Blog Post #5 (Darius Stewart)

Of course, or perhaps not so obviously, the main issue I've had in the classroom with nonnative students is the issue of contrastive rhetoric. As the article states, these students (who are nonnative speakers) are attempting to "acquire discourse-level patterns in their second language" (24). Moreover, in recent semesters, I've had at least one student come to me fully understanding they are attempting to acquire these patterns and therefore they are eminently aware how their writing might assume the foible that is "negative transfer, particularly of organizational and grammatical structures" (24). However, a concern I'm not sure the article explicitly confronts is that these students aren't worried so much about writing "in ways that are not 'English'-like," (27) but they are worried about how their writing skills might negatively affect their grades. In fact, a nonnative student has asked me on more than one occasion if I curve (or will curve) grades for written assignments. What this suggests to me, as an instructor in Gen. Ed. Lit., is something far different from what I understand is the point of this article. Though I assure these students that I evaluate their writing largely on how thoughtful their ideas are, understanding "negative transfer" is to be expected, except for a few instances, I haven't been able to sit with a nonnative student in a tutorial context to help them with these issues of organizational and grammatical structures. I make marginal comments on their papers, but that isn't always an effective substitute for one-to-one engagement.

Comments

  1. UnknownFebruary 19, 2019 at 7:34 AM

    It's interesting to think about how all of this theory could apply to our actual teaching. I have not had many international students, so it's hard to say what their primary concerns are about their own writing. But I would agree with you that they are far more concerned about their grades than about writing in an English manner--but this could be due to our student pool, who are largely not going into writing-heavy fields.

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