The CCCC Committee on Second Language Writing hosted two highly successful ESL professional development workshops at the 2011 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in Atlanta, Georgia. This conference marks the 15th straight year that the committee has offered these workshops at CCCC.

The two half-day workshops discussed culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) writers in writing courses (morning workshop) and writing centers (afternoon workshop) and were very well-attended. Twenty-five participants (not including presenters) attended the morning session, and 23 attended the afternoon session. Participants varied widely in institutional background—from two-year colleges to Research I universities—and in experience working with multilingual writers. The workshops attracted ESL specialists and ESL composition instructors as well as first-year writing and literature instructors, writing program and writing center administrators, graduate students, and even an university administrator. The strong turnout at this year’s workshops is one indication among many that more teachers and researchers in “mainstream” writing studies are growing increasingly interested in issues of multilingualism and globalization.

Both workshops adopted the term “culturally and linguistically diverse” instead of “ESL.” While this choice has the unfortunate side effect of adding to the ever-increasing alphabet soup of linguistic acronyms, workshop organizers felt it opened the discussion to include students from a range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds (i.e., from international students to bilingual, resident multilingual, or bidialectical students). Thus, framing the discussion in this way offered a richer portrait of linguistic pluralism in higher education, providing workshop attendees with a broader perspective of necessary programmatic and curricular changes in writing classes and writing centers.

MORNING WORKSHOP

The morning workshop, entitled “A Common Ground in a Sea of Change: Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Writers in the Writing Classroom,” adopted David Kirkland’s (2010) “sea of change” metaphor to describe the wide range of factors—linguistic, cultural, political, and technological—that writing and language educators must account for in an increasingly globalized educational landscape. Workshop organizers—Angela Dadek, Maria Jerskey, and Steve Simpson—structured the workshop to model a “vertical curriculum,” addressing writing instruction throughout students’ academic instruction (i.e., precollege writing, first-year composition, and technical writing [both undergraduate and graduate]). The workshop consisted of a series of 10-minute presentations, followed by collaborative “inkshedding” exercises allowing participants to share ideas on the sessions. (“Inkshedding” is a social form of free-writing in which participants each respond to a writing prompt, throw their responses into the center of a table, pick up someone else’s paper and respond, throw it back into the center of the table, etc.)

In keeping with the emphasis on “technological change,” the morning workshop used collaborative writing/social media platforms that not only demonstrated ways of working these technologies into writing or ESL classrooms but allowed discussion to extend beyond the workshop context. For example, prior to the workshop, Todd Ruecker and Marohang Limbu created a preworkshop page on Etherpad (a real-time collaborative writing Web site similar to Google Docs) and a Facebook page. Workshop participants were invited to visit these sites beforehand to acquaint themselves with the technology, to introduce themselves, and to share issues they wanted to discuss in the workshop. Thus, workshop presenters could interact with participants before the workshop and tailor their presentations to address participants’ questions. During the workshop, Ruecker and Limbu facilitated some online “inkshedding” sessions, and Dadak kept a running list of references and ideas on a group Etherpad page, which participants could refer to after the conference.

David Kirkland, a member of the CCCC Language Policy Committee, provided the theoretical overview for the session with his talk, “Sea of Change: Linguistic Pluralism and the Politics of Composition Studies.” Kirkland started with a hip-hop-inspired poem penned by a writing student, “Derrick,” and used it to bring into question our notions of “standard English,” a notion that often alienates students in writing classes. He challenged participants to consider how their own notions of “correctness,” and by extension, their perceptions of English instruction, need to change to account for the fluidity of language. Sarah Nakamaru followed up with a discussion of the City University of New York’s (CUNY) new writing exam and its effect on ESL and language minority students. Despite some positive changes to the test, the pass rate for ESL students dropped alarmingly from 47.5 percent to 31.8 percent. Thus, the presentation opened discussion of how teachers “can work within the constraints of high-stakes testing or other external factors (e.g., accreditation standards, etc.) to empower [CLD] students” (from inkshedding prompt).

Paul Kei Matsuda and Maria Jerskey discussed CLD students in first-year writing courses. Matsuda opened the segment with an overview of the different multilingual populations in first-year writing and, referencing the notorious “Asian student rant” that went viral on YouTube, stressed the need for more awareness of CLD students’ needs among both faculty and students. Maria Jerskey’s “First-Year Composition: Charting Ground in a Sea of Change” discussed using Web 2.0 technology—LaGuardia Community College’s “Community 2.0—to encourage students to write about their multilingual/multicultural identities and to create links between “non-school and school-based literacies.” Finally, Simpson’s “Stone Soup: How Not to Be the ‘ESL Person’” reported on a graduate-level “Learning Community” initiative linking technical communication courses with science and engineering seminars. He discussed ways of “decentering” language support so that members of the university community across departments and university office assume a shared responsibility for the success of multilingual students, a principle he demonstrated with the classic folk story, “Stone Soup.” (A further description of this program can be found in the SLW News, Volume 6, Issue 1.)

AFTERNOON WORKSHOP

“Broadening the Circle: Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Writers in the Writing Center,” organized by Kathryn Nielsen Dube and Helena Hall, assumed a different workshop structure than the morning workshop, allowing participants to tailor their workshop experience to meet their needs. The afternoon session started with a short talk by Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth, authors of ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors (2009), followed by one inkshedding session. Participants could then choose to attend two of four concurrent roundtable discussions on a variety of topics, from training writing center tutors to working with CLD writers to establishing better relationships between the writing center and university administrators.

Shanti Bruce led off the session by describing her dissertation research, a qualitative study of CLD students’ experiences in the writing center. Not only did her research touch on the different populations of CLD students who visit writing centers (e.g., resident multilingual, international/visa-holding, graduate students), but it uncovered students’ thoughts on visiting the writing center (e.g., their degree of comfort working with writing tutors, their expectations). The topic evolved into a discussion of how such research methods could be a critical way of assessing one’s writing center and learning more about the needs of students in one’s own institution. (This subject served as the topic of the inkshedding prompt.) Ben Rafoth followed with a discussion of terms and concepts from applied linguistics useful for discussing CLD students’ learning in the writing center (e.g., “avoidance” and “accommodation,” “affective filter,” “investment”). (For a complete list of terms and definitions, follow the link to session PowerPoints and handouts at the end of this article.)

Roundtable discussions covered a wide range of topics. Kathryn Nielsen Dube led a discussion on “Writing Centers, CLD Students, and Interdisciplinary Relations: (Re) Shaping the Culture on our Campuses.” Helena Hall and Gigi Taylor shared ideas from their institutions on “Training Writing Center Tutors to Work with CLD Writers.” Angela Dadek discussed concerns over “appropriating” students’ texts during writing center conferences. And Haivan Hoang, Christopher DiBiase, and Lisha Daniels Storey led a more theoretical session on “Rethinking the Native Speaker Norm.”

ESL WORKSHOPS AT 2012 CCCC

The CCCC Committee on Second Language Writing plans to host ESL workshops again at the 2012 Conference on College Composition and Communication in St. Louis. Workshops will be held on Wednesday, March 21. If you plan to attend the CCCC and would like to participate in planning future workshops, you are welcome to attend the committee’s open business meeting on Saturday, March 24, in the morning.

POWERPOINTS AND HANDOUTS

Files and handouts from the CCCC workshops can be found at the Convention link on the SLWIS website.

REFERENCES

Bruce, S., & Rafoth, B. (2009). ESL writers: A guide for writing center tutors. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

Kirkland, D. (2010). Teaching English in a sea of change: Linguistic pluralism and the new English education. English Education, 42(3), 231-235.

Steve Simpson is assistant professor of communication and writing center coordinator at New Mexico Tech. He teaches technical communication for undergraduate and graduate students and English for academic purposes, and he works with the Center for Graduate Studies developing graduate student programs and initiatives. He also serves on the CCCC Committee on Second Language Writing.