Post 1: Revising an ESL Course for a Modern Age

Introduction

Recently, I began the final semester in my contract as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at Northern Arizona University. Unlike many GTAs, in my department, we are the teachers of record. I have been teaching in some capacity for about 5 years, and this GTA position has been both a challenge and a blast. My contract is to teach a 6 hour load per semester. I have been teaching English 105, or the freshman composition course, at NAU, for 4 semesters now. I initially taught this class to American freshman students, and we focus on writing mechanics and rhetoric through the lense of projects. 

I recently had a job change from my original contract of teaching American students.  For the past 6 months, I have taught in the Program in Intensive English (PIE). You can see my students below! They are all from China, and this version of English 105 is ‘sheltered instruction’; essentially, the students are removed from a main university class and put into an ESL, or English as a Second Language, classroom. The course isn’t altered, but the teacher has ESL expertise and there are no native English speakers in the classroom.

Click here for more information about my student’s curriculum in the PIE for the semester. 

I am now teaching my traditional ESL version of English composition, to an entirely ESL class, in addition to a new course for me that is titled Reader’s Workshop. It is a support course for ESL students taking English 105 PIE, the ESL composition class at my university. The administration at the PIE fought for me to teach this class AND the composition class, which is a program change that they have been pushing towards for years. This is because Reader’s Workshop, the Reader’s Workshop, is intended to be a support course, but thus far, it has been a failure. 

At the start of the semester, I interviewed the founder of the PIE, Dr. Fredricka Stoller, who is also a mentor of mine. She is aiding me in the course revitalization for the Reader’s Workshop course, and urged me to begin with the students, as “students are key stakeholders… we are often doing research and writing to improve the classroom for students” (Stoller, 2020, personal communication). I will explain the course revitalization below. Dr. Stoller is also pictured below.

Reader’s Workshop Course Description

In Dr. Stoller’s words, in my field, we write because “we want to share what we have done and question what other people are doing” (Stoller, 2020, personal communication). Here, I am going to write about the past of my current course, and how this will inform my course revitalization.

In the past, a supplemental instructor taught Reader’s Workshop based upon a strictly controlled curriculum in the PIE and worked with the main composition teacher to best support the English 105 composition class. English 105 is made for native English speakers, and is quite difficult for ESL students, so this ESL version of the course was made with a supplementary course. Despite this idea, which should be beneficial for the students, the supplemental Reader’s Workshop course has faced several issues, which I gleaned through a meeting with the program administrator, Jessica Sargent:

• Contracts for the English 105 instructor and for the Reader’s Workshop supplemental instructor do not allow for extra meetings, so the courses have been largely independent.
• The English 105 course has been updated each semester for years. The Reader’s Workshop course has not been updated since the early 2000s.
• The Reader’s Workshop course has no space for digital literacy.
• There are many opinions and differing thoughts on how the Reader’s Workshop course should operate, which leads to poor communication and a lacking course (Sargent, 2020, personal communication)

Due to these issues, students do not see the merit in the course and often do poorly or barely perform. Thus, the course must be revised. I, and one of my colleagues in the same position, have been asked to revise this course in whatever way we see fit. The PIE has assigned us a supervisor, but the arguments are being quelled by the suggestion that the program goes with our suggestions, as people teaching the course.  

The Course Revitalization Goals

I am revising this Reader’s Workshop course with a coworker, a supervisor named Jessica Sargent, my professor, Dr. Stoller, and a former supplemental instructor of the course. For a course revision, we are focusing on four central ideas:

1. The course should focus on building digital literacy in a global community.
2. The course should build student strategies for transitioning from reading to writing.
3. The course should teach students to read in different disciplines and genres.
4. The course should be designed to support English 105 rather than being an independent course.

As I was reading this week, I noticed that my course development for PIE fell into many of our topics. For example, Starke-Meyerring talks about helping students to meet the global pace in our society today, especially through digital communication and literacy. Drawing upon these ideas, as well as ideas from my own field such as promoting multicultural literacy and examining English and its role in global communication. Additionally, many scholars examine the current practice mentioned by Cameron of promoting the western, and especially American style, as correct.  I want to shape this course to fit into a global, and digital community, rather than into an American university community. 

I am maintaining principles of good readers, which are found to be applicable across many languages and cultures. Students need to be able to tell fact from opinion, to identify main ideas and details, to select important points that they wish to remember or use, and to read a lot to develop their skills. NAU is lucky enough to have a world-renowned reading instructor named Fredricka Stoller (pictured below), who has taught at NAU for 35 years and founded the PIE in the 80s.

The Process of Course Revilitization 

To begin this process of changing the Reader’s Workshop course, I am taking a cue from Starke-Meyerring and am adding digital competency requirements to the Reader’s Workshop class. The students are keeping a digital journal where they respond to readings, practice writing skills such as summarizing and paraphrasing, and develop their own place in a digital culture. Students are expected to find readings of their choice and to read assigned readings to promote class goals, but also to practice use of the internet and internet based communication in many different ways. My students must write in English, but are also allowed to use whatever writing styles that they wish, including culturally based styles. Although myths and narratives are culturally based, as Smith suggests, I find that my students benefit greatly from the incorporation of their own cultures and narratives into their journals. The use of metaphor, even when it is something that I don’t have background knowledge for, makes my students’ writing rich and personal. I am blending ideas of individuality, cultural, and digital literacies so that my students have agency, learn to write in digital spaces, and perhaps even grow to like (or at least not hate) writing in English. 

I am additionally including issues of genre in my description, as Millar suggests that students must read frequently and read in many different genres to be successful. Genres are an important part of learning to be a communicator. Although many ideas of academic rules and writing come from a white, middle class, western bias, the rules of genre are different. Learning how to write fiction, or how to write a blog, or how to write an American introduction versus a Chinese introduction, all follow rules of genre. Students must be made aware of rules to be successful. Even more fun, students must be taught how and when to break rules to make rhetorical points. This aspect of genre will come into my class as we read news articles written in different countries on the same events. We will also read academic articles from their countries that are translated into English, and compare these articles with American academia. Overall, this exploration of genre will help integrate my students into a global community where they can recognize, mimic, and break rules according to conventions that they understand. Finally, I hope that my students recognize the way that I teach writing as one way of many, rather than the ‘correct American way’.

Finally, I am fighting against a stereotype that is brought up by Dr. Stoller on the topic of myths that my students will face in the university;

The myths are that students are not intelligent if they cannot write well. In fact, we have students who are doctors and physicists. Poor writing skills do not mean a lack of intelligence. It is an iterative process. We shouldn’t be distracted by grammatical errors, but in fact there is a lot of good and interesting information if we can see beyond grammatical mistakes. There is not one way of organizing ideas; sometimes we read things that don’t make much sense to us, but in fact it doesn’t fit with our assumptions. . Every language has its own set of norms and expectations. We must respect their way of thinking while teaching them the advantages of doing it an English way to be successful.

Conclusion

My students are smart and incredible; I think about them constantly and I love teaching them. Despite their brilliance, they still need to be set up for success in the PIE and beyond. My students face an uphill battle in this climate, and in order to be successful, they must be able to articulate themselves clearly on a variety of platforms and across a variety of genres. This is our motivation for fixing a broken course that they must take known as Reader’s Workshop. With the help of Dr. Stoller, Jessica Sargent, a former instructor, and a partner, we will make Reader’s workshop work for our students and will bring the course into the modern age. 

Outside References

Millar, D. (2011). Promoting Genre Awareness in the EFL Classroom. English Teaching Forum.

PIE. (2020). “Program in Intensive English Description”. https://nau.edu/pie/. Accessed Jan 21, 2020.

PIE. (2020). “Level 5 Courses”. https://nau.edu/pie/programs/intensive-english-courses/level-5/. Accessed Jan 21, 2020.

Sargent, J. (2020). Personal Communication.

Stoller, F. (2020). Personal Communication. 

Stoller, F., Anderson, N., Grabe, W. & Komiyama, R. (2013). Instructional Enhancements to Improve Students’ Reading Abilities. English Teaching Forum.