English 495: Tuesday, February 1

"How do we identify a cultural pattern in writing, if there truly is such a thing?" I questioned after I read the readings focused on contrastive rhetoric for today. Contrastive rhetoric, or CR, appears to be one field of study that truly fires researchers up, regardless of whether they stand on the for or against side. I do believe that nearly every culture has some genre or other aspect of writing that is unique to that particular culture. Maybe instead of that ubiquitous five paragraph essay they have a four paragraph one or something else along those lines.

Yet, I am wary of putting such stringent labels on groups of people's writing. It was said that Kaplan's doodles were "widely cited for their intuitively compelling 'truths' and equally criticized for overgeneralizing a highly complex idea" (Casanave 28). In his doodles, English writing is represented as a straight line. I believe that the Connor makes a great point in her article when she questions whether speakers of other languages would even see English texts as straight-forward. If I am asked to read a text from a genre, etc. that I am not familiar with-but told beforehand that it was straightforward-I'm not sure that I would think it to be.

We also must be careful in lumping everyone from the same place/culture together. How does one know how a person truly grew up or learned how to write? I'm sure that if someone would look at the writing of people living on my same block, he or she would absolutely find some differences, maybe even ones that affected the very form of the writing.

I want to take the remainder of this blog to consider some ideas for my research project for class. As of now, I have simply a broad scope of what I want to focus on. It's the narrowing down part that appears to be a bit rough. I know that I want to research the writing of 6- 12 grade ESL students, or those students in secondary school in the United States specifically... perhaps how content area teachers with no ESL experience can better teach ESL students mainstreamed into their classroom. What techniques have been shown to improve their writing? How does grading/rubrics change when asked to teach a class with everyone from accelerated native students to ESL students with little L1 background knowledge?  These questions are simply where I am at right now; I am sure the focus will change, even if slightly, by tomorrow even.