Concept Post

After combing through the posts and thoughts of my fellow peers that have embarked on this learning journey with me, I have found a couple similar themes in all of their discussions regarding the most important concepts one should have in mind while taking a course titled “The Teaching Of College Composition.”

One of the most prominent point to take away from my colleagues’ writings is that there is not one distinct ‘English’, and that most of us (and most writing programs in general) have standardized our writing to emulate what would be accepted as ‘academic English’. This ‘academic English’ is especially prominent in the U.S., making the rhetoric and composition journey for ESL/NNSs even more tumultuous and confusing. “Simply put,” Maddie explains in one of her entries exploring Robert Land and Catherine Whitley’s exploration of the evaluation of second-language student essays, “NSs have been trained to write according to the singular rhetorical convention accepted in U.S. academia; whereas, ESL students tend to write in differing rhetorical conventions that inexperienced composition teacher’s might read and analyze as having poorly constructed and unorganized arguments” (Carey 2016). The ESL students who are not well versed in ‘Standard Written English’ (the conventional English we are used to in academic settings) then suffer simply because their English isn’t up to our code. Now one may argue that it isn’t the differences of Englishes that is the issue, but the actual grammar itself, but Maddie debunks this in the same post where she relays that "According to their study, even when ESL students wrote papers free of grammatical errors, they still received a lower grade and lower peer-review than native speaking students" (Carey 2016). Another colleague of mine, Casey Guditus, writes similarly on behalf of paying attention to speakers of English who are non-native. In her discussion of G. Park’s 2012 study of five women enrolled in a TESOL program in America (mainly of Xia, a woman who was taught English in China), she relays Xia speaking of how she felt powerless due to her inadequacy of English (Guditus 2016). Xia notes that even though she was good at her English courses in China, she realized that English in Chinese classrooms was taught in a manner that would benefit students in tests, not in authentic English communication (Park 2012). Casey, in her review on Ferris, Brown, Hsiang, Eugenia, and Stine’s research on how teachers are prepared for/how they respond to L2 students, gives us the result of one of their surveys administered to 129 teachers, showing that only 22% of composition instructors had any sort of training in regards to L2 students (Ferris et al. 2011). “Teachers should individualize their feedback based on student needs, and address not only grammatical errors, but global errors as well,” Guditus points out (Guditus 2012). This is exemplified again in Atari and Triki’s breakdown on the revision of EFL writers. The two point out how the main practice of revision revolves around correcting mechanical errors rather than larger problems with the meaning of the whole piece itself (Atari and Triki 2000). The point that has been made that English and rhetoric come in many different styles, not just the one we are used to.

As we move forward as teachers of college composition, we must not only be aware of that fact, but also our own implicit biases to the kind of English we have been so conditioned into writing and reading.

In one of her blog posts, Linda Chary quotes Shirley Lim as saying “"writing is a collective act, an act that builds on the attempts of other writers to transform silence" (Lim 2010). This statement is in reference to the pedagogy of creative writing and, in the broader context, the pedagogy of writing in general. This brings us to the other concept which I believe should be equally as paramount as understanding that there are different kinds of English and rhetoric, and that concept is that college composition and creative writing are no longer two separate entities. As discussed in class, and from personal experience, more and more faculty for composition classrooms is comprised of graduate students in the MFA creative writing programs. Chary notes that we will “have students from all different disciplines but they will all have to write research papers and do academic writing. It is our responsibility to teach them  how to do it in a way that demystifies it, makes it accessible to them,” (Chary 2016). And with the background that some of us will have in creative writing, there is no doubt that the pedagogy we’ve undertaken through creative writing would bleed through our attempts at teaching college composition. Chary takes a look at Hilary Jank, who, after a two week course on academic writing, describes the pedagogy as “a synthesis of academic writing with several techniques of creative writing, by a professor whose philosophy was that even research writing was creative writing” (Jank 2012). Christopher Giofreda brings up Douglas Hesse’s article “The Place Of Creative Writing in Composition Studies,” to tackle, almost word for word, this exact issue as well. Hesse argues that rhetoric and composition should tackle the ways in which composition studies look at what the writing is ‘about’ rather than what it is ‘for’ (Hesse 2010). If we are to continually engage writing and creative writing as two different entities, then we have teachers versed in one method of writing trying to teach students a more ‘standard’ method, and that will, inevitably, clash. (Note too, how this plays into the first concept above: two different kinds of ‘English’, or writing in this case.) If we don’t pay attention and attempt to bring together the nuances of ‘rhetoric and composition’ and ‘creative writing,’ we stand to create an even larger divide that creates a distinct discursive gap between the two most common forms of writing in academia today.

            As a sort of a final thought, while there may be other concepts and themes out there that my colleagues have not as deeply delved into, that could also prove equally as vital to the “Teaching Of College Composition” repertoire, I stand in agreement with these two concepts as integral components of this classroom experience. Coming from a family background where English wasn’t the main language spoken at home, as well as the creative writing side of the coin, I personally can see the merit in having both these concepts fastened to the core of the pedagogy of composition. Without them, I think there is a vast overlooking of the needs future students may (and honestly, most probably will) have.