L2 Writing Beyond English

Nur Yiğitoğlu Aptoula, Melinda Reichelt, Nur Yiitolu, Melinda Reichelt

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788923149
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Writing & Presentation Skills

Most of what we know about writing in a second or foreign language (L2) is based on conclusions drawn from research on L2 writing in English. However, a significant quantity of L2 writing and writing instruction takes place in languages other than English and so there is a need for studies that look beyond English. The chapters in this book focus on languages other than English andinvestigate curricular issues, multiple languages in contact/conflict in L2 writing instructionand student attitudes toward pedagogical practices.The collection as a whole makes a valuable contribution to the study of L2 writing, and it will also prove an essential resource for instructors of second and foreign language writing.

Part 1

Curricular Issues

1 Writing Through the Senses: Bringing Life to College Spanish Writing Courses in the United States

Adela Borrallo-Solís and Andrea Meador Smith

A child who enters school today faces a 12- to 20-year apprenticeship in alienation
[…] We have lost the human ability to taste the feast of meaning that each event
and object offers to our senses.

Arnheim, 1972: 62

Composition Courses and Student Anxiety

When browsing through Spanish course offerings in higher education in the USA, we find a wide variety of classes dealing creatively with language, film, culture and literature. Spanish programs, as well as university curricula in other world languages, continue to develop innovative approaches to teaching language that resonate highly with our current students. However, one exception persists alongside those offerings: the dreaded writing classes.

Among the courses required to major or minor in Spanish, those that focus on writing are usually the least popular with students. While faculty tend to attribute students’ aversion to writing to the overwhelming use of technologies that might make writing seem antiquated, much of this negative perception results from what we as faculty do inadvertently in these classes. Most major Spanish programs in the USA advertise writing courses with labels like ‘grammar’ and ‘composition’, terms that are neither meaningful nor enticing. Many of these conventional ‘grammar and composition’ courses evolved from outdated learning approaches that treated the creative process as mechanical and relatively unimaginative. To break this trend, we have reconsidered how we view writing in our Spanish program, moving away from the artificial, arbitrary and impersonal approaches found in numerous textbooks, to embrace instead the exploration of writing through the senses. In the first half of this chapter, Adela Borrallo-Solís explains the philosophy behind her recreation of our program’s introductory writing course to focus on the senses, as well as the course’s execution and its effects on our students. In the second half, Andrea Meador Smith explains how she promotes writing through the senses in her approach to teaching film and guiding student writing about film.

As those who love writing are well aware, writing is more than simply transcribing thoughts onto a piece of paper. Rather, it is a process of exploration and self-discovery. In the words of noted second language (L2) scholar Yuh-show Cheng (2002: 647), ‘Writing is an emotional as well as cognitive activity, that is, we think and feel while we are writing’. However, this creative practice tends to be hindered by the negative perceptions many students have regarding writing. In the second half of the 20th century, scholars devoted significant attention to the growing, and at times overwhelming, anxiety that American students in a variety of disciplines experienced when tasked with writing assignments in their native language (as a starting point, see Bloom, 1980; Daly, 1978; Daly & Miller, 1975; Daly et al., 1988; Eulert, 1967; Faigley et al., 1981; Fleming, 1985; Petzel & Wenzel, 1993; among many others). Moreover, even students who are good writers in their native language may face anxiety and frustration when writing in an L2, because they expect to write well in another language, despite the reality that they are usually forced to write and communicate in a language of which they have an immature command (Cheng, 1998: 86).

At the turn of the century, L2 writing anxiety had become so pervasive that Cheng (2004) developed a scale to measure this form of anxiety in L2 students in particular, which expanded on the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale proposed by Horwitz et al. (1986) two decades earlier. At the root of such high levels of anxiety lies a multitude of factors ranging from students’ unrealistic expectations about the writing process to the instructor’s obliviousness to the anxiety of their students, even at the upper levels (Ewald, 2007: 123). The students in Ewald’s (2007: 123) study on anxiety in upper-level courses identified concerns such as comparing themselves to the linguistic proficiency of their classmates, the instructor’s expectations, their own level of preparation, the classroom environment itself and their relationships with peers and with their instructor. Ewald’s (2007: 124) summary of the research on the negative physical and psychological effects of foreign language learning anxiety is especially pertinent to the current discussion and to our, the authors’, commitment to rethink the way we teach writing: ‘“freezing,” concentration difficulties, worry, dread, sweating, heart palpitations, lack of comprehension, errors, forgetfulness, overstudying, tension, frustration, communication apprehension, avoidance, absenteeism, and even a complete inability to perform’.

In addition to factors like anxiety and individual pedagogical styles, research points toward another factor that can negatively influence student writing: the disconnect between body and mind. We, the authors, are writing this chapter after a long day of work, at a time when our bodies are asking us to rest while our minds are telling us to write in order to meet a deadline. This dilemma that many teacher-scholars face when our schedules leave little time for the writing process is the same issue that our students confront on a daily basis. Ideally, both students and instructors would find the perfect moment of the day in which inspiration would take over and allow us to produce wonderful and moving compositions. Unfortunately, the stress of daily life, constant anxiety and conflicting schedules make this optimal situation unattainable for most of us on both sides of the classroom. Nevertheless, this detachment between body and mind is rarely taken into consideration when we confront the task of teaching writing. As Wenger (1982: 5) suggests, many faculty seldom inquire about the level of exhaustion of our students, and even if we do, we do not necessarily change the structure of a class or the tasks at hand in order to accommodate our bodily states, leading one to wonder how many times we misread student exhaustion for disengagement. Because of the little importance we tend to give to our own bodily needs when teaching, unless the course revolves explicitly around body performance such as theater, dance and physical education, by the time our students get to college they have learned how to disconnect their intellectual pursuits from their personal bodies (Wenger, 1982: 66).

In order to restore communication between the body and the mind, Wenger created an illuminating English writing course in which the practice of yoga was utilized to promote mindfulness throughout the composition process. Reading her testimony challenged us to consider the importance of such connection in our writing courses, and inspired us to design a course that we titled ‘Writing through the Senses’. By reconsidering the process of writing through the exploration of our own sensorial perceptions, we hoped not only to lower the affective filter in our students, recognizing that they carry with them the necessary background knowledge to write effective essays, but also to promote curiosity, creativity, flexibility, excitement and awareness of ourselves and our surroundings, just as Wenger proposes.

Writing through the senses

Inspired by intermodality theories that underscore the many ways our senses interact with each other, we determined that in our introductory writing course it would be beneficial to explore the use of the five senses during the writing process. As Christensen (2012) proposes:

Beyond the five physical senses, however, several other senses affect our writing and deeply influence our intermodality, such as memory or the sense of what happened (which can be evoked from an old song, a smell of perfume, or a taste of food, for example), the sense of association (in which a place or object triggers a particular feeling or emotion), and the somatic sense or motor memory, in which our bodies ‘remember’ a movement, such as dance, riding a bike, or even the act of typing. Many other senses are tied to emotions, such as sense of pride, a sense of fear, or a sense of loss. We may experience a sense of self or a sense of peace, which are tied to our sentience (awareness of self), or that special kind of intuition often referred to as the sixth sense. (Christensen, 2012: 35)

Intuitively, one of the students who enrolled in Wenger’s (1982: 127) aforementioned course remarked that, after a whole semester focusing on connecting the body and the mind, his ideas ‘originate from what we see, what we hear, what we smell, what we taste, what we feel, with everything being alive and activated’. This metacognitive reflection made for a more enjoyable and productive writing process for this student, and we...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction: L2 Writing in Non-English Languages: Toward a Fuller Understanding of L2 Writing
• Part 1: Curricular Issues
• Part 2: Multiple Languages in Contact/Conflict in L2 Writing Instruction
• Part 3: Affect and Student Attitudes Toward Pedagogical Practices
• Conclusion
• Index