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 Teaching writing in
online and paper worlds
The following is being written in preparation for TESOL
2008 in New York City: Teaching writing in online and paper worlds.
Demonstration, Writing IS, #114600, April 3, 2008, 4:00-4:45, Liberty
Suite 2, Sheraton Hotel, New York City. If you will be in New York, I
hope to see you there! Names may change; it's unfinished. The
introduction script will follow my comments only roughly. -Thomas
Leverett, CESL, Southern Illinois Univ., Carbondale IL USA
62901-4518.
Written scripts for this presentation provide backup information
and resources; they are written somewhat informally.
Introduction
(below)
1. Communicative
competence in the digital age
2. Fitting weblogs
into a coherent writing pedagogy
3. Publishing is
non-count; assignments are count
4. Digital fluency as
goal and objective
5. Always in MyFace:
Social networking becomes a necesssity
6. brb: Using chat in
esl/efl writing classes
7. Space after period:
Line editing as a way of life
Handout
Last year's presentation: Student weblogging for fluency,
integration, and skills
[ Introduction,
Reasons for using weblogs ]
[ Ways to use
weblogs, weblogging as a genre itself ]
[ Kinds of
fluency ] [ Skills ]
[
Integration
-into what exactly? ]
[ Weblogs happen:
stuff happens on weblogs ]
[ Portfolios ] [
Portfolio showcase ]
[ New blogger, old
mac: tech problems ]
[ Resources
]
[ Weblogs in
esl/efl: bibliography ]
Introduction
Commitment to teaching students to write and present work online
fundamentally reorients both the teacher and the student to a new
medium, or rather, to two media at once. Writing teachers I have talked
to are apprehensive on several levels; when first writing this, I used
the analogy "opening up a can of worms," but later decided to rewrite
due to the vagueness of the term.
"Can of worms" is appropriate, however, if you consider that though
worms are not pleasant for many people, they are quite useful for
others, and represent a world of opportunity to those who spend their
days fishing. I have found weblogs beneficial for my writing class in
many ways, which I outlined last year (1);it teaches students in media
that they are likely to use; it gives them a real audience to write and
relate to every day; it makes them more flexible; it puts their writing
in real space where everyone can see it and comment on it as an ongoing
process, until they are ready to take it down. I think teachers are
attracted to the idea, but have a full plate already, and need to see
how weblogs are going to fit into an already busy schedule.
Their first concern is that by increasing their teaching load by double,
other skills will be devalued, given a fraction of time they were given
previously, or lost in the shuffle altogether. I feel that, yes,
orientation to online presentation has added numerous skills to the
objective list that I bring to class each day (2); however, I have not
lost that much in terms of what I no longer teach, what is in the
rearview mirror.
Teaching with weblogs has widened my scope, given me more to teach, more
to do. When I reflect on the characteristics of the paper world that
have been left in the dust, so to speak, I really don't feel I've lost
that much. My students know some things better, like what indentations
are and why we don't use them online, or what adjustments you have to
make to an online essay, when you know that the receiver will print it
on paper, and thus not have access to the ability to click on the
reference and arrive at the source. Much of what we deal with is
audience awareness; I have heard at TESOL presentations for years about
developing this in young writers, but now I feel that in moving from
medium to medium with many pieces, with essays, research papers, and
informal works, I have found an experiential way to drive the point
home, to incorporate audience awareness into developing writers'
systems.
For a writing teacher and a class of developing writers, amount of
writing is indeed an issue, possibly the primary issue, and if writing
teachers are afraid that putting things online will decrease the amount
of writing that they are able to do with their students, my response is
that maybe they should evaluate their entire program and the writing
students do in it; was three essays per term, or whatever they were
being expected to produce, enough to develop their skills adequately?
Where else were they asked to write, and how much? What other kinds of
writing were they producing, and what was being done with it? Were they
ever asked to write for and interact with real audiences, besides their
teachers? I have used weblogs to actually increase, almost double, the
amount of writing my students do; much of this is for fluency purposes,
directly communicating, with their classmates as their primary audience;
I draw my inspiration from two champions of the communicative era, Peter
Elbow and Marie Wilson Nelson, who basically taught me to deal with the
writer's confidence as a more fundamental concern than anything else
(3). I got tired of what I saw as a syndrome: students get an
assignment; they put it off; they finally troll the web or the hidden
files to find something that will do; they copy and paste, or, they just
copy. Sorry, that's got to stop. In our class, they write every day;
they write under my nose, then they publish it. And this happens so
much that I'm intimately familiar with their style, their spelling,
their grammar, etc. And I know when they've succeeded in communicating,
because I was part of the process.
Teaching toward online presentation has elevated the importance of what
my students write, since by nature asking them to put papers in a
permanent international archive is asking them to do something for
keeps, that would otherwise be in a notebook at the bottom of their
dresser, or worse, in the recycling pile. They have the option to
remove papers from the web, after the term is over, but they rarely do;
from this I deduce that either they did not understand what I told them
about their option, or that they feel it may be of some value to them
sometime in the future. I prefer to believe the latter; this is why we
saved old term papers, sometimes for years, in that dresser. But the
web is far more accessible than the dresser, and takes up less space in
terms of carbon footprint, so to speak, than the paper did. The fact
that they put it there themselves makes it more likely that they can
find it again.
Teaching toward online presentation has given me and my students a much
more intimate relationship with certain writing techniques and skills,
if only by virtue of using them and seeing them used in different media
and in more genres. My writing classes used to have paper products only,
essays and research papers done on paper, sometimes with title page,
abstract, and six to ten carefully numbered pages of text, a
bibliography at the end. Nowadays we have that in addition to an online
research paper, the abstract separated by being in a different weblog
and linked to the paper itself. Thus the students not only see the
separation of the abstract, but also participate in using it for its
proper function: as an invitation to read the paper itself. In the
original, it needs neither the title nor the author's name, since it's
part of the paper, but when it is with the paper itself, it's not doing
what an abstract is supposed to do: invite a reader to read a term paper
which is in another physical location. Thus the process of operating in
different media has given them a different and wider concept of what an
abstract is and why we would ask them to make one.
Since teaching toward online presentation can be restated as teaching
toward publication in an ongoing, and developing, but nevertheless
permanent arena, it has forced me to come to grips with the ongoing and
uncomfortable relationship of the ESL/EFL teaching profession with the
process of grammatical correction. While not all online publication has
to be for public consumption, it is clearly easier for developing
students to present work to the general public knowing that the teacher,
or someone, has helped them make sure that the work does not have
grammatical issues impeding its ability to communicate their thoughts.
In other words, I "correct" (or "line-edit," as we refer to it) what
they write, or get others to help; I justify it pedagogically, and I do
enough of it so that I feel that it would be an unfair burden on my time
if it weren't valuable to them. But I feel that it is valuable
to them, and arrange my time accordingly.
I've learned that students generally accept the fact that they need to
publish work or put it online, that they for example have to figure out
how to make a weblog and put a research paper, complete with linked
references, on it. I do notice a wide range of technological competence
and background, coming into the class; it gives some students
apprehension, for example, that they are so far behind their classmates
in certain ways, right from the start. To counter this I set up a
we-teach-each-other ethic in the classroom; this also comes in handy at
times when I also need to rely on them to do certain things, for
example, put an excel chart on a weblog, or copy and paste onto a chat
interface.
Teachers may feel they are stepping into the unknown, a world that is
very dynamic, egalitarian, active, one that you may not have time or
energy to master. Yes, true. Some blog posts have 60, 70, 80 comments,
though my students get very few. The web at its best is decentralized,
freewheeling, open and accepting of many things, including some typos
and vagueness about what your exact name is. On social networking
sites, people give you applications that allow other people to do other
things on your site, and you have to figure out what these are and what
people are putting there; if you don't have time to watch little
YouTubes, you probably should make time, or get out of MyFace, so to
speak. Social networking has been described as a necessity on today's
campuses, and it is- this is one more reason to make sure our students
can write online, can distinguish formal from informal, can upload
pictures, etc.
In short, teaching toward online presentation has made me far more aware
of the world that they in many cases already occupy, the world they will
need to produce most of their English in, I believe. It's one thing to
say to them, I'm going to make you write paper essays, because that's
what I believe your teachers in academic classes will ask you to do. But
I tell them, in essence: I'm going to ask you to make paper essays, and
then put them online in a presentable way, linking the references and
formatting them properly. Then I'm going to ask you to get into a chat
medium and write there, too, and while we're at it, I'd like you to use
an online whiteboard medium, where we can see your image while you talk
and use the chat interface at the same time. And I'm going to do this
because this is how I believe you are going to need to use your writing
skill in the future.
In answer to a challenge that was presented to me, however (4), I will
say that I am slow to change certain things, among them my view that
ultimately my students must survive in an academic world that is
basically undemocratic, read-only, non-interactive, etc. Ideally they
will be adequately prepared for both worlds. Ideally they will be able
to manage Facebook, at the same time chat and use their videocam, thus
keeping up with their friends, and turn around, pass tests, read books,
and write papers adequately to please their teachers. I don't feel
they're mutually exclusive, or even that the academy has the obligation
to change its media or modes of communication. Let it do as it sees
fit. I will prepare my students in any event. My main point is that the
world they live in, which we should be aware of in order to present
realia and prepare our students to use language in, is a world that we
have in some cases failed to come to grips with.
Thirty years ago, the communicative revolution changed the nature of
teaching language permanently, by insisting that grammatical competence
alone was of little value if one could not master the oral medium in
which it was being used. In that era, which in many ways is not over,
strategic and oral competence were stressed over grammatical accuracy;
classes were set up so that students took whatever they learned and
immediately began to use it, in pairs or in groups, with peers or with
whoever was handy, because the ability to use things in real
communicative situations was valued more than the ability to recognize
grammatical correctness at every junction. Today, the world is moving
into an online medium where writing is used more freely, more casually,
and more often between strangers. Online writing is today being used in
many of the functions that we are more familiar with performing orally:
meeting people, introducing ourselves, making business contacts
overseas. Thus the same imperative applies to today's writing teachers:
if our students are not able to use online environments successfully,
and use writing in chat and other online contexts, they will not be
fluent in the modern, more technological sense of the word.
The difference between the problem of today's writing teacher and the
problem of practitioners at the beginning of the communicative era is
that most of those teachers, and particularly the native speakers among
them, were at least already fluent themselves in the very strategies and
techniques they were trying to teach, though some of those strategies
were poorly defined, or the teaching materials needed to teach them
nonexistent; they were at least competent in the oral realm themselves,
and knew what was missing in their charges.
1. See Leverett (2007), below.
2. See Digital
Fluency as Goal and Objective, part 4.
3. See Fitting
Weblogs into a Writing Pedagogy, part 2.
4. This was best stated by Will Richardson (2007) in a comment to his
own post which is referenced below: "Pedagogy needs to change,
assuming, of course, we should be 'teaching' at all, because I think we're dealing
with a different environment...Yes, many of the outcomes are still the same. But
some important ones are not. Back in my day, the published story was the end point.
That's not the case today.
bibliography
Leverett, T. (2007). Why weblogs
work, in Student weblogging for fluency, integration, and skills,
Demonstration, Writing IS, TESOL, Seattle, WA, March.
Leverett, T. (2006). Daring to enter
the blogosphere. Includes This is your
program: This is your program on weblogs; This is your
class: This is your class on weblogs; and This is your
brain: This is your brain on weblogs. Prog. Admin. IS, Paper, TESOL
Convention, Tampa, FL, Mar.
Leverett, T. (2005). One teacher's
perspective on weblogs in a curriculum, from Leverett & Montgomerie,
Teaching teachers
to use and teach with weblogs, Internet Fair, CALL-IS, TESOL 2005,
San Antonio, March.
Richardson, W. (2007). It's
not just the "read/write" web. Weblogg-ed weblog.
http://weblogg-ed.com/2007/its-not-just-the-readwrite-web/. Accessed 4-08.
[ CESL ][cesl students' weblogs ][ cesl teachers' weblog ][ Tom Leverett's weblog ][ This is your brain:
this is your brain on weblogs ]
 Page maintained
by
Thomas
Leverett, CESL, SIUC
Photo above (Leap of Faith) by Kurt Larsen.
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