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eBook details

• Title: Pura Vida: What My Life in Costa Rica Taught Me About Teaching English As a Second Language (Personal Account)
• Author : Writing Lab Newsletter
• Release Date : January 01, 2009
• Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 65 KB

Description

Two and a half years ago, I did some of the worst writing of my life: I turned in essays with incomplete citations; I neglected to revise; and I relied on grammar check like it was my lifeblood. How, you may ask, can a teacher-researcher from a U.S. institution have become so negligent? The answer is, quite simply, that the context in which I wrote was not my own. During the academic year of 2004-2005, I took a series of graduate classes at the University of Costa Rica, where both the ethics and practice of writing were expressed differently than they are in the U.S. Of course, returning home, I slipped easily back into my old identity and habits; but that experience of having lived otherwise for a time continues to resonate. I still remember how, without my familiar orientation towards writing, I felt lost, unhinged, broken in half. I was a writer trying to learn how to write--and survive--in another country and academic system. Sound familiar? Yes, of course: this is exactly the challenge that most of our ESL writers face. Stepping further back in time, more than twelve years ago, I was trained as an undergraduate writing consultant. As part of that training, I was taught several basic strategies for working with ESL students. My preparation was, I suspect, fairly traditional from the standpoint of writing center theory: look for patterns, consider student affect, do not overwhelm. In addition, I was offered a summary of Kaplan's contrastive rhetoric as a theoretical basis for these techniques: different cultures employ different patterns of linguistic expression, so we must help students recognize the difference between their patterns and ours. Therefore, I learned that I should be attuned to both errors and attitudes--the pitfalls of linguistic acquisition and the power of cultural patterns of expression. The latter idea fascinated me. How could it be that varying cultural values shape the rhythms of thought and language? What kind of unspoken assumptions might be affecting the ways that my students write? These questions eventually drove me to study abroad myself--with the hopes that I might finally understand the phenomena that these students experience. But the lessons I learned, far from tracing out neat graphical representations of thought, opened far more questions for me than they answered.

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