Saurabh Anand,Minnesota State University, Mankato, Minnesota, USA

Saurabh: I grew up in Delhi, the national capital of India. It is also one of the largest cities in India. In 2018, I moved to the United States to join the MA TESOL program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, where I am also a graduate teaching assistant in the Department of English. It was a very natural choice for me because India is a very polyphonic country with its own 19,500 mother tongues or dialects and 22 official languages. I grew up myself speaking Hindi, English, and Punjabi. My mother speaks three languages. Most of us live in multiple languages. So multilinguality is very natural and organic in our lives.

In Delhi, I used to teach English and German as foreign languages, which got me interested in the language teaching discipline. My idea of teaching these languages as subjects has been ensuring learning to be joyful, easy, and yet effective by making the content as accessible as possible to uplift and retain my students' interest in the languages. In India, learning English and other foreign languages does not only open better career avenues, but it also signals upward social mobility. Currently, as a student-teacher at Minnesota State, Mankato, I teach an English composition section for multilingual writers. As a writing instructor, I am responsible for designing syllabi and instructional materials for teaching the American style of academic writing to varied or limited English language exposure.

Elena: What topics in second language writing research excite you right now?

Saurabh: Since I am new to the field, I am exploring my research interest across different second language (L2) contexts and audiences. My in-progress capstone project is an examination of a subject-focused corpus (set of reading materials) with regard to vocabulary recycling via narrow reading that, according to previous research, might be beneficial to reading comprehension. The purpose of this research is to generate interest among struggling readers (K–3), both multilingual and domestic speakers of the English language, in the reading material.

While teaching English composition at the university level, I enjoy exploring the relevance of the intentional use of technology in an ESL classroom. Technology could ensure spending relatively more time with students scaffolding the linguistic needs of our language learners. Multimodal teaching using pictures, videos, and other media might aid L2 students in expressing and showcasing what they already know using their first language (L1) literacy. Such teaching methods blended with language and/or content-based objectives might encourage language learners to stay engaged, uplifted, and comfortable while learning information through interactive features and without realizing the stress of learning a new language. They feel the learning process to be rewarding and, in the longer run, accelerate their language acquisition process.

One of the other research interests that has recently sparked my interest is the newly emerged writing centers in many private Indian universities catering to the needs of multilingual academics who studied in English-medium or vernacular schools up to high school level. It intrigues me to explore what pedagogical practices writing centers in the United States could borrow from these writing centers to support the increasingly high number of multilingual students.

Elena: Could you share your own experience related to academic writing?

Saurabh: The Western style of teaching writing where language learners are given multiple opportunities to grow through several draft submissions and feedback is a unique way of teaching. In contrast, most educational institutions, including institutions of higher education in the Global South, follow an examination pattern, according to which a student’s final paper is evaluated with no opportunity for revision (formative assessment). I am myself a product of this system, and never got any formal writing assistance until I joined Minnesota State University. Writing is not a discipline in India but something one needs to learn on their own. This kind of system leaves a lot of credible voices behind and hinders their intellectual development. If I had learned the skills of how to write from the beginning, I would have benefitted a lot more in my academic career. I am sure students who come from non-Western spaces would value the ability to improve over the drafts because of the summative assessment approach prevalent in U.S. academic institutions.

I come from a completely different background, which is business administration, and in India, there is no training provided to us on how to read complex academic work. So, when I encountered a lot of academic essays during my ongoing graduate school because I come from a different educational background, it was daunting for me. Then one of my mentors asked me to read an essay called “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources” (Rosenberg, 2011) and said it would be a guidebook. I found it initially very amusing that I am reading an essay on how to read essays, but that is the kind of teaching that is not practiced in India at all. We just learn on the job.

Elena: What have you learned in your graduate courses that, in your opinion, will lead you to accomplishing your professional goals?

Saurabh: As a graduate student, I learned how to teach writing. One of the biggest take-aways from my graduate work is the mandatory training on writing pedagogy I received before teaching a college composition course. This training lasted for an entire semester and focused on how to teach academic writing to multilingual writers, including holding peer-review workshops, providing students with corrective one-on-one feedback, and developing a peer mentoring system. This semester-long course also focused on interactive and collaborative learning that vindicated some of the teaching practices I had been engaged in in India as a language tutor of English. While taking other graduate courses, I learned that students enjoy classrooms in which an instructor provides meaningful content that they can relate to, establishes achievable language and content objectives, and designs teaching artifacts appropriate for their language learning journey. I learned that our multilingual students engage even more when the content is accessible and they see a reflection of themselves in it.

This experience is invaluable. If I were in India, I would have learned all these skills in my job while learning from my mistakes because these skills are not taught in a structured environment. On the contrary, in my present graduate coursework, my professors are deeply committed to my development as a student. Two years of rigorous mentorship and teaching observations stay a long way with you and train you to be an empathetic knowledge facilitator.

Reference

Rosenberg, K. (2011). Reading games: Strategies for reading scholarly sources. In C. Lowe & P. Zemliansky (Eds.), Writing spaces: Readings on writing (Vol. 2; pp. 210–221). Parlor Press.

Elena Shvidko is an assistant professor at Utah State University. Her research interests include interpersonal aspects of language teaching, embodied interaction in the classroom, second language writing, and teacher professional development.