SLWIS offered three special sessions with invited speakers at the 2011 TESOL Convention in New Orleans. This year our Academic Session focused on assessment and placement, and we worked with the Secondary Schools Interest Section (SSIS) and Non-Native English-Speaking Teachers Interest Section (NNESTIS) for our InterSections. The following is a brief summary of those sessions.

SLW ACADEMIC SESSION

Recurring Issues in ESL Writing Assessment and Student Placement

This session featured Deborah Crusan (Wright State University), Alister Cumming (University of Toronto), Danielle Zawodny-Wetzel (Carnegie Mellon University), and Tony Silva (Purdue University). The presenters shared recurring issues and effective approaches for L2 writing assessment and student placement, especially as they impact writing curricula in various contexts. The session was divided into two sections. The first explored challenges and possible future directions for assessment (Deborah and Alister), while ESL writing program directors explained their local responses to standardized assessments in the second (Danielle and Tony).

Section 1: Exploring challenges and possible future directions for assessment and placement

Deborah discussed several issues regarding student placement, particularly in higher education contexts, and explained how placement represents a perennial problem resulting in a number of implications.

Alister discussed how to link assessment effectively to learning, writing, and teaching. Given that one major effort among language educators in recent decades has been to use assessment as a basis to link students’ writing abilities to curriculum content and teaching and learning processes, Alister described five approaches that have addressed these matters: diagnostic assessment, dynamic assessment, curriculum standards, self-directed learning, and achievement testing. In the talk, Alister demonstrated how conceptual premises of these approaches differ as do their implications for educational practices.

Section 2: Local writing program responses to standardized assessments

Danielle reflected on what writing program administrators can learn from a local placement process. She described one university’s local placement process for a small number of incoming students who identify English as their second or weaker language. She outlined how the placement process works and how student writing is assessed within the First-Year Writing Program and also shared how those students’ self-reports about their English language literacy compare with their course placements. Danielle closed by explaining ways in which to use student placement data to shape curriculum and policy within a particular institutional context.

Tony addressed what would seem to be a fairly unique situation with regard to assessment and placement of second language writers at Purdue University. Though Purdue enrolls nearly 6,000 international students, roughly half undergraduate and half graduate students, and offers ESL writing courses for both groups, the university has neither an assessment nor a placement program for these students. Students, in consultation with their advisors, decide whether or not to enroll in ESL writing classes. Tony explained how this system came about and why it seems to work rather well.

SLW-SS InterSection

Negotiating ESL Writing Instruction and Standards on the Secondary Level

For our primary InterSection, SLWIS paired up with the Secondary Schools Interest Section (SSIS) for a session that focused on challenges that mandated standardized testing and curricular demands may place upon the teaching of ESL writing in the secondary school context. Panelists included Lynore Carnuccio (ESL-ETC Educational Consultants), Amanda Kibler (University of Virginia), Luciana de Oliveira (Purdue University), and Youngjoo Yi (Georgia State University).

First Lynore addressed how providing appropriate writing instruction for secondary English language learners who need to master academic writing across the curriculum to achieve academic success is a challenge for many reasons—including realistic expectations, student frustrations, standardized testing, and mandated graduation requirements. She then explained how the developmental nature of writing is particularly challenging but can be guided by TESOL’s PreK-12 English Language Proficiency Standards.

Amanda followed with a discussion of the impact of the new U.S. Common Core Standards (2010) on the organization of writing instruction for English language learners at the secondary level. She compared the new standards to several existing writing standards for native and nonnative speakers in relation to conceptualizations of “good writing” in the different sets of standards, and implications for pedagogy that follow from these conceptualizations.

Luciana described a genre approach to teaching writing to multilingual students at the secondary level, drawing on work in systemic-functional linguistics. She explained how such an approach emphasizes a focus on text as semantic choice in social contexts and an apprenticeship model based on expectations, modeling, joint construction, and independent construction. Using an example of a second language writer in an 8^th-grade history classroom, Luciana highlighted some challenges a genre approach can address and showed how teachers can assist second language writers in the context of the classroom.

Youngjoo concluded the panel by showing that despite the importance of writing development for students in the 21^st century, writing has often been neglected. She pointed out that neither has a comprehensive policy on L2 writing been developed nor have issues around writing instruction and development been examined, especially in high school settings. She went on to address the relationships among writing policies, writing instruction, and writing development by reporting the practices of several high school teachers and writing policies in a location where all students have to take both a state-mandated high school writing test and a locally funded writing test to assess students’ language arts, science, and social studies knowledge and skills. Youngjoo concluded by discussing to what extent such writing tests may influence teachers’ writing instruction and possibly students’ writing development.

NNEST-SLW InterSection

Issues for NNES Teachers in EFL Writing Teacher Preparation

For this InterSection, SLWIS served as secondary sponsor, with the Non-Native English-Speaking Teachers Interest Section (NNESTIS) as primary. The presenters, Icy Lee (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Lisya Seloni (Illinois State University), Claus Gnutzmann (University of Braunschweig), Ditlev Larsen (Winona State University), and Paul Kei Matsuda (Arizona State University), discussed how writing teacher education is both underdeveloped and underresearched in EFL contexts. Topics included challenges faced by nonnative English-speaking (NNES) teachers in preparing EFL writing teachers and issues in such teachers’ professional development.

Icy started the panel by pointing out that although the ability to write good English is crucial to student success at all levels, throughout the world most L2 writing instruction is delivered by inexperienced and underprepared writing teachers. She discussed a study using interview and classroom research data from four NNES teachers in Hong Kong, which showed that while writing teacher education can alter teachers' perspectives, develop their professional knowledge and skills, and improve their preparedness for teaching writing, teacher educators are faced with a number of challenges. She pointed out that the study had suggested that there are tensions between what teachers learn from writing teacher education and the informal learning that takes place in school in EFL contexts.

Aiming to question the standardization and monolingual ideologies in the teaching of L2 writing, Lisya shared results from a week-long intensive World English (WE) course in a North American teacher preparation program. The participants of this workshop, who were in-service native English-speaking (NES) and NNES teachers, discussed pluralistic approaches to teach English writing in the context of globalization and multi-literacy. Lisya went on to discuss the pedagogical and theoretical challenges and complexities that both NES and NNES teachers who participated this course faced while teaching writing and attempting to embrace the pedagogical foundations of WE.

Claus continued with an investigation of NNES academics' writing problems and strategies. He discussed how the monopoly of English in scientific communication produces considerable communicative disadvantages on the part of nonnative speakers, especially with regard to publications in international, English-speaking journals. He shared the results of research based on interviews with scientists from several disciplines that focused on the following questions: What are the problems and difficulties that NNES academics face in the writing of research articles? What strategies do they use in order to overcome these problems? Based on the responses, Claus provided suggestions of what L2 writing teachers can do to most effectively prepare NNES academics for academic writing and publishing.

Ditlev focused on how the EFL writing curriculum may be at odds with the academic background and pedagogical training of English writing teachers. He discussed how NNES teachers are teaching writing in several diverse EFL contexts and circumstances. They may face different challenges depending on whether their teaching situation takes place in their native language context or not, or whether they find themselves in an EFL teaching context where they do not share the students’ native language (as with NES teachers in EFL). Where the NNES teachers receive their academic degrees and pedagogical training may further complicate such challenges. The discussion of these issues was based on an investigation of the experiences of U.S and non-U.S. educated Chinese and Danish instructors teaching English writing in their native-language EFL contexts.

To wrap up this session and pull together different issues from all the previous panelists, Paul served as a respondent who contextualized issues, drew conclusions, and provided questions and answers to issues raised throughout.

Ditlev Larsen, SLWIS chair, is associate professor of English and ESL director at Winona State University, Minnesota, where he teaches writing, general linguistics, and teacher preparation courses in the undergraduate and graduate TESOL programs. His research interests include a variety of issues in ESL/EFL writing and the interrelationships between language and culture in the international use of English.