Reflection on my MEcology over this Semester
In hindsight of the course, what I realize now is that CCR 720 worked as a catalyst to bring about a change in my personality, attitude towards technology and day-to-day activities/ecology. It is, in fact, hard to believe that someone as good as me who had limited computer technology to typing and printing, email exchanges and basic internet search for years now uses different online tools, platforms and fora for social networking, multimedia exchanges and expressing private thoughts and ideas in addition to conducting various transactions/activities online . Similarly unbelievable thing that has happened over the semester is that my teaching approaches limited earlier to traditional print literacy are being increasingly informed by new media/digital technology. It is a miracle in fact that has happened. I now can recall how ignorant and dumb I was at the beginning of 720 class. I could hardly figure out what was going on in the class because everything was so new to me (Collin uses the term “brand new”). That’s the reason why I could not actively take part in the class discussion (for which I regret now) though I gradually got hang of the things. To my own surprise, I now know how to make IMovie, webpage (beyond my imagination earlier), use Photoshop, Flash and Power point which can come handy for so many purposes from pedagogical to professional, personal to institutional. I am now a technoman; this is CCR 720’s (Collin’s) gift.
I know I am supposed to talk here how my adoption of new media, digital platforms or fora this semester changed my day-to-day activities. I am sorry though I could not suppress my feel that I learned a lot from this course and my day-to-day professional and personal activities have been influenced greatly by my new understanding and knowledge of computer technology and their increasing use in composing practices. It seems that my digital literacy that spreads across divides makes a fascinating story. Before beginning this course I had virtually no idea of what blog was or Facebook, Twitter or Tagged accounts were let alone personal webpage and maintaining them was out of question. But now I have all of them and navigate, visit, update or use them regularly/periodically for various purposes. They have already been integral parts of my life.
I have maintained a personal blog. But unlike its typical use for commenting or describing events, uploading/sharing videos/audios or expressing personal ideas or feelings in the forms of poems or short narratives, I have used the space to store my notes and completed projects. In fact, since I was also required to maintain a blog with periodical entries of notes for Iswari’s class, I am now using the same blog to put notes for all the courses as well as store all my finished projects. This has totally changed my earlier habit of jotting notes on notebook and storing my completed projects in folders in my PC. Now I have also my webpage to store the finished projects though. But the advantage of storing them in blog is that they are ever available online and anybody can just access and use them. I am also thinking of using blog to compose poems or short stories or record my thoughts on just anything but I have yet to make that move.
My God!! Facebooking!! It has totally altered my ecology. Someone like me whose digital narrative spreads across divide and who was totally unaware that social networking sites like Facebook did exist few months back now spends hours facebooking—exchanging messages, photos and videos; commenting on status update, taking quizzes and doing so many other stuffs difficult even to name. After being in Facebook, I am using other media of communication like email, messenger and cell phone increasingly less on the one hand but on the other, and sadly, I feel that I am killing my invaluable time. The problem I am facing is that I just can’t restrain myself from checking who uploaded photos; what is going with whom; what comments someone passed on my stuffs and who added me as a friend. It is frustrating at times to know that my valuable time is being wasted for “academically less significant activities” but the moment of joy quickly returns when the thought that I am just a click away from hundreds of friends, that I can communicate with all of them at once and that I can exchange and store stuffs, and of course chat and do score of other things in one platform possesses me. Since it is an integration of multiple applications and programs, I console myself saying that I am performing multiple digital/online activities from one site and my time typically spent on messengers, email and other multimedia exchanges is being saved. Upon reflection, I also find that my feel that I am wasting time has root in my changed MEcology. New media was not a part of my life until fairly recently. May be they will start becoming integral to my life as my other cherished activities once I assimilate them and make them part of regular activities.
I am also regularly updating my status in Twitter and using Tagged for exchanging messages, photos, journals and videos. But I am yet to figure out the fundamental differences in social networking sites like Tagged, hi 5 and Facebook. Facebook seems to have combined all the features of Twitter, Tagged, hi5 and such other sites though there are some surface differences like in Twitter there are people following and being followed by one another. And status updates are immediately delivered to the other users who have signed up to receive them which does not happen in Facebook. But my perception now is that it is wise and time saving to use only one or two of such platforms regularly than to maintain a number of them spending a lot of time.
My final thoughts on these platforms: because blog is interactive and also because people can comment and share ideas, it has professional, scholarly or pedagogical potential. My professors at U of Louisiana and some even here required us to post on blogs regularly. They obviously saw and there obviously is pedagogical implication of this online forum. It can undoubtedly be used for scholarly exchanges of thoughts and ideas. This is the reason why there are types of blogs ranging from professional to corporate to personal. Likewise, Facebook, Twitter, Tagged and hi5 can be used for group activities and exchanges thus can be fora for networking, relation-building and information sharing. Since these activities are central to so many organizational and personal undertakings, they also have professional and corporate implications. I can see that our students can benefit by using these sites and platforms and I plan to encourage them towards that direction. At this point, I must also confess that I am still novice and have not yet reached the stage to be able to see for the unconventional use of these media and sites. But one thing now is uncontested: Santosh now is different Santosh few months back. Santosh is new media man, a techno friendly guy who successfully crossed and is on the other side of digital divide now.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Reflection: “What I learned in CCR 601 this fall”
Reflection: “What I learned in CCR 601 this fall”
Looking back at CCR 601, what flashes in my mind is Margaret’s ever smiling face and her brilliant moderation of class discussion. On top of that liveliness of the class, critical engagement with the “polemical” (Margaret’s word) texts carefully culled from the store of Rhet. Comp and thought sharing and interactions (though I was not as interactive as others in the class) are, I think, some of the things that have left indelible imprints in my mind. May be largely because this is the first time I had a full-fledged course on various issues of composition studies, I benefitted the most from this course. I had almost no idea of what composition or rhetoric was until I landed in US. First semester at U of Louisiana got spent on figuring out what rhetoric or composition as an area of study was. I got oriented towards the disciple nevertheless there. CCR 601 was thus the first course that truly introduced me to the key issues, debates, tenets and tropes of composition (studies). I must acknowledge that I learned whole bunch of things from this course. I also stole some of the teaching techniques from Margaret—particularly her way of initiating and sustaining class discussion. Similarly, I got struck by the fact that text selection makes a great difference in class activities and interactions. I obviously can not tell everything that I learned from CCR 601 here. Nevertheless I am attempting to articulate to the extent possible.
The best way to begin is to have a look at Margaret’s course plans, required readings and assignments for the course. Her plans and assignments were instituted around few distinct stages and there lay what she expected her students (us) learn from the course. She had two mappings, one each of interviewing, tracing and gesturing/locating in the disciplinary conversation, reviewing and final reflection as the activities as well as assignments for the course. I think these were also the skills she wanted us to learn. These activities and assignments accompanied by thought-provoking and controversial texts like The University in Ruins by Bill Readings, Rhetorics, Poetics, Cultures by James Berlin, Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays by Sharon Crowley, Language Diversity in the Classroom: From Intention to Practice ed by Geneva Smitherman and Victor Villanueva, The End of Composition Studies by David W. Smit and couple of other contemporary and most cited articles from the field of composition not only made the class exciting but also made me aware of the ongoing debates and discussions in the discipline. They also taught me a number of skills as Margaret had ingeniously imagined her students learning from the course.
Course readings introduced and familiarized me with the key issues and debates in the field. I learned that freshman composition as required course is highly contested and that Rhetoric and Composition as an emerging discipline is defined by the centripetal and centrifugal forces. These ones are also the ones prompting the disciplinary and interdisciplinary moves in the field. For instance, Sharon Crowley’s call to abolish the freshman comp and develop a solid disciplinary composition program is undercut by David W. Smit’s call to eradicate the generic freshman comp and spread writing across disciplines as writing across curriculum or writing in disciplines. I understood that though these calls seem antithetical they are but the realities in Rhet. Comp. Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins compelled me to see how not only rhetoric or composition as a discipline but whole academia is increasingly becoming disconnected from the notion of nations and nationalism as the waves of globalization are rendering the traditional political, cultural, economic and other borders irrelevant. Thus, with the demise of nation states as the sovereign entities, Readings brought me home the state of “ruins” the postmodern universities are in. They have now been the bureaucratic corporations driven by capitalism and attendant ideologies and hardly ever concerned about the traditionally cherished ideals and values. His ideas on how we can rebuild productive academic culture even out of “ruins” if we just cast away our alibis and come to the class with open mind and heart for negotiation clicked my head. I was similarly awe-struck by Smitherman and Villanueva’s edited collection Language Diversity. I was shocked to know how complicated the issue of language diversity in composition classroom is and how something acknowledged and sanctioned as necessary and inevitable half a century ago is yet to be implemented due to the complicated nature of case at hand. I got totally divided over the issue (in fact I was divided over almost all the issues that came up in the class). At first, I was driven by the idea that students should have rights to their languages. They are to be given the liberty to use their languages (even mother tongues or English variants) in composition classroom and practices if they choose to do so. This is what democracy or equality is. This continued to be my conviction until I thought really hard the issue putting myself at times in the place of a teacher who is to handle the classroom situations with students who speak and compose in nobody knows how many languages. I could then see that the issue at hand is not as simple as thought and needs a lot of debate, discussion, exploration and research before any policy can be formulated.
Now again I am realizing that I won’t be able to tell everything I learned from this course here. Many of the things I learned are the things internalized, conceptualized or even assimilated and are therefore inarticulate. Still I can confidently say that skills I learned through activities, discussion and assignments have been invaluable. My interviewing of Iswari and reading of his scholarly projects and later reporting coupled with reading of other faculty works proved to me the most fruitful thing in this semester. I could learn from him how people pursue scholarly work/s and how much labor, devotion and perseverance such work/s demand/s from us. I also got inspired by his ongoing project of globalizing composition and composing globalisms. I could see some potential openings for my future projects in the areas he was exploring. I don’t mean that only Iswari’s projects triggered my interest. All CCR faculty’s projects provided greater insights and helped me see the range of areas they are involved in from computer technology to transnational feminism to federal coding. It was the time well spent, to be precise. Next, book review, in addition to providing me the opportunity to learn the genre, helped me see how scholars like A. Suresh Canagarajah are theorizing academic writing and composition in the context of globalization and plural Englishes. Here is where my interest to explore the issues at a little greater length was aroused which resulted into my writing a seminar paper on the same issues for Iswari’s course. In the same vein, with mapping essays, though I was little confused at the outset, I learned to look at the overarching argument/s or trope/s in the texts. These essays required of me a lot of readings and close attention to the texts. I nevertheless could produce good essays at the end.
I have not yet confessed that with Collin’s archival work and our reading of citation politics and top ten most cited articles from CCC plus one essay on discourse conventions, I learned how challenging it is to gesture to a discipline and get published in scholarly journals of our field. I also understood how important publication is to our career as writing professionals and how those most cited articles are most cited because majority of them added new dimensions to our disciple.
Thus, with all the activities, assignments, readings, research and discussions in and out of the class, I learned a lot of skills and ideas. Learned again to be patient, take challenge and see that way ahead is thorny but not depressing. Hopefully I can use these skills in my future endeavors or transfer them to my teaching career or professional life. My overall impression of the class: Margaret’s class was awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Looking back at CCR 601, what flashes in my mind is Margaret’s ever smiling face and her brilliant moderation of class discussion. On top of that liveliness of the class, critical engagement with the “polemical” (Margaret’s word) texts carefully culled from the store of Rhet. Comp and thought sharing and interactions (though I was not as interactive as others in the class) are, I think, some of the things that have left indelible imprints in my mind. May be largely because this is the first time I had a full-fledged course on various issues of composition studies, I benefitted the most from this course. I had almost no idea of what composition or rhetoric was until I landed in US. First semester at U of Louisiana got spent on figuring out what rhetoric or composition as an area of study was. I got oriented towards the disciple nevertheless there. CCR 601 was thus the first course that truly introduced me to the key issues, debates, tenets and tropes of composition (studies). I must acknowledge that I learned whole bunch of things from this course. I also stole some of the teaching techniques from Margaret—particularly her way of initiating and sustaining class discussion. Similarly, I got struck by the fact that text selection makes a great difference in class activities and interactions. I obviously can not tell everything that I learned from CCR 601 here. Nevertheless I am attempting to articulate to the extent possible.
The best way to begin is to have a look at Margaret’s course plans, required readings and assignments for the course. Her plans and assignments were instituted around few distinct stages and there lay what she expected her students (us) learn from the course. She had two mappings, one each of interviewing, tracing and gesturing/locating in the disciplinary conversation, reviewing and final reflection as the activities as well as assignments for the course. I think these were also the skills she wanted us to learn. These activities and assignments accompanied by thought-provoking and controversial texts like The University in Ruins by Bill Readings, Rhetorics, Poetics, Cultures by James Berlin, Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays by Sharon Crowley, Language Diversity in the Classroom: From Intention to Practice ed by Geneva Smitherman and Victor Villanueva, The End of Composition Studies by David W. Smit and couple of other contemporary and most cited articles from the field of composition not only made the class exciting but also made me aware of the ongoing debates and discussions in the discipline. They also taught me a number of skills as Margaret had ingeniously imagined her students learning from the course.
Course readings introduced and familiarized me with the key issues and debates in the field. I learned that freshman composition as required course is highly contested and that Rhetoric and Composition as an emerging discipline is defined by the centripetal and centrifugal forces. These ones are also the ones prompting the disciplinary and interdisciplinary moves in the field. For instance, Sharon Crowley’s call to abolish the freshman comp and develop a solid disciplinary composition program is undercut by David W. Smit’s call to eradicate the generic freshman comp and spread writing across disciplines as writing across curriculum or writing in disciplines. I understood that though these calls seem antithetical they are but the realities in Rhet. Comp. Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins compelled me to see how not only rhetoric or composition as a discipline but whole academia is increasingly becoming disconnected from the notion of nations and nationalism as the waves of globalization are rendering the traditional political, cultural, economic and other borders irrelevant. Thus, with the demise of nation states as the sovereign entities, Readings brought me home the state of “ruins” the postmodern universities are in. They have now been the bureaucratic corporations driven by capitalism and attendant ideologies and hardly ever concerned about the traditionally cherished ideals and values. His ideas on how we can rebuild productive academic culture even out of “ruins” if we just cast away our alibis and come to the class with open mind and heart for negotiation clicked my head. I was similarly awe-struck by Smitherman and Villanueva’s edited collection Language Diversity. I was shocked to know how complicated the issue of language diversity in composition classroom is and how something acknowledged and sanctioned as necessary and inevitable half a century ago is yet to be implemented due to the complicated nature of case at hand. I got totally divided over the issue (in fact I was divided over almost all the issues that came up in the class). At first, I was driven by the idea that students should have rights to their languages. They are to be given the liberty to use their languages (even mother tongues or English variants) in composition classroom and practices if they choose to do so. This is what democracy or equality is. This continued to be my conviction until I thought really hard the issue putting myself at times in the place of a teacher who is to handle the classroom situations with students who speak and compose in nobody knows how many languages. I could then see that the issue at hand is not as simple as thought and needs a lot of debate, discussion, exploration and research before any policy can be formulated.
Now again I am realizing that I won’t be able to tell everything I learned from this course here. Many of the things I learned are the things internalized, conceptualized or even assimilated and are therefore inarticulate. Still I can confidently say that skills I learned through activities, discussion and assignments have been invaluable. My interviewing of Iswari and reading of his scholarly projects and later reporting coupled with reading of other faculty works proved to me the most fruitful thing in this semester. I could learn from him how people pursue scholarly work/s and how much labor, devotion and perseverance such work/s demand/s from us. I also got inspired by his ongoing project of globalizing composition and composing globalisms. I could see some potential openings for my future projects in the areas he was exploring. I don’t mean that only Iswari’s projects triggered my interest. All CCR faculty’s projects provided greater insights and helped me see the range of areas they are involved in from computer technology to transnational feminism to federal coding. It was the time well spent, to be precise. Next, book review, in addition to providing me the opportunity to learn the genre, helped me see how scholars like A. Suresh Canagarajah are theorizing academic writing and composition in the context of globalization and plural Englishes. Here is where my interest to explore the issues at a little greater length was aroused which resulted into my writing a seminar paper on the same issues for Iswari’s course. In the same vein, with mapping essays, though I was little confused at the outset, I learned to look at the overarching argument/s or trope/s in the texts. These essays required of me a lot of readings and close attention to the texts. I nevertheless could produce good essays at the end.
I have not yet confessed that with Collin’s archival work and our reading of citation politics and top ten most cited articles from CCC plus one essay on discourse conventions, I learned how challenging it is to gesture to a discipline and get published in scholarly journals of our field. I also understood how important publication is to our career as writing professionals and how those most cited articles are most cited because majority of them added new dimensions to our disciple.
Thus, with all the activities, assignments, readings, research and discussions in and out of the class, I learned a lot of skills and ideas. Learned again to be patient, take challenge and see that way ahead is thorny but not depressing. Hopefully I can use these skills in my future endeavors or transfer them to my teaching career or professional life. My overall impression of the class: Margaret’s class was awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Book Review: Writing New Media
Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition, by Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2004. 276 pages
Four veteran computer and composition teachers as well as advocates of new media—Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc—bring together their well-tested theories of composing and composing using new media in Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition, a collection of six essays, and attempt to expand the traditional boundaries of composition pedagogies and practices hitherto dominated and driven by the print culture. Citing existing composition practices and pedagogies as parochial and limiting, all these authors forcefully present new and innovative ones informed by computer, information and web technologies. Hallmark as these technologies and media have already become of everyday life and activities in 21st century, these authors call on all composition teachers to incorporate or introduce these new “materialities” into composition pedagogies and classrooms as well as into the composing practices of their students and themselves both in and out of classroom situations.
The collection has six essays: “Opening New Media to Writing: Openings and Justifications” and “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty: On Some Formal Problems in Teaching about the Visual Aspects of Texts” by Wysocki; “Students Who Teach Us: A Case Study of A New Media Text Designer” and “Toward New Media Texts: Taking Up the Challenges of Visual Literacy” by Selfe; “Box-logic” by Sirc and “The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation” by Johnson-Eilola. The essays are loosely connected with one another though all of them endeavor to offer new “openings” from or into new media and composing practices.
In “Opening New Media to Writing,” Wysocki “describes through considering… five possible openings for how what we know about writing can usefully affect how we approach new media” (5). She argues that new media needs to be opened to writing and that writing about new media needs to be informed by writing teachers’ awareness of how situated people use texts to make things happen as well as by their capacity to bring a “humane and thoughtful attention to materiality, production, and consumption,” (7) to new media texts. She also expresses the need to critique new media in the essay. In her second essay in the collection, “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty”, she, through examples, analysis of design principles, activities and discussion of Kantian understanding of beauty and judgment, discusses “how visual arrangements both carry values and shape our relations with texts and each other” (9). As had she pointed out the need of critiquing new media texts in her first essay, she here critiques many existing approaches to teach visual aspects of the texts by saying that most of them are incomplete and counterproductive as well as they, in fact, are working against helping students acquire critical agency with the visual by unnecessarily emphasizing the form over content. She then invokes eighteen century definitions of beauty and aesthetic judgment to set the “ground for shaping how we teach visual composition” (149). She also tells her students how they can strike a balance between tradition and innovation; why they should follow the principles and where they can push against them to make “reciprocal communications, shaping both composer and reader and establishing relationships among them” (173). She finally asks her students to see visual composition as rhetorical and encourages them to compose effectively with the visual elements for various rhetorical circumstances and make changes and create a different relation between themselves and their audiences.
After Wysocki, in “Students Who Teach Us,” Selfe, through a case study of a student, David Damon, a young black man from Detroit, who makes his way into the world of technology desite his failure in academia, argues that composition teachers should use new media in the classroom to teach new literacies or multiliteracies and thereby change the concept of literacy in the twenty first century partly because comp teachers now have access to these media and students as well are increasingly using them in their day-to-day lives/activities. For Selfe, David’s case suggests “about the changing nature of literacy and about what this means for composition pedagogy” (45) as it also teaches some lessons about literacy in postmodern world, when “new media literacies may play an important role in identity formation, the exercise of power, and the negotiation of new social codes” (46). In this changed landscape of literacy, she calls on English composition teachers to expand their own understanding of composing beyond conventional bounds of the alphabetic in order to avoid composition studies from the risk of becoming “increasingly irrelevant” (46).
Selfe’s other essay, “Toward New Media Texts,” claims that understanding visual literacy is route to understanding new media. Her again, she emphasizes that comp teachers need to be aware of the new technologies and media largely because they have already become integral parts of students’ ecologies. As she neatly states her plan at the beginning of the essay that her “chapter…seeks to provide a brief rationale and several specific strategies for integrating visual literacy into composition classrooms—both in terms of composition and production” (68), her achieves what she had planned for by the end of the essay. She becomes successful to communicate that by adding a focus on visual literacy to existing one on alphabetic literacy, we become able to know how our students are making sense of the world through the use of visual images as well as increase the relevance of composition in a changing world.
Geoffrey Sirc, in another essay in the collection, “Box-logic”, defines comp teachers’ new roles as curators in academia, who can “exploit possibilities of …[their] status, exposing students to a range of culturally valid forms as well as non-mainstream content; in so doing, ……[they] can provide……[their] audience with a host of possibilities for worlds and forms to inhabit” (126-7). Citing three historical figures who collected things in boxes, Sirc imagines students as collectors and texts as boxes filled with selected objects structured through some kind of loose association. That’s why he calls his students designers, “free associational drifts” trying to capture a mood or vision and their texts as collection of “retrojective, idiosyncratic dream-moments, now electronically gathered, framed, and exhibited” (11). His primarily goal as composition teacher, he maintains, is to encourage his students to take art stance to the everyday thereby giving it an aesthetic touch. Bringing the reference of box-theorists thus, he conceptualizes composition as an interactive amalgam of video, graphic, and audio, a medium to express students’ desire as well as publish their passionate writing in their social reality. For him a model of college writing becomes the DVD—“a compendium of “finished” text, commentary, selected features, interviews, alternative versions, sections initially deleted (but now appended) from the main text, amusing bits, and other selected assorted items of interest, clickable as desired, rather than the traditional scholarly essay” (146).
Finally, Johnson-Eilola’s “The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation” offers two ways to understand textuality in a changing world: symbolic-analytic work and articulation theory. While symbolic-analytic values manipulation of information, articulation theory allows us to figure out the meaning by looking at the ways how information is arranged and connected. He claims it “can offer us a way to understand the “mere” uncreative act of selection and connection as very active and creative” (226). Discussing some recent court decisions which show the increasing trend of valuing arranged collection of information fragments over creativity and intellectual property law, Johnson-Eilola emphasizes that writing is always already connected to economics. One remarkable thing he does in the essay is defining writing in a totally different way as a collection of information fragments which is broad enough to bring even search engines and weblogs under the categories of writings.
Thus, all the chapters in this collection explore new media and their implications to composing practices. The book makes a serious appeal to everybody that since there is a possibility of having or creating texts that look different than what we are accustomed to, “we approach different-looking texts with the assumption not that mistakes were made but that choices were made and are being tried out and on” (23).Most wonderful thing about this book is that each of the chapters includes some well-tested new media classroom activities, accompanied by teacher’s notes, objectives, targeted level and so on which are easily adaptable in our own classrooms. Therefore, the book is invaluable for everybody wanting to make an entry into the world of new media or for teachers who are looking for “openings” out of or into new media and composition. I highly recommend this text; its worth spending at.
Four veteran computer and composition teachers as well as advocates of new media—Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc—bring together their well-tested theories of composing and composing using new media in Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition, a collection of six essays, and attempt to expand the traditional boundaries of composition pedagogies and practices hitherto dominated and driven by the print culture. Citing existing composition practices and pedagogies as parochial and limiting, all these authors forcefully present new and innovative ones informed by computer, information and web technologies. Hallmark as these technologies and media have already become of everyday life and activities in 21st century, these authors call on all composition teachers to incorporate or introduce these new “materialities” into composition pedagogies and classrooms as well as into the composing practices of their students and themselves both in and out of classroom situations.
The collection has six essays: “Opening New Media to Writing: Openings and Justifications” and “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty: On Some Formal Problems in Teaching about the Visual Aspects of Texts” by Wysocki; “Students Who Teach Us: A Case Study of A New Media Text Designer” and “Toward New Media Texts: Taking Up the Challenges of Visual Literacy” by Selfe; “Box-logic” by Sirc and “The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation” by Johnson-Eilola. The essays are loosely connected with one another though all of them endeavor to offer new “openings” from or into new media and composing practices.
In “Opening New Media to Writing,” Wysocki “describes through considering… five possible openings for how what we know about writing can usefully affect how we approach new media” (5). She argues that new media needs to be opened to writing and that writing about new media needs to be informed by writing teachers’ awareness of how situated people use texts to make things happen as well as by their capacity to bring a “humane and thoughtful attention to materiality, production, and consumption,” (7) to new media texts. She also expresses the need to critique new media in the essay. In her second essay in the collection, “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty”, she, through examples, analysis of design principles, activities and discussion of Kantian understanding of beauty and judgment, discusses “how visual arrangements both carry values and shape our relations with texts and each other” (9). As had she pointed out the need of critiquing new media texts in her first essay, she here critiques many existing approaches to teach visual aspects of the texts by saying that most of them are incomplete and counterproductive as well as they, in fact, are working against helping students acquire critical agency with the visual by unnecessarily emphasizing the form over content. She then invokes eighteen century definitions of beauty and aesthetic judgment to set the “ground for shaping how we teach visual composition” (149). She also tells her students how they can strike a balance between tradition and innovation; why they should follow the principles and where they can push against them to make “reciprocal communications, shaping both composer and reader and establishing relationships among them” (173). She finally asks her students to see visual composition as rhetorical and encourages them to compose effectively with the visual elements for various rhetorical circumstances and make changes and create a different relation between themselves and their audiences.
After Wysocki, in “Students Who Teach Us,” Selfe, through a case study of a student, David Damon, a young black man from Detroit, who makes his way into the world of technology desite his failure in academia, argues that composition teachers should use new media in the classroom to teach new literacies or multiliteracies and thereby change the concept of literacy in the twenty first century partly because comp teachers now have access to these media and students as well are increasingly using them in their day-to-day lives/activities. For Selfe, David’s case suggests “about the changing nature of literacy and about what this means for composition pedagogy” (45) as it also teaches some lessons about literacy in postmodern world, when “new media literacies may play an important role in identity formation, the exercise of power, and the negotiation of new social codes” (46). In this changed landscape of literacy, she calls on English composition teachers to expand their own understanding of composing beyond conventional bounds of the alphabetic in order to avoid composition studies from the risk of becoming “increasingly irrelevant” (46).
Selfe’s other essay, “Toward New Media Texts,” claims that understanding visual literacy is route to understanding new media. Her again, she emphasizes that comp teachers need to be aware of the new technologies and media largely because they have already become integral parts of students’ ecologies. As she neatly states her plan at the beginning of the essay that her “chapter…seeks to provide a brief rationale and several specific strategies for integrating visual literacy into composition classrooms—both in terms of composition and production” (68), her achieves what she had planned for by the end of the essay. She becomes successful to communicate that by adding a focus on visual literacy to existing one on alphabetic literacy, we become able to know how our students are making sense of the world through the use of visual images as well as increase the relevance of composition in a changing world.
Geoffrey Sirc, in another essay in the collection, “Box-logic”, defines comp teachers’ new roles as curators in academia, who can “exploit possibilities of …[their] status, exposing students to a range of culturally valid forms as well as non-mainstream content; in so doing, ……[they] can provide……[their] audience with a host of possibilities for worlds and forms to inhabit” (126-7). Citing three historical figures who collected things in boxes, Sirc imagines students as collectors and texts as boxes filled with selected objects structured through some kind of loose association. That’s why he calls his students designers, “free associational drifts” trying to capture a mood or vision and their texts as collection of “retrojective, idiosyncratic dream-moments, now electronically gathered, framed, and exhibited” (11). His primarily goal as composition teacher, he maintains, is to encourage his students to take art stance to the everyday thereby giving it an aesthetic touch. Bringing the reference of box-theorists thus, he conceptualizes composition as an interactive amalgam of video, graphic, and audio, a medium to express students’ desire as well as publish their passionate writing in their social reality. For him a model of college writing becomes the DVD—“a compendium of “finished” text, commentary, selected features, interviews, alternative versions, sections initially deleted (but now appended) from the main text, amusing bits, and other selected assorted items of interest, clickable as desired, rather than the traditional scholarly essay” (146).
Finally, Johnson-Eilola’s “The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation” offers two ways to understand textuality in a changing world: symbolic-analytic work and articulation theory. While symbolic-analytic values manipulation of information, articulation theory allows us to figure out the meaning by looking at the ways how information is arranged and connected. He claims it “can offer us a way to understand the “mere” uncreative act of selection and connection as very active and creative” (226). Discussing some recent court decisions which show the increasing trend of valuing arranged collection of information fragments over creativity and intellectual property law, Johnson-Eilola emphasizes that writing is always already connected to economics. One remarkable thing he does in the essay is defining writing in a totally different way as a collection of information fragments which is broad enough to bring even search engines and weblogs under the categories of writings.
Thus, all the chapters in this collection explore new media and their implications to composing practices. The book makes a serious appeal to everybody that since there is a possibility of having or creating texts that look different than what we are accustomed to, “we approach different-looking texts with the assumption not that mistakes were made but that choices were made and are being tried out and on” (23).Most wonderful thing about this book is that each of the chapters includes some well-tested new media classroom activities, accompanied by teacher’s notes, objectives, targeted level and so on which are easily adaptable in our own classrooms. Therefore, the book is invaluable for everybody wanting to make an entry into the world of new media or for teachers who are looking for “openings” out of or into new media and composition. I highly recommend this text; its worth spending at.
Adaptaion of Freewriting Heuristic in the ESL Classroom
Adaptaion of Freewriting Heuristic in the ESL Classroom
Overview of Freewriting
An informal expressive mode of writing, freewriting is a catchword for the expressivists and a technique as well as an invention strategy for the process theorists of writing used in and during composing process. Said to be a private form of writing, it is also used as a preliminary to more formal writing. Freewriting is also equated with stream of consciousness writing, invisible writing, automatic writing, desperation writing, impromptu writing, and personal journal writing and so on, the major characteristic defining it being non-sop, continuous writing for some predetermined period of time without any regard to spelling, grammar or correctness.
Defining freewriting, Peter Elbow and co-editors in the introduction to their book, Nothing Begins With N: New Investigations of Freewriting, write, “freewriting is what you get when you remove almost all of the normal constraints involved in writing” (xiii) such as order, coherence, accuracy; spelling, grammar, and mechanics; focus, quality, excellence etc. Free writing for them is liberation in writing since a freewriter has the concession of writing anything in any order from garbage to chaos to poetry in stream of consciousness fashion only condition being that s/he should not stop while composing. Joy Marsella and Thomas L. Hilgers also talk of freewriting in similar terms in their essay “Exploring the Potential of Freewriting” as, “nonstop writing in which writers follow ideas wherever they lead them; freewriting performed as timed exercise; focused freewriting; and any one of these combined in a series of systematic operations that acts as heuristic” (105). They use Freewriting as a generic term for a number of activities such as unfocused, timed or focused writing activities.
Many researchers and scholars of freewriting agree that it has oral quality. “Freewriting usually moves …toward the condition of putting down language without thinking about it, toward that “transparency” of language production that is characteristic of speech” (Introduction, Nothing Begins With “N” xv-vi), claim Elbow and co-editors implying the oral quality of freewriting. Elbow, following this spirit, instructs his students to “‘utter’ words onto paper with a kind of intensity” (“Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting 190). For that matter, he calls freewriting “automatic writing or simply jabbering” (Elbow, Writing Without Teachers 1) and encourages people to generate words as is done while speaking, “put words on paper and indeed to put them down without stopping” (Elbow and co-editors, Introduction xiii) and continue “nonstop, non-censored writing” (Introduction, Writing Without Teachers xvi). In almost all of his writings on freewriting, Elbow thus is found to be describing freewriting in terms of the epithets of speech. His constant reference to voice in writing also indicates his emphasis on oral quality in freewriting. He claims that freewriting is a natural way of producing words in which “there is a sound, a texture, a rhythm- a voice- which is the main source of power in your writing” (Writing Without Teachers 7).
Some other scholars have equated freewriting with interior monologue or inner speech also highlighting the oral quality of freewriting. They argue that the properties of interior monologue or inner speech such as non-stop, private, flow without regard to syntax or semantics are also the properties of freewriting. “It is possible to understand freewriting as intimate conversation with oneself. As such, its syntax would resemble the syntax of inner speech” (21), writes Sheryl I. Fontaine in her essay “Recording and Transforming: The Mystery of the Ten-Minute Freewrite” emphasizing on the oral quality of freewriting. Association of interior monologue with freewriting implies its chaotic nature. Like psychological flow of thoughts in inner speech, freewriting may take any direction from one extreme to the other.
Generally, the technique of freewriting involves writing non-stop for few minutes whatever comes to mind concerning a subject. Elbow’s instructions for freewriting adequately explains its technique when he says, “simply write as quickly as you can, as though you were talking to someone” or when he suggests, “don’t plan, don’t stop, trust that something will come-all in the interest of getting oneself “rolling” or “steaming along” into a more intense state of perception and language production” (“Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting” 190). He asks to simply follow the train of thought and “just babble onto paper” (“Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting” 207).
Sheridan Blau, on the other hand, equates freewriting with invisible writing: “an experimental…writing (in which) the writer writes with an empty ballpoint pen on a blank piece of paper backed by a piece of carbon paper and a bottom blank sheet...the writer can’t see what he is writing as he writes but still produces a carbon copy of everything he has written” (283-84). Blau argues that since writers cannot see and reread what they have written and are required to write non-stop in invisible writing, their writings are almost like freewritings.
Elbow and Ken Macrorie are often associated with freewriting as the founding figures. Many credit Elbow but Elbow himself regards Macrorie as the father of this genre. Macrorie, in turn, credits Dorothea Brandea for inventing this technique citing her call for freewriting sometimes in 1940s as, “write anything that comes into your head: last night’s dream, if you are able to remember…write any sort of early morning reverie, rapidly and uncritically” (quoted by Macrorie in “The Freewriting Relationship” 72). Macrorie confesses that he is following Brandea’s footprint and calls any writing that appeals to unconscious, freewriting as, “Under the name of freewriting all sorts of writing may be done... it taps the unconscious language power in all of us. We locate that best by trying for some kind of truth, whether in fantasy, fiction, or non-fiction” (188). Then onwards, freewriting is being used as a heuristic or as a pre-writing technique of writing process. Many composition textbooks are recommending freewriting in chapters on “getting started” or “prewriting (Marsella and Hilgers 93-4).
Thus, it can be said that any writing that is lively, voiced, alive, or even authentic done without any plan, goal or aim is termed as freewriting. Freewriting is as at the heart of expressionistic theory of writing and is also being used as a tool for generating ideas or as a component writing process, a form of prewriting.
Freewriting as Invention Technique
Freewriting is being used primarily a technique for exploring and generating the ideas pertaining to a chosen topic. Quoting Elbow’s notion of freewriting as uncensored, generative writing form intended to stimulate writing skills, creativity, and new perspectives (Elbow 1986), Jame W. Pennbaker writes that freewriting, by virtue of being a kind of self-expressive writing, “strongly encourages the expression of individuals’ very deepest emotions and thoughts about personal and, oftentimes, traumatic events and issues” (158) . For him, freewriting is the only such technique that helps to express the ideas dormant in the deepest recess of mind or unconscious. As such, freewriting has proved to be a method of self-exploration and is instrumental in probing into one’s own reservoir of thoughts or ideas as it is for finding ideas to write a paper. Jeanne A. Simpson also expresses the similar opinion that, “Freewriting is an important method …for helping you to discover what you think about events around you and what your values, ideas, and problems really are.” (21). In this sense, freewriting can be a best resort for those facing a writer’s block or feeling stuck during composing process as it helps to warm up or activate the mind triggering it to probe into the heart of the matter thereby helping to discover unforeseen shades of meanings. That is why it is regarded as one of the major techniques of invention in writing.
Freewriting is a technique of invention also because invention itself is a preliminary form of formal writing. During invention, one does not have to worry about commas and spelling or even complete sentences. The aim is just to dump the ideas down however possible keeping in mind that they can be cleaned up later. Arrows, abbreviations, shorthand, fragments, lists, circles, and underlining are all perfectly acceptable. Invention is for one to begin to work from. It is not a perfect outline of your paper. (Simpson 2). Freewriting like invention exactly does the same thing. It can also be a preliminary to formal writing. It simply encourages generation of ideas by encouraging free association. It is generative for the writer who has trouble getting words on paper because it pushes the writer to begin and continue (Marsella and Hilgers 109). Freewriting is said to be much more easier to practice compared to other techniques of invention in writing process. The feature that distinguishes freewriting from other types of writings or invention strategies and therefore makes it easy to practice is its freedom from all worries and anxieties because it keeps the generating activities separate from the analytical or editorial. In this sense, it reduces the burden of editing or critical thinking while composing. All it requires is the ability to transcribe the ideas on paper or translate somehow the ideas or thoughts into some form of writing on paper. This is the only stake (if it is a stake at all) of freewriting that freewriter needs to be able to put the ideas non-stop on words. Elbow and co-editors also consent this aspect of freewriitng as they write, “freewriting asks us to do the most frightening thing of all-write nonstop” (xiii). This is what Marsella and Hilgers also imply when they say, “To learn how to use the freewriting heuristic, students must first experience themselves as capable of sustained, uncensored writing” (99). In this light, freewriting seems to require a certain level of linguistic command or resources in writers which may, therefore, may render this heuristic not equally feasible for all types of writers.
Implying freewriting as an invention technique, people like Marsella and Hilgers describe Freewriting as heuristic for invention, i.e. as an instrument that facilitates the discovery of ideas and thoughts on topic under consideration. Their view is that freewriting heuristic-three-step process of writing, reflecting and asserting- can be used to generate the making of full-fledged piece of finished prose. Ruth Spack also believes that invention strategies like freewriting can be employed to narrow down a topic, generate content, discover a form and create a thesis for an assigned essay (649). This way, freewriting has proved to be a popularly known technique of invention in writing process.
Freewriting for ESL Students: Prospects and Stakes
While Freewriting is such a widely used heuristic or technique of invention in writing, none of its founding figures or exponents of seem to talk of it with reference to ESL students. Therefore, there is dearth of literature on freewriting heuristics/exercises for ESL students, hardly any regarding its feasibility in the writing class. Only of late, some of the ESL teachers are trying to extrapolate this technique in the ESL classrooms. All who have researched and experimented with freewriting in the ESL classroom have found that this invention strategy is feasible but requires adaptation or modification of certain kind and degree as the realities, stakes and concerns of ESL students are different from those of the native students.
They have also mentioned that, after practicing freewriting technique, ESL students also feel that freewriting is a significant tool that inspires or provokes ideas or thoughts on topics under consideration. Freewriting practice also make the ESL students realize that since it forces their minds to generate or produce something on paper, it can be a tool for discovery or invention. For instance, Spack in her essay, “Invention Strategies and the ESL College Composition Student” states that when ESL students practice freewriting and other invention techniques “they can learn that writing, in addition to being a powerful tool for communicating ideas, is an intellectual thinking process, a creative craft, a way to use language to discover meaning, and a mode of learning.” (64). Her point is that the students understand freewriting and other attendant techniques to be helpful for the discovery of ideas and meaning after practicing freewriting.
Heekeyeong Lee is another researcher who investigates freewriting activities in a Canadian university and finds that it being adapted quite differently in ESL writing classrooms. Opposed to Elbow’s original notion of allowing students/writers to write anything off the heads about any topic of their choice, Lee observes that “the ESL program encouraged the writing teachers to stimulate students’ interests in writing topics by using a variety of prompts, such as writing down some words or phrases and showing pictures, pieces of music, or cartoons, while still allowing students to write whatever they want (Donaldson, 1990)” (60-61). During his study, he interviewed some of the ESL students and from their responses, came to realize that adaptation done so far was still not optimum. He feels the necessity of adaptation in allotted time of 10-15 minutes for the freewriting assignment too. He then confirms that “For some students, especially for those who had little experience in English composition previously, the time limit may be too short to respond to a given topic in written form” (71).He reached to this conclusion after many interviewees complained him about the inadequacy of allotted time for completing the assigned task. For instance, one of the interviewees answered him that he “felt that it was hard to get to used to writing quickly in 15 minutes” (72). Another responded similarly that time limit of 15-20 minutes was “too short, almost every time. I need 25 to 30 minutes…I am slow at writing down…I am not used to writing drafts or whatever writing… so I need more time than other people…” (72).
Lee, however, does not bother to find the answer to the question as to why all ESL students cannot complete their task within the given time frame which their native counterparts or relatively skilled colleagues can and thus leaves this question unaddressed. The answer to this question may lie on the fact that ESL students herald from different cultural, linguistic and topographical backgrounds and do have specific stakes, concerns and realities. The first among them is the obvious fact that unlike the native speakers of English, they do not have the intuitive sense of English and that most of them are still struggling with grammar, spelling or are at the phase of language acquisition and are therefore not in a position to be able to express themselves fluently and comfortably. Some of them may even be below the level of basic writers in terms of linguistic felicity though sophisticated in thinking level or idea generation. The language factor may have certain bearing on the feasibility of freewriting heuristic in the ESL classroom.
Even Elbow seems to have been aware of the role of language factor in freewriting exercises. “Peter Elbow claims, in fact, that skilled, experienced writers, rather than basic writers, are the ones who find freewriting most satisfying and profitable” (Blau 295). Elbow also, however, does not specify what level of linguistic competence and writing performance is desirable for the effective freewriting practices. He simply declares that everyone can benefit from freewriting. But the language factor can be a major consideration with ESL freewriting as freewriting places so much importance in fluency in writing. Those who are not fluent in generating sentences or putting ideas in words or simply in writing have little disadvantage compared to those who are fluent as Marsella and Hilgers also feel, “to learn how to use the freewriting heuristic, students must first experience themselves as capable of sustained, uncensored writing” (99). While even natives who have intuition and speech fluency have hard time freewriting, we can just imagine the situation of ESL students from varied backgrounds and realities for many of whom English is second, third or even foreign language and are venturing freewriting exercises. The stake is high and many of them get crippled and clogged or incapacitated by inadequacy of vocabulary or linguistic resources for unblocked expression.
Elbow vaguely refers to such writers when he describes an extreme situation of freewriitng:
a bunch of people … who all make lots of grammatical mistakes. Perhaps they speak some other language and know English partly, or perhaps they speak some “non-standard” dialect of English-or perhaps both…When they want to write for an audience that insists on Standard English, they must get someone to help them make the appropriate adjustments...” (Writing Without Teachers 138)
He, however, fails to propose those adjustments. But the condition of many ESL students is similar to what he says. These students make lots of grammatical mistakes, speak some other language, know English partly and are writing for some native teacher who insists on Standard English. Therefore, these students often undergo pain freewriting. Their major stake is the translation- translation of their thoughts or ideas or consciousness into words on paper. It is again Elbow who realizes that translation is the major issue in freewriting:
I sometimes think of it as a matter of translation. That is, it feels to me as though the “contents of mind” or “what I am trying to say” won’t run naturally onto paper- as though what’s “in mind” is unformed, incoherent, indeed much of it not even verbal, consisting rather of images, feelings, kinesthetic sensations... it often feels…writing requires some act of translation to get what’s in mind into freewriting”. (“Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting” 20)
The above description is Elbow’s experience, of the one well known for writing, a native with years of scholarship and mastery, himself a founder of freewriting technique. What may be the predicament of ESL students particularly those at the initial phase of learning of English? Will they be able to translate their thoughts or perceptions into English? These questions also need further exploration to be able to assess the feasibility of freewriting in ESL classroom.
Due to language inadequacy to fluent writing, ESL student are found to require rereading and pauses to continue writing or make a move in writing. But freewriting does not allow the writers the opportunity to reread or go back see what they have written. Blau, with reference to invisible writing, a variant of freewriting, says, “Deprived of the ability to reread what they have just written, basic writers engaged in invisible writing may feel they can find nothing to connect their thinking to and therefore seem to have no resources for forging ahead in coherent continuous discourse” ( 294). He also reports that these writings are particularly difficult for basic writers because they disallow or discourage the “what next” strategy by making it difficult for a writer to use each written sentence as a cue for the next one. The ESL writers being somewhat like basic writers also get stuck or muddled when forced to write non-stop as freewriting forces the writers to concentrate on the emerging idea rather than on the surface features of language. Therefore, the ESL cannot generate as many sentences as is needed to express ideas pertaining to given topic.
With some limitations and adaptations notwithstanding, researchers, scholars and teachers, however, agree on the point of the potential of freewriting being a powerful tool of invention for ESL writers/students too.
Lee, for example, mentions a number of benefits of freewriting as, “Selecting a topic which relates to personal experience and stimulates specific ideas is very important for the students to increase writing fluency and to develop generation through freewriting activities…producing a longer composition within a limited time leads the student to feel confident in their English writing” (94). He also finds freewriting having a sequential relationship with the other academic activities and a hierarchical relationship with the overall process writing class (95). He even does not fail to declare that “freewriting activity…contributes to the overall success of the writing class” (119-20) and that “students build confidence and writing fluency through regular repetition of writing” (120). Similarly, Zamel in her essay, “The Composing Processes of Advanced ESL Students: Six Case Studies” discovers that ESL writers like their native counterparts experience writing as a process. From her observation of the ESL writers composing, she confirms that “certain composing problems transcend language factors and are shared by both native and non-native speakers of English” (168) and that “ESL and native English-speaking writers may experience similar difficulties with the composing process” (168). She observes the whole composing process (prewriting, writing and revising activities) of both less skilled and more skilled ESL writers. Her study, however, does not talk about freewriting directly. Even so, some of her observations and findings say something about difficulties encountered by both the skilled and unskilled ESL writers and the strategies devised by them to tackle such difficulties. For example, she saw that:
the more skilled writers devised strategies that allowed them to pursue the development of their ideas without being sidetracked by lexical and syntactic difficulties. These strategies included writing down the English word in question and circling it, leaving a blank space for a word or phrase, or using their own native language when the word(s) in English failed them. (175)
She observes that more skilled ESL writers devised strategies to tackle their blocks and continued their writing activity. Based on her observation, it seems that more skilled ESL writers/students are capable of freewriting exercises as they could devise the strategies to break the block and continue writing any way. In contrast, the least skilled ones, she found, failed to devise such ways and “talked about being anxious about vocabulary and grammar” (178). Even though more skilled handled the writing situation, her interviewees, both skilled and unskilled, responded her that they did not find freewriting comfortable. The responses of many of the students were like:
“If I have an idea, but I don’t have the words. I write in Chinese so I don’t lose it” (179).
“My big problem is spelling. I may have no idea how to put it down. I even sometimes cannot reread what I have written” (179).
“I don’t like some of my expressions because they are too weak. I feel angry because when I say something, it’s said a simple way. I don’t have the words that are adequate to explain my ideas” (179).
All of her interviewees stressed on the inadequacy of language resources in second language for fluent expression. Despite these interview responses, after extensive observation, interviews and analysis, Zamel makes the concluding remarks that, “while there is some concern with language-related difficulties, these difficulties do not seem to interrupt the ongoing process, but rather are addressed in the context of making and communicating meaning” (180).
As mentioned earlier, Zamel’s but was not specifically a study of freewriting process of the ESL students. She observed the whole process of pre-writing, writing and revision, and ultimately reached the above conclusion. But her conclusion may not say much about freewriting as a long process like hers allows writers time to think, reread, consult the sources and pause which freewriting does not.
Responding to Zamel’s finding, Joy Reid blames Zamel of treating ESL writers as native and failing to take into account the rhetorical differences across languages and cultures as, “their (ESL writers) approaches to rhetorical forms differ from the approaches of native speakers.” (151). Similar voice that the ESL students should not be treated the way the native students are is being heard for long. The implication of the voice is that ESL writers/students do have different concerns, stakes and realities, cultural or otherwise and therefore need special adjustment, which is, in case of freewriting exercise, adaptation, modification or methodical revision based on contexts is desirable.
As such, there are obvious differences in native and ESL students. They hail from different cultural, linguistic, topographical, religious and socio-economic backgrounds. The variation is evident even among the ESL students. Many scholars, researchers and teachers of ESL literacy firmly hold that these differences are to be taken into account while formulating curricula or approaching any academic activity for the ESL students. Even CCCC’s Position Statement reflects this spirit as it reads:
Second-language writers -- who have come from a wide variety of linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds -- may have special needs because the nature and functions of discourse, audience, and persuasive appeals often differ across linguistic, cultural and educational contexts. Furthermore, most second-language writers are still in the process of acquiring syntactic and lexical competence -- a process that will take a lifetime. These differences are often a matter of degree, and not all second-language writers face the same set of difficulties.
This extract implies that every ESL student is different in terms of capacity, background, and linguistic competence and therefore needs a special care and attention. An adoption of same set of techniques and approaches in all situations is doomed to fail and therefore the choice of pedagogical approach should be contingent upon the contexts, requirement or other ground realities of the students. In this sense, CCCC’s call “to include second-language perspectives in developing theories, designing studies, analyzing data, and discussing implications” holds special meaning.
Robert B. Kaplan also explores the cultural and rhetorical differences characteristic of the ESL students in his essay, ““Contrastive Grammar: Teaching Composition to the Chinese Student” and mentions the fact that ESL students have to struggle a lot before being able to write as fluently as native speakers such as “ the Chinese student- even one who has mastered English syntax to a relatively high degree of proficiency- may still not generate English paragraphs because he does not possess in his linguistic inventory the materials generating links between individual syntactic units and links between larger units of discourse” (13). In the similar vein, Florence Baskoff argues that the students’ native languages constrain over their writings in second language to some extent. She labels such a phenomenon as ‘cultural interference’ which is, she says, is due to the difference in the style of literary and rhetorical patterns of expression in their native language and English (84).
Keeping in view all these cultural and linguistic diversities, Bela H. Banathy forwards a distinct view about literacy for ESL students and says that native tongue of the students should be made a starting point because most of ESL students feel comfortable writing and reading in their native languages. He says, “The base from which to proceed in specifying the learning task in the acquisition of a foreign language is the native language of a learner. It is this base to which the foreign language is compared and contrasted in order to establish similarities and differences…” (78). Similarly, referring to the process turn in ESL writing instruction, Ann Rhimes objects the use of invention strategies like freewriting in the ESL classroom saying, “We should not… swing too far in the direction of treating students like native speakers of the language…” (232) because, according to her “the process of writing in a L2 is startlingly different from writing in our L1” (232). Like Banathy, she also suggests that resorting to L1 can be helpful at the time of crisis such as not finding words in L2 or feeling stuck due to the lack of linguistic resources in L2. She reports many her students confessing that they “sometimes turned to their L1 to help them out....” (238). Similarly, she observes the ESL students pausing, rereading, editing and letting the idea gel and find its form and voice while composing and then doubts, “Are we perhaps doing our ESL writers a disservice if we ask them to do a rapid free writing, if we try to cut down on those pauses and backtracking, all in the name of “fluent writing”?”(247). She points to the possible reality that ESL writers may need time and recursiveness to generate ideas as well as L2 with which to express the idea. After such an observation, she recommends ESL teachers that “we need to give our students what is always in short supply in the writing classroom-time…” (248) and assess the level of linguistic competence before assigning fluent writing because, “To generate, develop, and present ideas, our students need an adequate vocabulary” (248). She underscores the point that before assigning any freewriting exercises, ESL teachers make sure that the students possess certain level of linguistic resources and have adequate time required to complete the task.
Similarly, scholars Ilona Leki and Joan Carson report that their students complained against being asked to write off the top of their head in limited time. According to them, their students’ complaints was that “time limits prevented them from finding ideas they felt satisfied with and accessing appropriate vocabulary to express those ideas (49).”
Mauris Harris and Tony Silva, on the other hand, speak about the absence of intuitive capacity of English in ESL students. They request all the concerned to keep in mind the fact that non-native speakers of a language (especially ones with lower levels of second language proficiency) simply don’t have the intuitions about the language that native speakers do. They suggest that it is better to “tell ESL writers that it is unrealistic for them to expect to be able to write like native speakers of English” (531). This way, the issue of linguistic resource is raised time and again when it comes to talking about ESL literacy. Lisa Winer too, in her essay, “Spinach to Chocolate”: Changing Awareness and Attitudes in ESL Writing Teachers” writes that the non-native speakers of English often “express anxiety and frustration at lack of specific linguistic knowledge of English” (62) when asked to write.
As also stated above notwithstanding all these constraints, concerns, stakes and differences, scholars, researchers and ESL teachers like Spack believe that if invention strategies like freewriting if adapted and used appropriately, even the ESL students benefit a lot from them. She says, “Although ESL students may experience invention differently from their native English-speaking counterparts, they can benefit from instruction in invention which is adapted to meet their needs” (649). But she regrets to state that many of the composition textbooks have failed to delineate the complexity of composing process of ESL students and says, “These texts have not shown students how meticulous and even painful writing can be, especially for non-native speakers” (649). Realizing the complexities of ESL composing process, she says that she institutes freewriting heuristic with little modification. In her assignment, “students are encouraged to use their native language or to coin a vocabulary word in English does not immediately come to mind so that they can keep their pens moving” (656). She thus grants the students liberty to use their mother tongues or coin the words in case they feel blocked. Also she asks the students to practice freewriting and other invention strategies only after assessing their linguistic capacity because she deems it necessary to determine when “ESL students are ready to be taught and to use the art of invention” (663) and also believes that to make sure they perform excellently, “students should not give up on invention techniques too early” (657). Along with linguistic consideration, she also suggests to take into account the cultural and attendant aspects of the students to ensure the better performance in freewriting heuristic. To support her statement, she cites the resistance of some Japanese students to practice freewriting at the beginning of the semester as, “they have been trained to believe it is wrong to write whatever comes to mind without regard to error” (663).
She then lists some preconditions for assigning freewriting in the ESL classroom. The first is that students need to have rich vocabulary and sufficient language resource. Secondly, if assigned prior to students’ gaining command of English language, the students are be allowed to use their native vocabularies citing Lay’s finding from his investigation of four Chinese college students that “recourse to the native language is both helpful and effective” (664).
Thus, from the discussion, analysis, scrutiny and assessment of findings, observations and experiences of so many ESL scholars, researchers, teachers and students, some generalization about the freewriting heuristics in ESL classroom can be made such that freewriting heuristic is feasible in ESL classroom but requires adaptation or modification based on a number of situational variables such as linguistic ability, cultural background, social values, rhetorical patterns etc. of the students. Before instituting freewriting heuristic teachers need to assess the linguistic resources or competence as well as ESL writing performance of the students. They should allocate relatively more time for the ESL students and also allow the students use mother tongue in case blocked or stuck. Moreover, freewriting should not be assigned at the beginning of the semester or the course. Since there is the possibility of cultural interference, the students are to be oriented towards and trained in freewriting or other modes of writing gradually over a semester or two. In short, what is required is the situational and delicate adaptation and handling of freewriting exercise. It is entirely the matter of teacher’s discretion but an ESL teacher should be the one well read in ESL stakes, concerns, differences and literacy. S/he should anchor the class activities including freewriting delicately and sensitively. Only then ESL students will be able to make most of freewriting heuristic by doing excellently what Elbow terms as “the most frightening thing of all-write nonstop”.
Works Cited
Banathy, Bela H. “Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis”. Journal of English as a
Second Language, 4 (Fall 1969): 89-96.
Belanoff, Pat, Peter Elbow, and Sheryl I. Fontaine, ed. Introduction. Nothing Begins With
N. Carbodale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. xi-xviii
Blau, Sheridan. “Thinking and the Liberation of Attention: The Uses of Free and
Invisible Writing”. Nothing Begins With N. Ed. Belanoff, Pat, Peter Elbow, and
Sheryl I. Fontaine. Carbodale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois, 1991. 283-303
CCCC. “Statement on Second Language Writing and Writers”. 2001. JSTOR. Edith
Larland Dupre Lib., U of Louisiana at Lafayette. 15 April 2008
Elbow, Peter. “Towards a Phenomenology of Freewriting”. Nothing Begins With N. Ed.
Belanoff, Pat, Peter Elbow, and Sheryl I. Fontaine. Carbodale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois, 1991. 189-214
---. Writing Without Teachers. 2nd ed. New York: OUP, 1998.
Fontaine, Sheryl I. “Recording and Transforming: The Mystery of the Ten-Minute
Freewrite. Nothing Begins With N. Ed. Belanoff, Pat, Peter Elbow, and Sheryl I.
Fontaine. Carbodale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois, 1991. 3-16
Harris, Muriel and Tony Silva. “Tutoring ESL Students: Issues and Options. College
Composition and Communication. 44 (1993): 525-537. JSTOR. Edith Larland Dupre Lib., U of Louisiana at Lafayette. 15 April 2008
Kaplan, Robert B. “Contrastive Grammar: Teaching Composition to the Chinese
Student”. Journal of English as a Second Language 68 (1968): 40-48.
Lee, Heeykong. “Investigation of Freewriting Activities in ESL Process Writing
Classrooms”. Diss. Carleton University, 1999.
Leki, Ilona and Joan Carson. ““Completely Different Worlds”: EAP and the Writing
Experiences of ESL Students in University Courses”. TESOL Quarterly. 31
(1987): 36-69. JSTOR. Edith Larland Dupre Lib., U of Louisiana at Lafayette. 15 April 2008
Macrorie, Ken. “The Freewriting Relationship”. Nothing Begins With N. Ed. Belanoff,
Pat, Peter Elbow, and Sheryl I. Fontaine. Carbodale and Edwardsville: Southern
Illinois, 1991. 173-189.
Marsella, Joy, and Thomas L. Hilgers. “Exploring the Potential of Freewriting”. Nothing
Begins With N. Ed. Belanoff, Pat, Peter Elbow, and Sheryl I.
Fontaine. Carbodale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois, 1991. 93-111
Mullin, Anne E. “Freewriting in the Classroom: Good for What?” Nothing Begins With
N. Ed. Belanoff, Pat, Peter Elbow, and Sheryl I. Fontaine. Carbodale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois, 1991. 139-148
Pennbaker, James W. “Self-Expressive Writing:Implications for Health, Education, and
Welfare”. Nothing Begins With N. Ed. Belanoff, Pat, Peter Elbow, and Sheryl I.
Fontaine. Carbodale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois, 1991. 157-170
Raimes, Ann. “What Unskilled Students Do as They Write: A Classroom Study of
Composing”. TESOL Quarterly. 19 (1985): 229-258. JSTOR. Edith Larland Dupre Lib., U of Louisiana at Lafayette. 15 April 2008
Reid, Joy. “Comments on Vivian Zamel’s “The composing Processes of Advanced ESL
Students: Six Case Studies”. TESOL Quarterly. 18 (1984): 149-153. JSTOR. Edith Larland Dupre Lib., U of Louisiana at Lafayette. 15 April 2008
Simpson. Jeanne H. The Element of Invention.New York: Eastern Illinois
University, 1990.
Spack, Ruth. “Invention Strategies and the ESL College Composition Student”. TESOL
Quarterly. 18 (1984): 649-670. JSTOR. Edith Larland Dupre Lib., U of
Louisiana at Lafayette. 15 April 2008
Winer, Lisa. ““Spinach to Chocolate”: Changing Awareness and Attitudes in ESL
Writing Teachers”. TESOL Quarterly. 26 (1992): 57-80. JSTOR. Edith Larland
Dupre Lib., U of Louisiana at Lafayette. 15 April 2008
Zamel, Vivian. “The composing Processes of Advanced ESL Students: Six Case Studies.
TESOL Quarterly. 17 (1983): 165-187. JSTOR. Edith Larland Dupre Lib., U of
Louisiana at Lafayette. 15 April 2008
Overview of Freewriting
An informal expressive mode of writing, freewriting is a catchword for the expressivists and a technique as well as an invention strategy for the process theorists of writing used in and during composing process. Said to be a private form of writing, it is also used as a preliminary to more formal writing. Freewriting is also equated with stream of consciousness writing, invisible writing, automatic writing, desperation writing, impromptu writing, and personal journal writing and so on, the major characteristic defining it being non-sop, continuous writing for some predetermined period of time without any regard to spelling, grammar or correctness.
Defining freewriting, Peter Elbow and co-editors in the introduction to their book, Nothing Begins With N: New Investigations of Freewriting, write, “freewriting is what you get when you remove almost all of the normal constraints involved in writing” (xiii) such as order, coherence, accuracy; spelling, grammar, and mechanics; focus, quality, excellence etc. Free writing for them is liberation in writing since a freewriter has the concession of writing anything in any order from garbage to chaos to poetry in stream of consciousness fashion only condition being that s/he should not stop while composing. Joy Marsella and Thomas L. Hilgers also talk of freewriting in similar terms in their essay “Exploring the Potential of Freewriting” as, “nonstop writing in which writers follow ideas wherever they lead them; freewriting performed as timed exercise; focused freewriting; and any one of these combined in a series of systematic operations that acts as heuristic” (105). They use Freewriting as a generic term for a number of activities such as unfocused, timed or focused writing activities.
Many researchers and scholars of freewriting agree that it has oral quality. “Freewriting usually moves …toward the condition of putting down language without thinking about it, toward that “transparency” of language production that is characteristic of speech” (Introduction, Nothing Begins With “N” xv-vi), claim Elbow and co-editors implying the oral quality of freewriting. Elbow, following this spirit, instructs his students to “‘utter’ words onto paper with a kind of intensity” (“Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting 190). For that matter, he calls freewriting “automatic writing or simply jabbering” (Elbow, Writing Without Teachers 1) and encourages people to generate words as is done while speaking, “put words on paper and indeed to put them down without stopping” (Elbow and co-editors, Introduction xiii) and continue “nonstop, non-censored writing” (Introduction, Writing Without Teachers xvi). In almost all of his writings on freewriting, Elbow thus is found to be describing freewriting in terms of the epithets of speech. His constant reference to voice in writing also indicates his emphasis on oral quality in freewriting. He claims that freewriting is a natural way of producing words in which “there is a sound, a texture, a rhythm- a voice- which is the main source of power in your writing” (Writing Without Teachers 7).
Some other scholars have equated freewriting with interior monologue or inner speech also highlighting the oral quality of freewriting. They argue that the properties of interior monologue or inner speech such as non-stop, private, flow without regard to syntax or semantics are also the properties of freewriting. “It is possible to understand freewriting as intimate conversation with oneself. As such, its syntax would resemble the syntax of inner speech” (21), writes Sheryl I. Fontaine in her essay “Recording and Transforming: The Mystery of the Ten-Minute Freewrite” emphasizing on the oral quality of freewriting. Association of interior monologue with freewriting implies its chaotic nature. Like psychological flow of thoughts in inner speech, freewriting may take any direction from one extreme to the other.
Generally, the technique of freewriting involves writing non-stop for few minutes whatever comes to mind concerning a subject. Elbow’s instructions for freewriting adequately explains its technique when he says, “simply write as quickly as you can, as though you were talking to someone” or when he suggests, “don’t plan, don’t stop, trust that something will come-all in the interest of getting oneself “rolling” or “steaming along” into a more intense state of perception and language production” (“Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting” 190). He asks to simply follow the train of thought and “just babble onto paper” (“Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting” 207).
Sheridan Blau, on the other hand, equates freewriting with invisible writing: “an experimental…writing (in which) the writer writes with an empty ballpoint pen on a blank piece of paper backed by a piece of carbon paper and a bottom blank sheet...the writer can’t see what he is writing as he writes but still produces a carbon copy of everything he has written” (283-84). Blau argues that since writers cannot see and reread what they have written and are required to write non-stop in invisible writing, their writings are almost like freewritings.
Elbow and Ken Macrorie are often associated with freewriting as the founding figures. Many credit Elbow but Elbow himself regards Macrorie as the father of this genre. Macrorie, in turn, credits Dorothea Brandea for inventing this technique citing her call for freewriting sometimes in 1940s as, “write anything that comes into your head: last night’s dream, if you are able to remember…write any sort of early morning reverie, rapidly and uncritically” (quoted by Macrorie in “The Freewriting Relationship” 72). Macrorie confesses that he is following Brandea’s footprint and calls any writing that appeals to unconscious, freewriting as, “Under the name of freewriting all sorts of writing may be done... it taps the unconscious language power in all of us. We locate that best by trying for some kind of truth, whether in fantasy, fiction, or non-fiction” (188). Then onwards, freewriting is being used as a heuristic or as a pre-writing technique of writing process. Many composition textbooks are recommending freewriting in chapters on “getting started” or “prewriting (Marsella and Hilgers 93-4).
Thus, it can be said that any writing that is lively, voiced, alive, or even authentic done without any plan, goal or aim is termed as freewriting. Freewriting is as at the heart of expressionistic theory of writing and is also being used as a tool for generating ideas or as a component writing process, a form of prewriting.
Freewriting as Invention Technique
Freewriting is being used primarily a technique for exploring and generating the ideas pertaining to a chosen topic. Quoting Elbow’s notion of freewriting as uncensored, generative writing form intended to stimulate writing skills, creativity, and new perspectives (Elbow 1986), Jame W. Pennbaker writes that freewriting, by virtue of being a kind of self-expressive writing, “strongly encourages the expression of individuals’ very deepest emotions and thoughts about personal and, oftentimes, traumatic events and issues” (158) . For him, freewriting is the only such technique that helps to express the ideas dormant in the deepest recess of mind or unconscious. As such, freewriting has proved to be a method of self-exploration and is instrumental in probing into one’s own reservoir of thoughts or ideas as it is for finding ideas to write a paper. Jeanne A. Simpson also expresses the similar opinion that, “Freewriting is an important method …for helping you to discover what you think about events around you and what your values, ideas, and problems really are.” (21). In this sense, freewriting can be a best resort for those facing a writer’s block or feeling stuck during composing process as it helps to warm up or activate the mind triggering it to probe into the heart of the matter thereby helping to discover unforeseen shades of meanings. That is why it is regarded as one of the major techniques of invention in writing.
Freewriting is a technique of invention also because invention itself is a preliminary form of formal writing. During invention, one does not have to worry about commas and spelling or even complete sentences. The aim is just to dump the ideas down however possible keeping in mind that they can be cleaned up later. Arrows, abbreviations, shorthand, fragments, lists, circles, and underlining are all perfectly acceptable. Invention is for one to begin to work from. It is not a perfect outline of your paper. (Simpson 2). Freewriting like invention exactly does the same thing. It can also be a preliminary to formal writing. It simply encourages generation of ideas by encouraging free association. It is generative for the writer who has trouble getting words on paper because it pushes the writer to begin and continue (Marsella and Hilgers 109). Freewriting is said to be much more easier to practice compared to other techniques of invention in writing process. The feature that distinguishes freewriting from other types of writings or invention strategies and therefore makes it easy to practice is its freedom from all worries and anxieties because it keeps the generating activities separate from the analytical or editorial. In this sense, it reduces the burden of editing or critical thinking while composing. All it requires is the ability to transcribe the ideas on paper or translate somehow the ideas or thoughts into some form of writing on paper. This is the only stake (if it is a stake at all) of freewriting that freewriter needs to be able to put the ideas non-stop on words. Elbow and co-editors also consent this aspect of freewriitng as they write, “freewriting asks us to do the most frightening thing of all-write nonstop” (xiii). This is what Marsella and Hilgers also imply when they say, “To learn how to use the freewriting heuristic, students must first experience themselves as capable of sustained, uncensored writing” (99). In this light, freewriting seems to require a certain level of linguistic command or resources in writers which may, therefore, may render this heuristic not equally feasible for all types of writers.
Implying freewriting as an invention technique, people like Marsella and Hilgers describe Freewriting as heuristic for invention, i.e. as an instrument that facilitates the discovery of ideas and thoughts on topic under consideration. Their view is that freewriting heuristic-three-step process of writing, reflecting and asserting- can be used to generate the making of full-fledged piece of finished prose. Ruth Spack also believes that invention strategies like freewriting can be employed to narrow down a topic, generate content, discover a form and create a thesis for an assigned essay (649). This way, freewriting has proved to be a popularly known technique of invention in writing process.
Freewriting for ESL Students: Prospects and Stakes
While Freewriting is such a widely used heuristic or technique of invention in writing, none of its founding figures or exponents of seem to talk of it with reference to ESL students. Therefore, there is dearth of literature on freewriting heuristics/exercises for ESL students, hardly any regarding its feasibility in the writing class. Only of late, some of the ESL teachers are trying to extrapolate this technique in the ESL classrooms. All who have researched and experimented with freewriting in the ESL classroom have found that this invention strategy is feasible but requires adaptation or modification of certain kind and degree as the realities, stakes and concerns of ESL students are different from those of the native students.
They have also mentioned that, after practicing freewriting technique, ESL students also feel that freewriting is a significant tool that inspires or provokes ideas or thoughts on topics under consideration. Freewriting practice also make the ESL students realize that since it forces their minds to generate or produce something on paper, it can be a tool for discovery or invention. For instance, Spack in her essay, “Invention Strategies and the ESL College Composition Student” states that when ESL students practice freewriting and other invention techniques “they can learn that writing, in addition to being a powerful tool for communicating ideas, is an intellectual thinking process, a creative craft, a way to use language to discover meaning, and a mode of learning.” (64). Her point is that the students understand freewriting and other attendant techniques to be helpful for the discovery of ideas and meaning after practicing freewriting.
Heekeyeong Lee is another researcher who investigates freewriting activities in a Canadian university and finds that it being adapted quite differently in ESL writing classrooms. Opposed to Elbow’s original notion of allowing students/writers to write anything off the heads about any topic of their choice, Lee observes that “the ESL program encouraged the writing teachers to stimulate students’ interests in writing topics by using a variety of prompts, such as writing down some words or phrases and showing pictures, pieces of music, or cartoons, while still allowing students to write whatever they want (Donaldson, 1990)” (60-61). During his study, he interviewed some of the ESL students and from their responses, came to realize that adaptation done so far was still not optimum. He feels the necessity of adaptation in allotted time of 10-15 minutes for the freewriting assignment too. He then confirms that “For some students, especially for those who had little experience in English composition previously, the time limit may be too short to respond to a given topic in written form” (71).He reached to this conclusion after many interviewees complained him about the inadequacy of allotted time for completing the assigned task. For instance, one of the interviewees answered him that he “felt that it was hard to get to used to writing quickly in 15 minutes” (72). Another responded similarly that time limit of 15-20 minutes was “too short, almost every time. I need 25 to 30 minutes…I am slow at writing down…I am not used to writing drafts or whatever writing… so I need more time than other people…” (72).
Lee, however, does not bother to find the answer to the question as to why all ESL students cannot complete their task within the given time frame which their native counterparts or relatively skilled colleagues can and thus leaves this question unaddressed. The answer to this question may lie on the fact that ESL students herald from different cultural, linguistic and topographical backgrounds and do have specific stakes, concerns and realities. The first among them is the obvious fact that unlike the native speakers of English, they do not have the intuitive sense of English and that most of them are still struggling with grammar, spelling or are at the phase of language acquisition and are therefore not in a position to be able to express themselves fluently and comfortably. Some of them may even be below the level of basic writers in terms of linguistic felicity though sophisticated in thinking level or idea generation. The language factor may have certain bearing on the feasibility of freewriting heuristic in the ESL classroom.
Even Elbow seems to have been aware of the role of language factor in freewriting exercises. “Peter Elbow claims, in fact, that skilled, experienced writers, rather than basic writers, are the ones who find freewriting most satisfying and profitable” (Blau 295). Elbow also, however, does not specify what level of linguistic competence and writing performance is desirable for the effective freewriting practices. He simply declares that everyone can benefit from freewriting. But the language factor can be a major consideration with ESL freewriting as freewriting places so much importance in fluency in writing. Those who are not fluent in generating sentences or putting ideas in words or simply in writing have little disadvantage compared to those who are fluent as Marsella and Hilgers also feel, “to learn how to use the freewriting heuristic, students must first experience themselves as capable of sustained, uncensored writing” (99). While even natives who have intuition and speech fluency have hard time freewriting, we can just imagine the situation of ESL students from varied backgrounds and realities for many of whom English is second, third or even foreign language and are venturing freewriting exercises. The stake is high and many of them get crippled and clogged or incapacitated by inadequacy of vocabulary or linguistic resources for unblocked expression.
Elbow vaguely refers to such writers when he describes an extreme situation of freewriitng:
a bunch of people … who all make lots of grammatical mistakes. Perhaps they speak some other language and know English partly, or perhaps they speak some “non-standard” dialect of English-or perhaps both…When they want to write for an audience that insists on Standard English, they must get someone to help them make the appropriate adjustments...” (Writing Without Teachers 138)
He, however, fails to propose those adjustments. But the condition of many ESL students is similar to what he says. These students make lots of grammatical mistakes, speak some other language, know English partly and are writing for some native teacher who insists on Standard English. Therefore, these students often undergo pain freewriting. Their major stake is the translation- translation of their thoughts or ideas or consciousness into words on paper. It is again Elbow who realizes that translation is the major issue in freewriting:
I sometimes think of it as a matter of translation. That is, it feels to me as though the “contents of mind” or “what I am trying to say” won’t run naturally onto paper- as though what’s “in mind” is unformed, incoherent, indeed much of it not even verbal, consisting rather of images, feelings, kinesthetic sensations... it often feels…writing requires some act of translation to get what’s in mind into freewriting”. (“Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting” 20)
The above description is Elbow’s experience, of the one well known for writing, a native with years of scholarship and mastery, himself a founder of freewriting technique. What may be the predicament of ESL students particularly those at the initial phase of learning of English? Will they be able to translate their thoughts or perceptions into English? These questions also need further exploration to be able to assess the feasibility of freewriting in ESL classroom.
Due to language inadequacy to fluent writing, ESL student are found to require rereading and pauses to continue writing or make a move in writing. But freewriting does not allow the writers the opportunity to reread or go back see what they have written. Blau, with reference to invisible writing, a variant of freewriting, says, “Deprived of the ability to reread what they have just written, basic writers engaged in invisible writing may feel they can find nothing to connect their thinking to and therefore seem to have no resources for forging ahead in coherent continuous discourse” ( 294). He also reports that these writings are particularly difficult for basic writers because they disallow or discourage the “what next” strategy by making it difficult for a writer to use each written sentence as a cue for the next one. The ESL writers being somewhat like basic writers also get stuck or muddled when forced to write non-stop as freewriting forces the writers to concentrate on the emerging idea rather than on the surface features of language. Therefore, the ESL cannot generate as many sentences as is needed to express ideas pertaining to given topic.
With some limitations and adaptations notwithstanding, researchers, scholars and teachers, however, agree on the point of the potential of freewriting being a powerful tool of invention for ESL writers/students too.
Lee, for example, mentions a number of benefits of freewriting as, “Selecting a topic which relates to personal experience and stimulates specific ideas is very important for the students to increase writing fluency and to develop generation through freewriting activities…producing a longer composition within a limited time leads the student to feel confident in their English writing” (94). He also finds freewriting having a sequential relationship with the other academic activities and a hierarchical relationship with the overall process writing class (95). He even does not fail to declare that “freewriting activity…contributes to the overall success of the writing class” (119-20) and that “students build confidence and writing fluency through regular repetition of writing” (120). Similarly, Zamel in her essay, “The Composing Processes of Advanced ESL Students: Six Case Studies” discovers that ESL writers like their native counterparts experience writing as a process. From her observation of the ESL writers composing, she confirms that “certain composing problems transcend language factors and are shared by both native and non-native speakers of English” (168) and that “ESL and native English-speaking writers may experience similar difficulties with the composing process” (168). She observes the whole composing process (prewriting, writing and revising activities) of both less skilled and more skilled ESL writers. Her study, however, does not talk about freewriting directly. Even so, some of her observations and findings say something about difficulties encountered by both the skilled and unskilled ESL writers and the strategies devised by them to tackle such difficulties. For example, she saw that:
the more skilled writers devised strategies that allowed them to pursue the development of their ideas without being sidetracked by lexical and syntactic difficulties. These strategies included writing down the English word in question and circling it, leaving a blank space for a word or phrase, or using their own native language when the word(s) in English failed them. (175)
She observes that more skilled ESL writers devised strategies to tackle their blocks and continued their writing activity. Based on her observation, it seems that more skilled ESL writers/students are capable of freewriting exercises as they could devise the strategies to break the block and continue writing any way. In contrast, the least skilled ones, she found, failed to devise such ways and “talked about being anxious about vocabulary and grammar” (178). Even though more skilled handled the writing situation, her interviewees, both skilled and unskilled, responded her that they did not find freewriting comfortable. The responses of many of the students were like:
“If I have an idea, but I don’t have the words. I write in Chinese so I don’t lose it” (179).
“My big problem is spelling. I may have no idea how to put it down. I even sometimes cannot reread what I have written” (179).
“I don’t like some of my expressions because they are too weak. I feel angry because when I say something, it’s said a simple way. I don’t have the words that are adequate to explain my ideas” (179).
All of her interviewees stressed on the inadequacy of language resources in second language for fluent expression. Despite these interview responses, after extensive observation, interviews and analysis, Zamel makes the concluding remarks that, “while there is some concern with language-related difficulties, these difficulties do not seem to interrupt the ongoing process, but rather are addressed in the context of making and communicating meaning” (180).
As mentioned earlier, Zamel’s but was not specifically a study of freewriting process of the ESL students. She observed the whole process of pre-writing, writing and revision, and ultimately reached the above conclusion. But her conclusion may not say much about freewriting as a long process like hers allows writers time to think, reread, consult the sources and pause which freewriting does not.
Responding to Zamel’s finding, Joy Reid blames Zamel of treating ESL writers as native and failing to take into account the rhetorical differences across languages and cultures as, “their (ESL writers) approaches to rhetorical forms differ from the approaches of native speakers.” (151). Similar voice that the ESL students should not be treated the way the native students are is being heard for long. The implication of the voice is that ESL writers/students do have different concerns, stakes and realities, cultural or otherwise and therefore need special adjustment, which is, in case of freewriting exercise, adaptation, modification or methodical revision based on contexts is desirable.
As such, there are obvious differences in native and ESL students. They hail from different cultural, linguistic, topographical, religious and socio-economic backgrounds. The variation is evident even among the ESL students. Many scholars, researchers and teachers of ESL literacy firmly hold that these differences are to be taken into account while formulating curricula or approaching any academic activity for the ESL students. Even CCCC’s Position Statement reflects this spirit as it reads:
Second-language writers -- who have come from a wide variety of linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds -- may have special needs because the nature and functions of discourse, audience, and persuasive appeals often differ across linguistic, cultural and educational contexts. Furthermore, most second-language writers are still in the process of acquiring syntactic and lexical competence -- a process that will take a lifetime. These differences are often a matter of degree, and not all second-language writers face the same set of difficulties.
This extract implies that every ESL student is different in terms of capacity, background, and linguistic competence and therefore needs a special care and attention. An adoption of same set of techniques and approaches in all situations is doomed to fail and therefore the choice of pedagogical approach should be contingent upon the contexts, requirement or other ground realities of the students. In this sense, CCCC’s call “to include second-language perspectives in developing theories, designing studies, analyzing data, and discussing implications” holds special meaning.
Robert B. Kaplan also explores the cultural and rhetorical differences characteristic of the ESL students in his essay, ““Contrastive Grammar: Teaching Composition to the Chinese Student” and mentions the fact that ESL students have to struggle a lot before being able to write as fluently as native speakers such as “ the Chinese student- even one who has mastered English syntax to a relatively high degree of proficiency- may still not generate English paragraphs because he does not possess in his linguistic inventory the materials generating links between individual syntactic units and links between larger units of discourse” (13). In the similar vein, Florence Baskoff argues that the students’ native languages constrain over their writings in second language to some extent. She labels such a phenomenon as ‘cultural interference’ which is, she says, is due to the difference in the style of literary and rhetorical patterns of expression in their native language and English (84).
Keeping in view all these cultural and linguistic diversities, Bela H. Banathy forwards a distinct view about literacy for ESL students and says that native tongue of the students should be made a starting point because most of ESL students feel comfortable writing and reading in their native languages. He says, “The base from which to proceed in specifying the learning task in the acquisition of a foreign language is the native language of a learner. It is this base to which the foreign language is compared and contrasted in order to establish similarities and differences…” (78). Similarly, referring to the process turn in ESL writing instruction, Ann Rhimes objects the use of invention strategies like freewriting in the ESL classroom saying, “We should not… swing too far in the direction of treating students like native speakers of the language…” (232) because, according to her “the process of writing in a L2 is startlingly different from writing in our L1” (232). Like Banathy, she also suggests that resorting to L1 can be helpful at the time of crisis such as not finding words in L2 or feeling stuck due to the lack of linguistic resources in L2. She reports many her students confessing that they “sometimes turned to their L1 to help them out....” (238). Similarly, she observes the ESL students pausing, rereading, editing and letting the idea gel and find its form and voice while composing and then doubts, “Are we perhaps doing our ESL writers a disservice if we ask them to do a rapid free writing, if we try to cut down on those pauses and backtracking, all in the name of “fluent writing”?”(247). She points to the possible reality that ESL writers may need time and recursiveness to generate ideas as well as L2 with which to express the idea. After such an observation, she recommends ESL teachers that “we need to give our students what is always in short supply in the writing classroom-time…” (248) and assess the level of linguistic competence before assigning fluent writing because, “To generate, develop, and present ideas, our students need an adequate vocabulary” (248). She underscores the point that before assigning any freewriting exercises, ESL teachers make sure that the students possess certain level of linguistic resources and have adequate time required to complete the task.
Similarly, scholars Ilona Leki and Joan Carson report that their students complained against being asked to write off the top of their head in limited time. According to them, their students’ complaints was that “time limits prevented them from finding ideas they felt satisfied with and accessing appropriate vocabulary to express those ideas (49).”
Mauris Harris and Tony Silva, on the other hand, speak about the absence of intuitive capacity of English in ESL students. They request all the concerned to keep in mind the fact that non-native speakers of a language (especially ones with lower levels of second language proficiency) simply don’t have the intuitions about the language that native speakers do. They suggest that it is better to “tell ESL writers that it is unrealistic for them to expect to be able to write like native speakers of English” (531). This way, the issue of linguistic resource is raised time and again when it comes to talking about ESL literacy. Lisa Winer too, in her essay, “Spinach to Chocolate”: Changing Awareness and Attitudes in ESL Writing Teachers” writes that the non-native speakers of English often “express anxiety and frustration at lack of specific linguistic knowledge of English” (62) when asked to write.
As also stated above notwithstanding all these constraints, concerns, stakes and differences, scholars, researchers and ESL teachers like Spack believe that if invention strategies like freewriting if adapted and used appropriately, even the ESL students benefit a lot from them. She says, “Although ESL students may experience invention differently from their native English-speaking counterparts, they can benefit from instruction in invention which is adapted to meet their needs” (649). But she regrets to state that many of the composition textbooks have failed to delineate the complexity of composing process of ESL students and says, “These texts have not shown students how meticulous and even painful writing can be, especially for non-native speakers” (649). Realizing the complexities of ESL composing process, she says that she institutes freewriting heuristic with little modification. In her assignment, “students are encouraged to use their native language or to coin a vocabulary word in English does not immediately come to mind so that they can keep their pens moving” (656). She thus grants the students liberty to use their mother tongues or coin the words in case they feel blocked. Also she asks the students to practice freewriting and other invention strategies only after assessing their linguistic capacity because she deems it necessary to determine when “ESL students are ready to be taught and to use the art of invention” (663) and also believes that to make sure they perform excellently, “students should not give up on invention techniques too early” (657). Along with linguistic consideration, she also suggests to take into account the cultural and attendant aspects of the students to ensure the better performance in freewriting heuristic. To support her statement, she cites the resistance of some Japanese students to practice freewriting at the beginning of the semester as, “they have been trained to believe it is wrong to write whatever comes to mind without regard to error” (663).
She then lists some preconditions for assigning freewriting in the ESL classroom. The first is that students need to have rich vocabulary and sufficient language resource. Secondly, if assigned prior to students’ gaining command of English language, the students are be allowed to use their native vocabularies citing Lay’s finding from his investigation of four Chinese college students that “recourse to the native language is both helpful and effective” (664).
Thus, from the discussion, analysis, scrutiny and assessment of findings, observations and experiences of so many ESL scholars, researchers, teachers and students, some generalization about the freewriting heuristics in ESL classroom can be made such that freewriting heuristic is feasible in ESL classroom but requires adaptation or modification based on a number of situational variables such as linguistic ability, cultural background, social values, rhetorical patterns etc. of the students. Before instituting freewriting heuristic teachers need to assess the linguistic resources or competence as well as ESL writing performance of the students. They should allocate relatively more time for the ESL students and also allow the students use mother tongue in case blocked or stuck. Moreover, freewriting should not be assigned at the beginning of the semester or the course. Since there is the possibility of cultural interference, the students are to be oriented towards and trained in freewriting or other modes of writing gradually over a semester or two. In short, what is required is the situational and delicate adaptation and handling of freewriting exercise. It is entirely the matter of teacher’s discretion but an ESL teacher should be the one well read in ESL stakes, concerns, differences and literacy. S/he should anchor the class activities including freewriting delicately and sensitively. Only then ESL students will be able to make most of freewriting heuristic by doing excellently what Elbow terms as “the most frightening thing of all-write nonstop”.
Works Cited
Banathy, Bela H. “Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis”. Journal of English as a
Second Language, 4 (Fall 1969): 89-96.
Belanoff, Pat, Peter Elbow, and Sheryl I. Fontaine, ed. Introduction. Nothing Begins With
N. Carbodale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. xi-xviii
Blau, Sheridan. “Thinking and the Liberation of Attention: The Uses of Free and
Invisible Writing”. Nothing Begins With N. Ed. Belanoff, Pat, Peter Elbow, and
Sheryl I. Fontaine. Carbodale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois, 1991. 283-303
CCCC. “Statement on Second Language Writing and Writers”. 2001. JSTOR. Edith
Larland Dupre Lib., U of Louisiana at Lafayette. 15 April 2008
Elbow, Peter. “Towards a Phenomenology of Freewriting”. Nothing Begins With N. Ed.
Belanoff, Pat, Peter Elbow, and Sheryl I. Fontaine. Carbodale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois, 1991. 189-214
---. Writing Without Teachers. 2nd ed. New York: OUP, 1998.
Fontaine, Sheryl I. “Recording and Transforming: The Mystery of the Ten-Minute
Freewrite. Nothing Begins With N. Ed. Belanoff, Pat, Peter Elbow, and Sheryl I.
Fontaine. Carbodale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois, 1991. 3-16
Harris, Muriel and Tony Silva. “Tutoring ESL Students: Issues and Options. College
Composition and Communication. 44 (1993): 525-537. JSTOR. Edith Larland Dupre Lib., U of Louisiana at Lafayette. 15 April 2008
Kaplan, Robert B. “Contrastive Grammar: Teaching Composition to the Chinese
Student”. Journal of English as a Second Language 68 (1968): 40-48.
Lee, Heeykong. “Investigation of Freewriting Activities in ESL Process Writing
Classrooms”. Diss. Carleton University, 1999.
Leki, Ilona and Joan Carson. ““Completely Different Worlds”: EAP and the Writing
Experiences of ESL Students in University Courses”. TESOL Quarterly. 31
(1987): 36-69. JSTOR. Edith Larland Dupre Lib., U of Louisiana at Lafayette. 15 April 2008
Macrorie, Ken. “The Freewriting Relationship”. Nothing Begins With N. Ed. Belanoff,
Pat, Peter Elbow, and Sheryl I. Fontaine. Carbodale and Edwardsville: Southern
Illinois, 1991. 173-189.
Marsella, Joy, and Thomas L. Hilgers. “Exploring the Potential of Freewriting”. Nothing
Begins With N. Ed. Belanoff, Pat, Peter Elbow, and Sheryl I.
Fontaine. Carbodale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois, 1991. 93-111
Mullin, Anne E. “Freewriting in the Classroom: Good for What?” Nothing Begins With
N. Ed. Belanoff, Pat, Peter Elbow, and Sheryl I. Fontaine. Carbodale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois, 1991. 139-148
Pennbaker, James W. “Self-Expressive Writing:Implications for Health, Education, and
Welfare”. Nothing Begins With N. Ed. Belanoff, Pat, Peter Elbow, and Sheryl I.
Fontaine. Carbodale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois, 1991. 157-170
Raimes, Ann. “What Unskilled Students Do as They Write: A Classroom Study of
Composing”. TESOL Quarterly. 19 (1985): 229-258. JSTOR. Edith Larland Dupre Lib., U of Louisiana at Lafayette. 15 April 2008
Reid, Joy. “Comments on Vivian Zamel’s “The composing Processes of Advanced ESL
Students: Six Case Studies”. TESOL Quarterly. 18 (1984): 149-153. JSTOR. Edith Larland Dupre Lib., U of Louisiana at Lafayette. 15 April 2008
Simpson. Jeanne H. The Element of Invention.New York: Eastern Illinois
University, 1990.
Spack, Ruth. “Invention Strategies and the ESL College Composition Student”. TESOL
Quarterly. 18 (1984): 649-670. JSTOR. Edith Larland Dupre Lib., U of
Louisiana at Lafayette. 15 April 2008
Winer, Lisa. ““Spinach to Chocolate”: Changing Awareness and Attitudes in ESL
Writing Teachers”. TESOL Quarterly. 26 (1992): 57-80. JSTOR. Edith Larland
Dupre Lib., U of Louisiana at Lafayette. 15 April 2008
Zamel, Vivian. “The composing Processes of Advanced ESL Students: Six Case Studies.
TESOL Quarterly. 17 (1983): 165-187. JSTOR. Edith Larland Dupre Lib., U of
Louisiana at Lafayette. 15 April 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
