Book Review

I am reading the following book for my book review.

Shohamy, E. (2001). The power of tests: A critical perspective on the uses of langauge tests. London:  

     Pearson.

I have only read the introduction and preface and skimmed the rest so far.

Genre Approach

     Since I am situated within the curriculum and instruction department rather than the English department, I have little background knowledge about the genre approach. My experience with writing pedagogy comes from implementing writing workshop in my classroom and helping other teachers to do so. Although I had no formal knowledge of the genre approach, I feel that I implemented some of the tenets into my writing instruction. We organized units around various genres, discussed the purpose behind author’s choices, designed instruction to encompass the social nature of writing, and sometimes incorporated critical literacy skills. My point in sharing this information is to illustrate that how we label our instruction does not necessarily reflect what is actually happening in the classroom. Teachers implement writing workshop in many different ways. Some teachers may be working under a more typical process approach. Others may be going beyond process writing or may still be operating under more traditional perspectives. Discussions of which method is best may guide teachers to be more reflective and purposeful about their teaching practices, but I think what matters most is considering the individual needs of students and going forward from there. However, I think it is very challenging to teach in this way, and I have many lingering questions. For instance, how do teachers decide which method is best for their students? Surely, it begins with knowing students well, but at what point does deciding a method for the students become paternalistic or hegemonic? Should students be included in methodological decisions? Within the genre approach, how do we decide which genres to teach? How do we ensure authentic opportunities for writing? Does the teaching of writing and of specific genre traits automatically decontextualize writing and render it inauthentic?

In Your Own Words

I agree with Pennycook that a dogmatic focus on plagiarism is arrogant and hypocritical. I think that many teachers see policing against plagiarism as a way of maintaining their authority as a teacher. They might see a student’s plagiarism as an insult to the teacher’s intelligence or as a blatant act of resistance and defiance. From this perspective plagiarism is a crime and the teacher’s job is to issue, as Pennycook states, “threats, warnings, and admonitions.” From this perspective, teachers are likely to view students who borrow from texts as incompetent and deficient. I imagine that these assumptions would be made even more readily for students who speak English as a second language or other traditionally marginalized groups of students and would work to maintain the status quo and keep the “guardians of truth” in power.

I’ll admit that I have found myself working from this perspective of plagiarism as crime before, but I’ve come to recognize that it is much more beneficial to give students the benefit of the doubt. In the classes that I teach online, I serve a mostly nontraditional group of students with a wide variety of cultural backgrounds and educational experiences. I truly believe that most of the students who “plagiarize” do not understand how to properly cite sources or think that it is only necessary to cite direct quotations. They may have great difficulty paraphrasing and summarizing. Therefore, when I “catch” students cutting and pasting from the internet or other sources into their academic papers, I invite them to explain themselves, offer advice for citing according to academic standards, and allow them to redo their work. I feel that this approach allows me to understand my students better and to improve my explanations of class policies. It allows the students to learn from the experience and to maintain a position of respect and dignity.

I believe that the key is to listen to students in an effort to learn their intentions and understandings. I like Pennycook’s idea of a “fascination response.” Rather than responding defensively to students, teachers can respond with openness and curiosity in an effort to understand cultural and individual differences. It is also helpful to acknowledge the challenges in what we are asking students to do. For example, the students that Pennycook interviewed explained how difficult it was for them to “use their own words” in a language for which they felt no ownership. I think that it is important to be explicit about what we mean by such phrases and rules. 

Voice and Identity

I have been exploring identity as a research topic for several purposes, so I am very interested in different conceptualizations of identity. I hadn't really thought of identity in terms of voice, and after reading the articles, I am still not inclined to closely associate the two concepts. It seems to me that voice is more closely associated with positioning. When Hervela & Belcher discussed voice as identity, they seemed to be characterizing identity as a thing which can be owned and traded in. When they talked about voicing and conceptualized voice as social, they were speaking in terms of positioning. For example, the graduate students' voices as writers depended on others' perceptions of them. They were dealing with issues of voice and identity because their positions in U.S. academia differed so greatly from their positions in their home countries.

I also took issue with Hervela &  Belcher's claim that the graduate students had to learn to write in "an English voice." There is clearly no unified English voice. There is a  mulitiplicity of voices depending on a wide variety of identities and positions which can exist within any individual and shift based on social contexts. I thought that Prior addressed this mulitplicity of voices well in his article. I liked his idea of learning as a "process of becoming." I think that teachers and students can benefit from seeing learning as change. I think the problems arise when teachers try to micromanage the learning process. The "process of becoming" should be a negotiation between teacher and student, and students should have the ultimate ownership of their own learning. Furthermore, students should be let in on the process of coming to a voice. They could examine their own writing and try to identify the origin of certain phrases. This sort of metacognitive practice could help students to gain a deeper understanding of genre characteristics and to make specific choices about the development of their voice. It could give teachers a tool for hearing the individual voices of their students and help them to avoid ascribing voice.

Writing Across Borders

     I liked what Tony Silva said about writing with an accent. It makes a lot of sense to me that we shouldn’t expect writers to write without an accent anymore than we would expect them to speak without an accent. I also agree that fair isn’t equal and that international students may need some accommodations such as adequate time for response and a focus on meaning over grammar. I have no trouble conceptualizing how such accommodations could be done in a K-12 setting or in an L2 classroom.  It is more difficult for me to attend to the needs of L2 students in content area classes at the university level especially in the classes that I teach online.  In the online setting, I never meet my students face to face. They offer short introductions of themselves, but I often have no definite information about their age, gender, ethnicity, native language, or other demographic data. I might suspect that a student speaks English as a second language based on writing that seems accented.  I can make some guesses about their language of origin based on their name and their introductions, but I am not allowed to ask a student about their language status or to refer them to ESL services unless they self identify. Since I am expected to grade papers with provided rubrics which include grammar, mechanics, organization, word choice, etc., I am often conflicted when grading papers that seem accented. How am I supposed to accommodate for L2 students when I don’t know for sure which students are nonnative speakers? Do I stick to the rubric for every student? Do I disregard the rubric so that I can focus on meaning for all students?  The situation makes me question the value of rubrics, but the real issue is that I don’t have the opportunity to get to know my students well. I imagine that this is also a big challenge for instructors who teach general education courses with extremely high class sizes. I’m left wondering what can be done to prepare content area teachers to address the needs of international students.

Project Ideas

I have a couple of ideas for the project for this course. First, I am interested in taking a critical look at literacy assessment. In the Casanave (2003) article that we read, she proposed examining writing as a sociopolitical artifact. I thought that I might take a close look at an assessment and ask questions such as:

1. Who was it designed for and for what purposes?
2. How does it influence ELL's  in a K-12 setting?
3. What sorts of identities does the test ascribe to students?

One assessment I might examine is the ACCESS which is a test of English proficiency that many states use in order to comply with NCLB requirements for ELL's.

I'm also very interested in the concept of identity, so another option for the project is to do a literature review on that topic. I would be particularly interested in research methodology and seeing how researchers of second language writing have conceptualized identity, what methods they have used, and what implications there are for future identitity studies.