March 26, 2007

Writing Across Borders Workshop, Feb. 21st, 2007

Filed under: Activity News, ESL/International GTAs, Evaluating Student Writing, Responding to Student Writing, Sponsored Workshops — at 1:35 pm

On February 21st, Laurie Maynell, an instructional consultant in FTAD, and I facilitated a discussion on how to respond international students’ writing. After watching Writing Across Borders–a documentary produced by experts at Oregon State University– we engaged in a lively discussion on the strategies we can use to improve international students’ writing.

This documentary’s main purpose is to help faculty, writing assistants, and other professionals work more effectively with international students in US classrooms by addressing some of the most significant challenges international students face whenwriting for American colleges and universities. This documentary is a nice real-life reflection that depicts the notion that people use different rhetorics when they write in different cultures. The documentary includes various interviews conducted with international students in which international students talk about the challenges they face in the process of adjusting into American rhetorical style of writing.

After watching the documentary, we addressed the following questions in our groups:

  • What do you do when you think you notice a cultural difference in how a student is writing or responding to an assignment?
  • How do you broach the subject?
  • What points were made in the film in regards to the relationship between culture and writing?
  • Some faculty members are obviously stricter about surface errors than others. The film points out that to be fair in their grading, faculty need to be aware that international students will write with an “accent”, that they will misuse articles, that they cannot be assessed entirely equally. Some faculty accept accent and grade accordingly while others do not. Should we worry at all about this issue?
  • How might you counsel students about this issue?
  • Share with your group members the strategies you use to help international students become effective writers. Are the strategies applicable to native English speaking students as well?

    • Thanks to the audience’s insightful comments, our workshop ended with some useful discussions about the kinds of teaching and evaluation practices that teachers could use to facilitate international students’ socialization processes to the American academic writing style and better prepare them to be successful writers. Some of the teaching strategies and practices emerged in our group discussion are as follows:

  • Engage in conversation with international students about their writing concerns
  • Invite international students to your office to talk about the kind of feedback that would help them best.
  • Avoid commenting on the small grammar issues unless they really interfered with the meaning.
  • Accented writing could be acceptable as log as it does not interfere with the meaning.
  • Focus on patterns of errors, rather than going over surface level errors in individual papers.
  • Be explicit about your writing expectations.
  • Make yourself familiar with the rhetorical conventions used in your students’ native language and discuss how they differ from Standard American English.

    • We wish to see you in our follow up workshop; Responding to International Student Writing on Friday April 6, from 1:30 to 3:30. Stay tuned for more information about this workshop. A reminder email will be sent at the beginning to the spring quarter. In this hands on session, we will be doing some interactive activities, where together we will look over some international students’ writing and discuss the most efficient ways that we can respond and evaluate international students’ writing.

    Thanks so much for your attendance and we hope to see you in our upcoming workshops during the Spring quarter!

    Lisya Seloni

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