three and four

WORKING WITH ESL STUDENTS AND WRITING ACROSS BORDERS The film Writing Across Borders focuses on international students writing at American universities. It points out the difficulties of international students in meeting American professors’ requirements, and on the linguistic and cultural differences between writing in the United States and writing in other countries. One of the film’s key points is that people from different countries and cultures use different processes to produce different styles of writing from the American style. Subsequently, many ESL students have a hard time satisfying the requirements for their assignments, due to a host of issues such as organizational practice, sentence structuring, voice, grammar, and simply the way and timing in which ideas are presented in writing. Relating this to my taking Japanese for my foreign language requirement, I can certainly see these issues as becoming problematic for ESL students. Many of them speak much better English than I speak Japanese, and when I speak in Japanese, my words certainly have an Americanized organization and voice, along with cultural nuances, and most certainly grammatical errors. It is no surprise to see the other side of that when an international student comes into the writing center. In my own experience consulting for ESL students, this has proved to be undeniably true. For the consultant, it may be difficult to tell just how “American” an international student’s writing should sound, and most importantly, how much the consultant should scrutinize seemingly awkward phrasings and organization practices that result from a different cultural perspective. I have seen dozens and dozens of missing articles and prepositions, extremely awkward phrases and ways of stating ideas, and generally mistakes that would be the death of American students in ESL students’ writing. However, in a truly inclusive and open university, how much of this culturally influenced writing should be left to the individuality of the student, and how much should be changed so that more readers will be able to understand the writing? This is a most basic question that every consultant should have to and will have to come to terms with, before being able to help an ESL student in a meaningful way. The best answer I can give, and one that is somewhat supported by the film, Writing Across Borders, is that a consultant, whose job is to help the client express their ideas, not simply write for them, should allow a student to keep their own voice, but should also help them find ways of stating their ideas so that they will be clear to a reader of any background. This obviously means that each client will require different types of help, but that is the case not just with ESL students but with any client of the writing center in general. Consultants would do well to help their international clients see where they, say, may need to insert a comma or change one to a semicolon, insert an article or preposition to clarify a sentence’s meaning, or unify tenses throughout a paper. What a consultant should not do is try to change those parts of an ESL student’s paper that are irrelevant to another’s understanding of the paper, but are the results of the client’s cultural outlook. For example, if an argument is made in a more circular fashion than typical in English, but the argument is solid and understandable to an American or English-speaking audience and transcends the cultural divide, then there is no reason to push the ESL writer to go about making their point in a more “American” fashion. In this way, international students writing to a primarily American audience can be understood, but they still can retain the cultural perspective that they identify with and that undoubtedly is a part of their authorial identity. Furthermore, allowing an ESL student to keep their cultural outlook within their writing exposes readers from different backgrounds to different views on whatever subject is being written about, which is what a university should be all about. Ideally, the university, and by association the writing center, should be a place where different cultural outlooks intersect, resulting in a multitude of writing styles, and therefore, more exposure to different perspectives. When students of different geographical and cultural backgrounds are encouraged to write within their cultural outlooks, but in a way that is understandable to all English readers, writers, and speakers, the university can truly become “multi-cultural.” Different perspectives in writing will expose students of different backgrounds to various outlooks, further widening their outlook on the world.

RECREATION AND CHANGE THROUGH LITERACY I like to consider myself a fairly literate person, at least within the world of literature, but I am also literate in other activities besides reading and writing that, although they require different skills and thought processes, share in common with literary literacy the requirement of proficiency in a certain task or way of thinking. Playing guitar is one of the actions that I consider myself literate in, and it closely correlates with reading, writing, and speaking, due to its expressiveness and the need for a guitar player to know a guitar like his own body or mind. Similar to reading a skilled author, reading a song played by a fellow guitar player takes concentration and practice. After learning the guitar, or becoming guitar literate, one can pick up on the chords of a song and moreover the key of the song simply by watching another performer play. Active participation, an important practice in reading, takes on an even more interactive function in playing music. As a friend plays the blues in G, without a word, I can play harmoniously or melodically in symphony because of my experience. D minor is the saddest key, and I know to utilize that knowledge by accordingly playing something dark or sad. When I am at my best in guitar playing, I become one with my guitar, and it becomes as natural to use as a limb of mine, which I am completely in tune and in the moment with. Moreover, playing lead guitar (improvising with scales) to another guitar player’s rhythm (usually a chord progression) is especially like speaking. I have to be literate in the layout of the fretboard of my guitar, in order to be able to choose the notes and express myself through their arrangement, just as when speaking, I must be literate in order to choose my words and express what want to get across orally. Guitar is a language of the fingers and mind, as speaking is the tongue and the mind. Guitar is also similar to speaking in that I try to use expressive phrasing to effectively separate different sections of a guitar part, similar to how someone would speak in phrases and sentences, or even write in sentences or paragraphs. Paragraphs are the idea packages in which I conceptualize a world that I can create and exist in with others who participate in my writing, either by participating in a meaningful way in my life, by occupying my mind, or by reading my writing. The interactive nature of the mind, and therefore words, can create a world of literature, a world of the mind and of expression. This world of expression is one in which I thrive, even more so than the world of music, I often think. It is a world in which I can live beyond my own physical existence. Thru words, I have the ability to create, destroy, and re-create myself. In words I can be reborn. I can fashion my self my existence into whatever I want to be, drawing on all of my experiences and thoughts. Thru words, I can find meaning in the constant change that is existence; I am at once myself and everyone and everything. I realize that I have much to learn of literacy, and, in turn, much to learn about myself, but I feel that my tools of words and notes have allowed me the ability to sculpt myself into that which I want to be. I can create my own world, and I can create and re-create myself within this world. Writing and playing music are actions, and in my world, actions create meaning and the essence of self in an otherwise meaningless existence. People define themselves by that which they do. Literacy is an intentional gift, one which I take for myself through a process of continued experience and a continuous want to experience more. By writing, I literally carve myself into a literary being.