WAC and Second Language Writers: Research Toward Linguistically and Culturally Inclusive Programs and Practices. Edited by Terry Myers Zawacki and Michelle Cox
This book highlights:
1) How university programs in the US and beyond can accommodate the linguistically and culturally diverse students--accommodation not only in teaching pedagogies and methods but also in attitudes and policies.
2) Skilled language use doesn't mean only in the perfection of form.
3) Genre and rhetoric are intrinsic to their working in both languages.
Here are some lines from different chapters of this book and two questions that I found interesting:
Chapter 2
If we are truly to situate ourselves both critically and consciously in a global context and at the same time attend to the intensely local characteristics of a unique campus population, and of the various needs of the individuals within that population, a consciousness of linguistic diversity has to be a factor in all of WAC’s administrative and pedagogical decisions; it must be explicitly included, because otherwise, we may easily fall back on our unspoken assumptions of monolingualism.
Chapter 8
More collaboration among the L2 writing and other disciplines on campus
Faculty development programs
WAC has increased emphasis on writing across undergraduate programs without creating mechanisms that help second language (L2) students succeed as writers and without creating faculty development programs that offer training in working with L2 writers. This study responds in part to these calls for more articulation between second language writing and WAC research, seeking to understand the ways in which WAC and second language writing can complement each other in their collective efforts to better serve the needs of faculty in the disciplines and multilingual writers in those disciplines.
Chapter 12
Faculty support--- If multilingual students are often invisible, multilingual faculty may be even more so, as they have adapted, in order to survive in US academia, to a norm of English-only in their professional publications and communications, and, often, as well, in their interactions with students, even those with whom they may share a non-English language. But these faculty sometimes need encouragement to step forward and bring their expertise to the WAC/WID classroom, to participate in a program which they might otherwise perceive as dominated by unarticulated monolingualist assumptions.
Chapter 17
...specific workshop strategies for moving faculty gradually from a difference-as-deficit model to an interim difference-accommodation procedure and ultimately toward a difference-as-resource consciousness which even advanced theoretical work in the area is only now in the process of fully articulating.
Our classroom practice, our pedagogical theory, and our research all need to change and develop in order to meet the challenges of the new mainstream. By building our pedagogy on a solid research base which combines global awareness with local specificity, we can adjust our college writing pedagogy in order to reach multilingual learners and help them to succeed at the highest academic levels. That is: Think globally. Research locally. Teach consciously.
Q: How will students who maintain multicompetence in a variety of languages which they use for particular purposes, which they mix and match casually and skillfully in their everyday lives, bring a different sensibility to their academic studies?
Q: How will they read differently and write differently, between multiple languages and across diverse cultures, moving among and synthesizing genres and ideas in ways that we cannot predict in advance, but will have to respond to day after day in the present moment of the classroom?
This book highlights:
1) How university programs in the US and beyond can accommodate the linguistically and culturally diverse students--accommodation not only in teaching pedagogies and methods but also in attitudes and policies.
2) Skilled language use doesn't mean only in the perfection of form.
3) Genre and rhetoric are intrinsic to their working in both languages.
Chapter 2
If we are truly to situate ourselves both critically and consciously in a global context and at the same time attend to the intensely local characteristics of a unique campus population, and of the various needs of the individuals within that population, a consciousness of linguistic diversity has to be a factor in all of WAC’s administrative and pedagogical decisions; it must be explicitly included, because otherwise, we may easily fall back on our unspoken assumptions of monolingualism.
Chapter 8
More collaboration among the L2 writing and other disciplines on campus
Faculty development programs
WAC has increased emphasis on writing across undergraduate programs without creating mechanisms that help second language (L2) students succeed as writers and without creating faculty development programs that offer training in working with L2 writers. This study responds in part to these calls for more articulation between second language writing and WAC research, seeking to understand the ways in which WAC and second language writing can complement each other in their collective efforts to better serve the needs of faculty in the disciplines and multilingual writers in those disciplines.
Chapter 12
Faculty support--- If multilingual students are often invisible, multilingual faculty may be even more so, as they have adapted, in order to survive in US academia, to a norm of English-only in their professional publications and communications, and, often, as well, in their interactions with students, even those with whom they may share a non-English language. But these faculty sometimes need encouragement to step forward and bring their expertise to the WAC/WID classroom, to participate in a program which they might otherwise perceive as dominated by unarticulated monolingualist assumptions.
Chapter 17
...specific workshop strategies for moving faculty gradually from a difference-as-deficit model to an interim difference-accommodation procedure and ultimately toward a difference-as-resource consciousness which even advanced theoretical work in the area is only now in the process of fully articulating.
Our classroom practice, our pedagogical theory, and our research all need to change and develop in order to meet the challenges of the new mainstream. By building our pedagogy on a solid research base which combines global awareness with local specificity, we can adjust our college writing pedagogy in order to reach multilingual learners and help them to succeed at the highest academic levels. That is: Think globally. Research locally. Teach consciously.
Q: How will students who maintain multicompetence in a variety of languages which they use for particular purposes, which they mix and match casually and skillfully in their everyday lives, bring a different sensibility to their academic studies?
Q: How will they read differently and write differently, between multiple languages and across diverse cultures, moving among and synthesizing genres and ideas in ways that we cannot predict in advance, but will have to respond to day after day in the present moment of the classroom?
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