Teaching in a Writing Center Fall 2020

                Casanave emphasizes the seductive nature of contrastive rhetoric. We humans like to identify patterns where we see them. For example, my multilingual student from the current semester repeatedly used phrases like “meat of the goat”. I thought of the way Romance languages like French assign possessives, so I assumed that was the issue. The student knew French better than English. The problem with making these assumptions though is that, as Casanave notes, we mistake other educational issues as purely language barriers. When I assumed a linguistic origin for my student’s wording, I dismissed any individual problems he might have.  My student's first language wasn't even French, so why go to that instead of his actual tongue?               The galling part is that I experienced learning another language: Spanish. My family moved to the United States when I was only a yea...

    The videos made me think about how I can broaden my expectations as a teacher of writing in order to accommodate a wider range of organizational and rhetorical preferences. American organizational preferences as defined in the videos are so ingrained in me as a writer and teacher -- getting right to the point in the introduction, not using the first person in academic papers, limiting the sources you cite to course readings, aiming for clarity, etc. I considered how, as a teacher and tutor, I can help international students learn what American preferences are and how to meet their American professors’ expectations — in cases where the students’ professors are unfortunately not going to accommodate intercultural rhetorics — without devaluing the preference of the students’ native cultures. In terms of these contrasting cultural preferences, I was particularly interested in the discussion of how readers in Japan are typically expected to “participate more” in the reading pro...

 An important takeaway I had from the videos and articles was that nothing exists in a vacuum--individual writing abilities aren't solely defined by native language, but are shaped by a combination of language, culture, politics, and one's own individual tastes and thought processes. I do believe it's a useful tool to know these ideas of intercultural rhetoric when approaching student work, and to have an awareness that their thought process and foundation to writing is likely different from what I was taught in an American school (the 5 essay paragraph, don't use the first person, etc.) But ultimately it's just one lens in a big box of tools when it comes to teaching writing.  The video has made me interested in how translation from Japanese to English works. One of my favorite author is Sayaka Murata, and I've read the translated version of her short stories and her novel Convenience Store Woman. I wonder if it was sort of dumbed down for American readers? I f...

As I read through Casanave’s article, I was struck by how interesting contrastive/intercultural rhetoric are as ideas. In particular, the brief mention of how those concepts have been informed by corpus linguistics (29), or using computers to analyze large chunks of text, reminded me of an aspect of information literacy I’m currently researching. Part of teaching library instruction sessions in the classroom is talking about information literacy, and a big topic in information literacy nowadays is how to recognize “fake news.” To that end, there has been a recent development in AI-generated text called GPT-3 that, in limited use-cases, has reached the point of being able to produce short pieces of text that are almost indistinguishable from human-created text. Moreover, it’s able to create writing in different styles, and it can even mimic individual famous writers. The possibilities of using this, or a future evolution of the idea, to create “fake news” and other such things are obv...

While I find the concepts of CR and IR intriguing in theory, I agree with Casanave's assessment that they don't offer much (yet at least) in terms of concrete pedagogical insight or improved practices. What seems clear enough in the abstract, like that cultures write and communicate differently, becomes less clear, less certain, and less helpful in the specific. Instinctually, it makes sense to me that the individual is at least as powerful a force on writing style as the individual's home culture. I say that because when I think of my own writing, my style will vary wildly depending on the occasion and the audience. Thus, I was pleased with Casanave's assertion that audience expectations is a sound core principle to emphasis when teaching writing, especially ESL students who might be less familiar with the expectations of American professors and peers. I also was amused by Kaplan's use of the term "negative transfer" to denote instances when features of...

This seems to be largely a continuation of previous topics, and I can't say that my thoughts have really changed too much. Robertson's video aligns with what I've already described previously, that intelligibility should always be the primary consideration. Is the meaning there? Are their ideas thoughtful or fleshed out, or at the very least, show a sense of engagement? The one teacher perfectly explains that "do" versus "does" has no bearing on reader understanding, and, in the past, that has always been my methodology when approaching papers in general . I would even say that "correct"/"standard" grammar contributes very little when a reader has context.  Perhaps, more enlightening were some of the student anecdotes of the video, particularly in mind were the Turkish student and the Ecuadorian student. Both students mentioned difference in form and how what an American might consider to be basic formatting and structure seems a bit ...

  A, perhaps obvious, takeaway from this week’s materials is that it seems clearly good to be aware of cultural differences surrounding writing. This awareness ideally would motivate us all to expand our thinking and challenge our assumptions about the best ways to present various arguments. It seems to me that we should all learn more about different styles of writing and argumentation and some of the contexts in which these different styles are deployed. These considerations would enrich all of our writing—helping us disrupt the “standard, academic” essay form (if such a form even really exists!), and working to make a more inclusive, engaging, provocative world of writing.  I do however worry about the ways that a Cultural Rhetoric approach to teaching ESL students could lead to generalizations that are untrue, inaccurate, and/or unhelpful. It seems to me that focusing too much on the ‘culture’ side of things will cause us to obscure the needs of the individual student (or ...

      I think being aware of the possibilities for different writing styles and teaching practices internationally is important. I think intercultural rhetoric gives the opportunity to be aware of protentional issues and plan to deliberately teach the specifics of American academic arguments. I think, as with any Composition 1 or Rhetoric 1 students, international students should be introduced to the style of American academic papers and have them diagrammed. I don’t think that academic papers need to be set as the standard for the most logical or most intelligent form of writing, they’re certainly not the most intuitive, they’re just the standard we happen to have. The biggest issue I see with Intercultural/contrastive rhetoric, is that it seems very Eurocentric and built on generalizations and untestable assumptions, a criticism that Casanave doesn’t shy away from. I think Kaplan’s original idea that transfer from the language or ‘culture’ was in...

Aside from my critique that Tony Silva--one of the speakers from the videos--needs to speak with a little more enthusiasm, one of my main focuses in watching the videos and reading the chapter on contrastive and intercultural rhetoric had to do with the parallels between written language rhetorical variations and training in philosophy. I do not consider myself a philosophical thinker in a strict sense, but I do think of philosophy--and the learning of philosophy--as a way of training one’s brain to look at topics differently. The conversations within the videos and reading made me consider how approaching different writing assignments is a lot like learning to think in ways that go beyond one’s own academic and cultural background. In this way, I think it would be valuable for American educators to learn how individuals from other cultures construct sentences, arguments, and pieces of writing in general. Rather than focusing on colonizing the written structural, stylistic, and formatt...

 I found the perspective of the Writing Across Borders video to be incredibly helpful and informative. I was reminded a bit of my time in Amsterdam and being in class with students from a wide variety of countries. Although it wasn't a strict academic setting, there were definite cultural differences that arose and (more often than not) American and European voices were the dominant ones in the conversation. These videos wish that my program had employed a more diverse collection of teaches from countries outside of the Eurocentric academic institutions. While I think it is tricky to formulate one approach to teaching students from different backgrounds, I really resonated with what Vicki Tolar Burton said around 8:02 in part 2 about having an intentional conversation with each of her international students. I think this is a great way to approach the "problem" of cultural diversity and open up conversation about the potential differences that might arise. In a classroom ...

Students in my GEL class are reading Heavy by Kiese Laymon and we were discussing a chapter in which the narrator and his friends hanging out in middle school, and one of my students said, "It's hard to read the dialogue because they don't talk normal." I almost groaned but didn't. Instead, I calmly said, "You know, let's discuss that thought for a moment" and then went on a lecture about how when we say things like "this way of speaking is or isn't normal we end up otherizing groups of people and saying that our own version of English is what's normal, and that's not okay." Later, a student in the class, who's Black, emailed me and we talked about this incident, how white students can easily and unknowingly invalidate, erase, and outcast people of color in the classroom. We discussed the importance of inclusivity in the classroom. All this is to say that I do agree with the CCCC statement, and that following some rule of ...

As I was reading through the CCCC's declaration, a constant question on my mind was "What is Black language?" I come from a place of ignorance. I understand the rejection of linguistic standardization; the purpose of a language is to communicate, not to enforce an arbitrary standard. The problem is that Black language still has conventions and rules, and many people, including myself, aren't familiar with those rules and conventions. Demand #4 aims to solve this dilemma, but until there's widespread consciousness of Black language, how do we address the topic? I'm especially concerned about what advice to give students using Black language when I don't know the professor's attitude on the topic. Do I talk with the professor with the student's permission?  The previous paragraph highlights a mental block in how I treat Black language. I say I'm fluent in English, yet I also say I'm not familiar with Black language, which is just English. Tal...

  “College was a whole new world from high school, and I had been fortunate enough to find friends and resources to help me, but when I came to Purdue, I realized it had not been intended for me, or people like me; despite decades of access, some things about the place still resisted me. ” (23-24) This part from Morrison’s essay really resonated with me because I had a similar experience in my own life. I went to a college that was very, very different from where I grew up, and when I first got there I felt a similar sense of alienation. That sense stayed with me until, by chance, I went to the office hours of a Spanish professor to ask something and accidentally said something in Spanglish, which is what I grew up speaking. I still remember how the professor’s face lit up as he started talking in a rapid-fire Mexican Spanglish, and how I finally felt like I could actually belong at the college as I fired back and we laughed and talked like human beings instead of actors beholde...

During my freshman year of high school, I had an English teacher who stood by the concept that communication does not have a standard. Or, rather, that as long as the information is understood, then delivery didn't necessarily matter. For instance, is "vernaculate" a word? Doesn't matter, as long as the point is made, as long as the receiver of the message understands what is being said.  These statements from MSU and the CCCC reminded me of this particular moment in high school, and a potentially surprising one to learn in an English classroom. The sentiment has stuck with me over the years, and I can't help but feel how true that remains. A "standard" or "academic" English/language seems largely out of place in a world where language constantly evolves and changes from individual to individual. Alongside its racist implications, standardization limits expression, limits the ways we can feel free to articulate ourselves. Really, this comes dow...