who wants his/her statement of purpose to sound like a native speaker had written it: the assumption is that, if it doesn’t sound like the writing of a native speaker, the “authorities” over that piece of writing are going to consider it junk. In my 101 class, of course, that isn’t true. However, I don’t know if it’s true in the case of a grad school committee. I’d like to say that it definitely isn’t, that some grammatical errors or a decidedly non-American essay construction are not going to be factors for which a NNS is not admitted to a grad program—but, tradition says that they would be factors.
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