English 495: Tuesday, April 19

I found this readings particularly interesting this week, perhaps because the articles appear to parallel some of the issues that I am working on in relation to my paper for this class. I am considering how to better educate preservice teachers to work with ESL writers. However, many of the same things that I have considered within this also appear to arise when discussing faculty members involved in WAC. "Train all faculty, including WAC faculty in the disciplines, in appropriate pedagogical techniques for reaching MLLs," writes Hall. He notes that the job of teaching writing to these second language learners is neither fully the job of either the WAC instructor or the ESL instructor. Rather, it is the job of both to help work with these students. In my paper, I echo this collaboration with mainstream and ESL teachers at the secondary level. Really, collaboration amongst faculty members is essential at any level regardless of what types of students they are educating. It almost seems like common sense to me, although a sense that rarely gets acted upon it seems

The metaphor of writing in the disciplines as a second language is something new to me, and I am not sure exactly how much I agree with it. Yes, I'm sure I would find it hard at first to write up some scientific report, being unfamiliar with form, etc. Yet, I just can see how this can be equated to a foreign language at all. Sure, some structure or terminology may be different, but the words are not foreign. Now if one would have me write that scientific report in, say, German, then that would be a completely different, and extremely troublesome, story.

I like that fact that Hall mentioned that MLLs may actually have some advantages over monolingual speakers in WAC programs. They have already had to adapt to new genres, to new languages, so that linguistic adaptability is inevitable. Perhaps that's why I had so much trouble with academic writing once I returned to school after wrtiting only journalistic scripts for so long. I better get back to those Spanish lessons...