Ilona Leki

Twenty-Five Years of Contrastive Rhetoric: Text Analysis and Writing Pedagogies.

Contrastive rhetoric studies with implications for the ESL writing classroom began with Robert Kaplans 1966 study of some 600 L2 student essays. This work was exploratory and, to a degree, more intuitive than scientific, but valuable in establishing contrastive rhetoric as a new field of inquiry. It has also created controversy. Kaplans diagrams of rhetorical patterns have been widely reprinted, appearing even in ESL composition textbooks. Indeed, it is in L2 writing classes that contrastive rhetoric work has the greatest potential practical application. The diagrams, with their implications in regard to patterns of written discourse, readily place contrastive rhetoric into the current traditional approach to teaching ESL writing (Silva, 1990), but contrastive rhetoric has not found much favor with those who adopt a process orientation to teaching writing. Proponents of process approaches maintain that contrastive rhetoric research examines the product only, detaching it from and ignoring both the contrastive rhetorical context from which the L2 writers emerge and the processes these writers may have gone through to produce a text. Furthermore, as a result of this research orientation toward the product, when the findings of contrastive rhetoric have been applied to L2 writing, they have, almost by definition, been prescriptive: In English we write like this; those who would write well in English must look at this pattern and imitate it. Modern contrastive rhetoric researchers, hoping to reconcile contrastive rhetoric to teaching composition, insist, perhaps somewhat defensively, that text-oriented research does not equal product-oriented writing instruction (Grabe & Kaplan, 1989). While that may be the case, in practice the diagrams have, in fact, been used to justify prescriptive approaches to teaching writing. Even more unfortunately, perhaps because of the simplicity of the diagrams, the findings of early contrastive rhetoric studies were

A Narrow Thinking System : Nonnative-English-Speaking Students in Group Projects Across the Curriculum

In examining the contexts of learning for L2 English bilinguals, educators and researchers may have ignored an important feature of that context, the social/academic relationships the learners develop with native-English-speaking peers. Long considered a means of promoting learning and independence among students, group work is one domain where such social/academic interactions occur in university-level courses across the curriculum in English-dominant countries. The research reported here details the experiences of two nonnative-English-speaking (NNES) students in course-sponsored group projects. The findings suggest that the particular social/academic relationships that develop within work groups may undermine the ability of NNES students to make meaningful contributions to the group projects. Furthermore, even group projects that appear to work well may conceal particular burdens for NNES students of which faculty who assign group projects may remain unaware.

Broadening the Perspective of Mainstream Composition Studies: Some Thoughts from the Disciplinary Margins

In this article we (a) argue that mainstream composition studies is at present too narrow in its scope and limited in its perspective and (b) offer some thoughts, from our unique interdisciplinary position, that we feel could help mainstream composition professionals improve this situation. In our article, we first provide evidence that we feel suggests an unfortunate pattern of neglect in mainstream composition studies of writing in English as a second language (ESL) and writing in languages other than English. We then introduce a number of concepts from second language studies (primarily from second language acquisition and second language writing instruction) that we believe could help mainstream composition studies address its limitations; develop a more global and inclusive understanding of writing; and thus avoid being seen as a monolinguistic, monocultural, and ethnocentric enterprise.

Living through College Literacy Nursing in a Second Language

This case study of a Chinese undergraduate nursing student focuses on her literacy experiences in her nursing major. Although traditional academic writing played some role in her education, the unusual demands of nonacademic, disciplinary documents, particularly nursing care plans (NCPs), played a more significant and more intractable role in her education and in the difficulties she faced. This investigation of features of academic literacy across the curriculum also embeds this student’s experience in broader concerns of the nursing curriculum and nursing regulatory agencies, further complicating the role of disciplinary literacy acquisition.

WRITING, LITERACY, AND APPLIED LINGUISTICS

The first charge to the contributors to this volume was to consider applied linguistics from the point of view of the subfield each of us represents. Such a formulation constructs writing and literacy research as subordinate to the super-ordinate domain of applied linguistics and this was not one that corresponded well with my own sense of my work in relation to applied linguistics. To investigate this issue further, I informally questioned other writing researchers about whether or not they consider themselves applied linguists and what they do to be applied linguistics.

Outsiders: American Short Stories for Students of ESL

Literature for Discussion: A Reader for Advanced Students of English as a Second Language. John F. Povey