Teaching Philosophy (2015)

Student’s Linguistic Identities, Classroom Communication, and the Purpose of a Liberal Arts Education 

(Published May 2015)

No one is a native to the cultures of academic and professional environments. I have taught both regular English and ESL composition courses at Penn State, and I have noticed that all students need personalized support and preparation for communicating in the diverse rhetorical situations encountered at the university and beyond. Assigning essays in traditional composition genres is effective for helping students to analyze rhetorical situations, but instructors also need to make a variety of student-focused adaptations depending on the classroom environment.

Due to the globalized nature of 21st century universities, composition instructors at all levels must practice culturally responsive pedagogy. Geneva Gay (2010) defines culturally responsive pedagogy as using students’ own cultural resources as scaffolding to introduce curricular content, thus strengthening students’ identities while making education more personalized (pp. 32-33) [1]. This kind of teaching requires composition instructors to understand the unique needs of English Language Learners and other groups facing marginalization in the classroom. Instructors can address these needs through adaptive strategies that incorporate sensitivities to culture, gender, and socioeconomic class. My teaching philosophy is that composition instructors need to develop more awareness of 1) students’ linguistic and cultural identities, 2) classroom communication strategies, and 3) the overall purpose of a liberal arts education.

Valuing Students’ Linguistic Identities

In academic settings, it is difficult to avoid the dichotomy between Standard English and other forms of nonstandard English, even though Standard English is not as monolithically homogeneous as once thought (Gay, 2010, p. 82) [1]. It is likewise difficult to find a neutral term for the concept of “nonstandard” English, and the term “first language interference” has a distinctly negative connotation. How can teachers help students explore the norms of academic English without denigrating other forms of English?

One way is to encourage to students to explore their own linguistic identities by recognizing the value of these identities and the linguistic competence that students bring into the classroom. Martha Kolln, who defines grammar as “the internalized system that native speakers of a language share,” has argued for helping students to “understand the system they know unconsciously as native speakers” [2].  In a diverse classroom, however, students’ internal grammars include a variety of rule-governed dialects as well as forms of ESL “interlanguage.” Citing the research of Selinker, Ilona Leki defines interlanguage as the “intermediary grammars that are systematic and rule-governed but exhibit features unlike target language features.” In today’s composition classrooms, a large portion of students are expected to internalize grammatical concepts that differ significantly from the unconscious rule-governed grammars of their own languages or dialects.

Teachers therefore need to develop culturally responsive methods for developing students’ metalinguistic awareness about their own and others’ internalized grammar systems. These internal grammar systems first must be valued in the classroom, and then they can even be used as scaffolding to help students acquire the grammatical concepts of Standard academic English. I believe in using activities that employ contrastive analysis to help students gain metalinguistic awareness about themselves and others, and I thus designed a reflective journal activity to fulfill this purpose for students in my ESL courses. In this activity, students translated a sample English email into an email written in their own native language, and then they analyzed the rhetorical and grammatical differences between the two versions of the email. I am interested in developing similar activities to help students compare and contrast the conventions in their own native languages and the conventions of academic discourse. I believe in using these kinds of activities to strengthen students’ sense of linguistic identity and also to help them understand the areas of academic English that are the most difficult for them personally.

Shaping Classroom Communication in Regular vs. ESL Composition Courses

Another element of culturally responsive pedagogy is shaping the classroom into a safe space for all students to express their viewpoints, thus exercising their oral academic skills. In addition, students can learn a lot from each other, so there needs to be ample opportunity for them to interact with one another, either in small groups or in large group discussions.

Since both instructor-centered time and student-centered time are necessary, it is important to balance these approaches to adapt to particular groups of students. Here is how I categorize different activities conceptually:

  •  Teacher-Centered: lecturing using the chalkboard or a PowerPoint so students can take notes
  • 60% Teacher-Centered/ 40% Student-Centered: large group discussions where I ask discussion questions and expect students to volunteer to answer
  • Student-centered: student led activities such as 1) small group discussions and 2) presentations to the rest of the class

I have been learning how to adapt classroom communication to the comfort levels of the students. I have noticed that one of the biggest differences between regular English composition and ESL composition is the length and development of students’ comments during group discussions.

In regular English composition courses, sometimes I planned half or more of the entire class as large group discussion, because I knew I could depend on native speakers of English to respond with elaborate comments that would also help other students learn. In a classroom of native/ near-native speakers of English, I would put a lot of pressure on students to participate in class discussion by cold-calling if no one volunteered. It was easy for me to create scaffolding questions right on the spot to help native speakers verbally explore new regions of thought. In these group discussions, my goal was always for students to learn from listening to one another’s ideas and interpretations.

When I started teaching ESL composition, however, I quickly noticed that my past methods would not work with English language learners. Cold-calling would put an inappropriate amount of pressure on L2 students, so I spent less time on large group discussion, and instead I started experimenting with a variety of small group activities aided by worksheets. According to my understanding of good language teaching, instructor-led lecturing should be kept to a minimum, and the class time should be used efficiently to give as many people as possible a chance to speak to one another.

In the ESL composition classroom, I have learned that small group activities must be carefully balanced to be cognitively challenging but also simple enough for students to understand. They cannot be too simple, or the students will think it is just “busy-work.” My philosophy is that activities need to be cognitively engaging and difficult in order to motivate students to see them as worthwhile. However, I now know I need to be careful not to make the activities overly complex. I have learned that the instructions for a small group discussion activity should be fully understood by the students the first time so that the instructor does not have to explain them again after the activity has already started.

What is a Liberal Arts Education?

During the process of adapting to students’ cultures and shaping the classroom communication environment, I also think composition instructors need to consider why we are here in the first place. Part of the answer involves recognizing that this question is to some degree unanswerable. We are always discovering more about what the purpose of a liberal arts education might be. When planning and executing a course, it is important to focus on defining and measuring specific educational objectives, but as a humanities scholar, I believe there is academic merit to a wide variety of activities simply because of the communication/ thinking skills and content involved, regardless of whether the outcomes can be assessed.

It is not necessary for every activity to be stringently woven into the linear teleological narrative of the major assignments in a course. Students need to be able to master all kinds of academic skills, which are to some degree undefinable and rather amorphous. Academic skills cannot be nailed down on a list, and education cannot be fully standardized and quantified. No one knows the best way to educate other people, or perfectly assess their progress, so I think a more practical heuristic is to spend part of class time on objective-oriented activities and part of the time on cognitively engaging activities that are unique to the individual students’ and teachers’ interests.

This is why in my classes I include a variety of “stand-alone” activities, related to topics such as students’ cultural identities, logic, rhetorical analysis, and ethical issues such as human rights. All of these activities emphasizing soft skills will hopefully enable students’ to write insightful papers that meet the assignment requirements, but to me, a liberal arts education is a lot more than meeting course objectives. It is about exposure to new ways for thinking and talking about the world and human experience. The positive “outcomes” will be unpredictable and even unmeasurable, but definitely felt within a society.

 

[1] Gay, G. (2010).  Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. (2nd Ed.).  New York: Teachers College Press.

[2] Kolln, M. (1981). “Closing the Books on Alchemy,” CCC, 32. Cited by Patrick Hartwell [p. 306] in Glenn, C., & Goldthwaite, M. A. (2008). The St. Martin’s guide to teaching writing. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

[3] Leki, I. (2004). “Meaning and Developing of Academic Literacy in a Second Language.” In Huot, B., Bazerman, C., and Stroble, B. (Eds.), Multiple literacies for the 21st century (115-128). Cresswood: Hampton Press.  Article reprinted on pp.  330-342 in Glenn, C., & Goldthwaite, M. A. (2008). The St. Martin’s guide to teaching writing. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

 

 

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