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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.

Here’s a link to some practical tips when designing a translingual writing curriculum. What stood out in the article as interesting includes the conception of conferences as a way to help understand where students come from culturally and how that influences their writing practices. It also seems helpful to encourage students to use footnotes to describe unfamiliar concepts from their other linguistic resources. It’s also refreshing to hear that the notion of error is unproductive and that students linguistic practices should rather be viewed as a step in the process of negotiating meaning to be able to communicate in line with a given rhetorical situation.

Here are a couple of other links to more OWL resources on translingualism: 1) Introduction to Tanslingual Writing and 2) Suggested Readings on Translingualism.

The elements discussed in the above links inform the ELL first-year writing courses in this website. This includes use of conferences, and use of a sequence of assignments and multiple drafts as part of a process approach. In addition, written feedback is an essential component of the ELL courses, both from the instructor and peers. A clear effort is also made to weave a language focus throughout all units. As I reflect on how to continue these efforts, I would like to share a few examples that can be turned into in-class activities.

Recently, in interactions with students individually during conferences. One of the students, for example, did not want to read his paper out loud. When inquiring as to why that may have been the case, the student declared that his English was weak. He said that his professors did not understand him. In an effort to provide the student with a different perspective on his linguistic abilities. I told him that he is a better communicator than a monolingual speaker, because the student also knows Chinese. I told the student that his communicative repertoire is larger and that perhaps monolingual English speakers could benefit from some training in listening strategies for achieving mutual intelligibility with him. The student seemed shocked that I reversed the situation from a monolingual English “native speaker” being the proficient one to the student himself being potentially the more proficient one thanks to his two languages. I blurred the line between named languages (Chinese and English) and the student seemed to have gained a great deal of confidence in his overall communication abilities, turning his attention to the screen and beginning to read out loud with a smile. While the student is aware of his purpose for expanding his communicative repertoire in written  standard american English, he now seems not have an inferiority complex.

Other translingual writing activities that could enhance a course might include reading texts in other languages a student may know and summarizing them in English. Another possibility is to summarize the texts in another language, but incorporate them in English into another piece of writing. When offered this possibility to students, many chose to do one of the reflective annotated bibliography entries in a language other than English.

Yet another activity, for a story on becoming interested in one’s major, a student could incorporate a dialogue that occurred in one’s native language, writing it in one’s native language on purpose and explaining it to the audience. Further, corpus-based activities could be implemented to raise awareness of spoken and written register differences. This latter activity could be accompanied with an empowering discussion of how to purposefully draw on one’s linguistic repertoire to challenge normative uses of standard languages.