In, “Composition Studies and ESL Writing: A Disciplinary Division of Labor,” Paul Matsuda outlines the historical, political, and social forces that have shaped ESL teaching and Composition Studies as primarily distinct practices. Published in 1999, the article considers why at the time, “It almost [seemed] as though the presence of over 457,000 international students in colleges and universities across the nation (Davis 2) [did] not concern writing teachers and scholars.”
In 2019, twenty years after Matsuda, there are nearly 1.1 million international students enrolled in post-secondary institutions in the US (Institute of International Education, 2018). Given the cosmopolitan nature of our current academic landscape, the need to dissolve the tension between TESL and Composition Studies would appear greater than ever. The following blog posts will look at our ongoing efforts to bridge this gap by explaining how methodologies and best practices from both TESL and CS, as well as theories in Translingualism, inform the first-year writing courses shared in this website.
By elucidating the histories, interests, and bearings of both TESL and CS, we hope that the room for coordination among the two fields, and how we have located this space within our curricula, will be more clearly understood.
How We Got Here: A Shared History
Matsuda describes both Composition Studies and TESL as fields fighting for survival and recognition. Writing on the reputation of both camps in the broader university context, Matsuda explains that before 1941, “it was commonly believed that anyone whose native language was English was qualified to teach English to nonnative speakers-much as some thought any literate person could teach writing” (Matsuda, 1999).
While the difficulty of teaching either college writing or English to non-native speakers may now engender less skepticism (debatable), Matsuda characterizes the boundaries that exist between these fields as most often resulting from efforts to codify and substantiate each practice (but especially TESL) as academic fields worthy of administration attention, funding, research, training, and faculty appointments.
Matsuda notes the founding of Michigan’s English Language Institute in 1941 as a turning point in the professionalization and subsequent academic isolation of TESL. Much of this process centers around the development of an “applied linguistic” approach to language teaching, which the ELI promoted. In this way, instructors from this program, which would become an industry-wide standard setter and produce many methodological evangelizers, based their teaching off of linguistic theories and analysis.
Matsuda, citing Fries, captures the sentiment behind this applied linguistic foundation in the following quote:
“It is not enough for the foreign language teacher to be able to speak English; to be most effective he [sic] should know English-its sound system, its structural system, and its vocabulary-from the point of view of a descriptive analysis in accord with modern linguistic science.”
With an understanding of applied linguistics as such, the professional standard for an ESL instructor that further emerged in the second half of the 20th century required the teacher to be someone who is not only able to recast a grammatical solution after observing a mistake (e.g. “It’s “being,” not “‘been”’), but also someone capable of analyzing the ungrammatical phrase and explaining where it fits within a meta-linguistic understanding of both the target language (i.e. English), and the native language of the student (their L1).
Accordingly, instructor feedback that would meet the TESL standard for addressing a student error like “being” versus “been” may involve explicit discussion of a students’ knowledge of past participles, progressive inflections, and gerunds. It may also touch on the areas of interference from the native language that could be obscuring the students’ awareness of these differences. The instructor intervention may include a discussion of a preference for passive constructions within the student’s L1, which could explain the incorrect over-reliance on “been.” Additionally, the feedback may even touch on the student’s ability to distinguish between the phonetic differences in the oral production of “been” and “being.”
This applied linguistic approach was met with skepticism from some language instructors who weren’t educated according to the ELI standard (Matsuda). These teachers believed that the emphasis on linguistic theories was a form of unnecessary posturing. On the other hand, traditional structural linguists believed that the level of analysis and discussion produced by applied linguists wasn’t a sufficiently rigorous use of linguistics.
As a result, the TESL community circled their professional wagons, and doubled down on their methodological and theoretical principles by creating their own journals and conferences, which more often than not excluded, implicitly or explicitly, composition teachers who didn’t have the applied linguistics training.
The Need For Collaboration
Matsuda writes that, “in a 1956 panel entitled “Studies in English as a Second Language.” The panel chair, Paul R. Sullivan, began the session by noting that ‘all teachers of English frequently teach English as a second language’ in effect because of the presence of students who spoke a differing variety of English, if not another language, outside of school” (1999, p.11). It’s important to note that “a different variety of English” could include native varieties as well. If an instructor has had a student who writes in anything other than Standard Written English, then this comment is relevant to them.
As college classrooms become more inclusive, and we continue to recruit domestic and international students who write in ways that deviate from Standard Written English, the collaboration and coordination among TESL and CS faculty, and help from those who identify as both (like Matsuda), will be paramount. Canagarajah (2016) called for more work on translingual writing pedagogy in practice, putting ideas about viewing student linguistic backgrounds as a resource (Horner et al. 2011; Donahue 2016; Zapata & Laman 2016) to work and reflecting on ways to foster a translingual approach to writing. Building on this rich history, we look forward to building bridges between CS and translingualism on the one hand and Second Language Writing on the other (Atkinson et al., 2015) to meeting the varying needs of linguistically diverse students and their functionally divers purposes for learning to write.
In the writing courses on this resource website, we used an eclectic theoretical grounding. We hope to make clear how these decisions informed the lessons in subsequent blog posts. Future entries will discuss how grammar and rhetorical purpose instruction are wed throughout the lessons; how we raise student awareness to ungrammatical features and tendencies within their writing; how the drafting process informs the final product; and how an applied linguistic and Translingualism approach can be brought into native and non-native writing classrooms.