Dialogue on Writing: Rethinking ESL, Basic Writing, and First-year Composition
Language: English
Pages: 504
ISBN: 0805838619
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Designed for courses on theories and methods of teaching college writing, this text is distinguished by its emphasis on giving teachers a foundation of knowledge for teaching writing to a diverse student body. As such, it is equally relevant for teacher training in basic writing, ESL, and first year composition, the premise being that in most colleges and universities today teachers of each of these types of courses encounter similar student populations and teaching challenges. Many instructors compile packets of articles for this course because they cannot find an appropriate collection in one volume. This text fills that gap. It includes in one volume:
*the latest thinking about teaching and tutoring basic writing, ESL, and first year composition students;
*seminal articles, carefully selected to be accessible to those new to the field, by classic authors in the field of composition and ESL, as well as a number of new voices;
*attention to both theory and practice, but with an emphasis on practice; and
*articles about non-traditional students, multiculturalism, and writing across the disciplines.
The text includes suggestions for pedagogy and invitations for exploration to engage readers in reflection and in applications to their own teaching practice.
Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers 10 Industrial Avenue Mahwah, New Jersey 07430 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dialogue on writing : rethinking ESL, basic writing, and first-year composition / edited by Geraldine DeLuca ... [et al.]. p. cm. Includes
freedom.” Shor’s essay describes a basic writing class in which his students are angry at the test that has placed them there and that they perceive to be unfair. He describes in some detail how he moved the students toward a conception of what a fairer test would be and then to a reading and writing curriculum that evolved out of their needs and interests and that enabled most of them to pass the test at the end of the term. This was not, of course, the solution to all their problems, but Shor’s
student demonstrated no understanding of a writer’s ability to use language to create a world. In her mind Faulkner was doing the work of a stringer, and she was content to summarize what she perceived to be his impartial recording of events. When I shared my own reading of “Dry September,” a story on one level about a rumor of rape, I started explaining how it spoke to me about a certain psychosexual sickness that lies just below the surface of Southern life easily exposed by even the slightest
commodification of X, I’m looking for some X-ification, if you will, some basic decency and far less greed in our structures of commodity. I’m seeking some X-ification, some gentle equalities and student empowerment in our establishments of education. This is how I am reading X as text. I may seem far afield from my basic argument, but actually I have merely stepped inside it for a moment, personifying critical reading ability, conceived broadly, though, of course, I don’t imagine that everyone
already that their writing for the classroom is “artificial” and that what they say “doesn’t really matter” as long as they give the teacher “what she wants.” I want to examine this perception of their “job” as students, not erase the ways they and I are constructed by our institutional and cultural roles. At the same time, I want to suggest that we can be more conscious of how all of our experiences are rhetorically constructed and consider why it might “matter” to tell our stories one way