630 Journal #1

(Originally written for Second Language Writing, submitted on 03 September 2010. Edited to add the names of articles discussed.) So far it's been an interesting experience, reading in a field that seems both alien and familiar at once. Many of the things we've read about—composition exercises, doubts about grammar instruction, and student attitude—feel quite similar to what I've studied in rhetoric and composition, but then separate histories and theories shift and reshape the narrative I've created. I find myself wondering what "ALM" and "University of Michigan" signify. I'm puzzled when everybody seems so reluctant about Stanley Kaplan's article, "Cultural Thought Patterns in Intercultural Education" (1966), even though many of his ideas seem to resonate with things still being discussed today. What's been most surprising, however, is how little my own background in second language studies prepared me for what we're reading and discussing now. Only two years ago, I was teaching conversational English in Poland, and while I'd never claim to be an expert based on a single year of experience, I thought I had a decent idea of how that kind of teaching should go. I hoped, perhaps, that some of what we read would be old hat. To my dismay, many of the pedagogical strategies in our historical articles—particularly those of Gibian, Ives, and Pincas—seem to be dismissed because scholars know better somehow. Yet the methods and materials I instructed to use with my Polish students was considered effective and relatively common. As Gibian suggested in "College English for Foreign Students" (1951), our students were often asked to write short pieces on specific topics, usually in the form of a story. (The stories had to follow a very particular pattern.) They were expected to read articles (though not so dense as the ones Gibian prescribed) and summarize and answer questions on them. Idioms, of course, were frequent sources of amusement, but digging into the meaning behind them often presented a challenge. Aside from this, however, lessons often took a sterner cast, as my students also had to memorize and imitate sentence patterns, as Ives advocated in "Help for the Foreign Student" (1953). (I recall one hour spent endlessly generating sentences that ended in "though.") And in conversation, I was supposed to correct mistakes in pronunciation and grammar repeatedly, no matter how many times they were made. Sadly, there were no Erazmus moments in those classes—freewriting, as he described it in "Second Language Composition Teaching at the Intermediate Level" (1960), was not considered something that would improve their skills. The methods Pincas supported in "Structural Linguistics and Systematic Composition Teaching to Students of English as a Second Language" (1962) were preferred: building composition grammatically, rather than creatively. They were given model sentences (and later, model paragraphs) and new vocabulary, and then expected to generate sentences that looked like the models, using the new vocabulary. While it felt like they incrementally became more comfortable with the patterns, they often froze when asked to generate sentences without their models. Maybe, though, it shouldn't be a surprise that, in some ways, what happens "in the wild" diverges from what scholars in the field advocate. After all, the purpose of the methods might be somewhat different. In Poland, much of the concern often centered on looming tests—high school students facing their A-levels, or students of all ages working towards proficiency exams. Yet, as we discussed in reaction to Zamel's article, "Teaching Composition in the ESL Classroom" (1976), though those proficiency exams are passed, students who choose to study in the United States (or some other country where English is a native language) discover the proficiency they've worked toward is often found sorely lacking. It's funny that this, too, is often a familiar complaint. "Why didn't they learn what they needed before they got here?" Composition instructors bemoan America's high schools. Now, perhaps, we lower our brows at whoever scores the TOEFL results, or whatever proficiency exam indicated they were, in fact, proficient in English. (I once had a student who, having passed her proficiency exam with a high score, was suddenly frustrated when she tried watching BBC news and couldn't follow most of it.) There is a gap between what students learn prior to College English and what is expected of them in College English. Further, conversational proficiency does not equal writing proficiency, no matter the language being used. (Ask any 18-year-old to compose a short story in their native language, and the issues will soon be revealed.) While Kaplan was definitely too simplistic in his assessment of the ways culture changes narrative style, it is true that learning new genres of writing are infinitely more difficult when the writer is struggling with the nuance of the language in the first place. So where does that leave us? Or at least, where does that leave me, the composition scholar who plans to administrate College English programs in the future, programs with increasing numbers of non-native English speakers and a scant number of instructors who are prepared for that particular challenge? It seems ridiculous to lower what we consider the standards of College English, but it seems equally impossible to raise the bar for proficiency exams and ESL instruction worldwide.