El enfoque comunicativo en la enseñanza del idioma inglés

Writing is a key skill in the university, being the medium through which most evaluation of students is made. For L2 students, linguistic proficiency is an obvious issue. Weigle (2005), writing about expertise in L2 writing, suggests that there is a threshold level of proficiency below which existing L1 skills will not be available for transfer to facilitate “attempts to deal simultaneously with the multiple considerations of writing such as overall goals, audience, and genres” (p. 140). She suggests that a full understanding of the process needs to take into account “social perspectives” such as finding out what the requirements of a discourse are by such means as reading and writing its texts, and seeing what it considers important and what methods of enquiry stand. These aspects of writing have received wide attention in the literature on non- traditional students in the university because of the challenges they present, some of which will be enumerated below.

3.1.2.1.1.

Academic literacies

Lea and Street (1998), in an article arising from an investigation of perceptions of writing held by staff and students in university courses across disciplines, suggest earlier perspectives on teaching writing, such as the skills approach, focusing on surface

features like grammar and spelling, and assuming a homogeneous style of writing which would serve in all academic situations, are inadequate. They found that requirements vary across disciplines, and even between teachers within a discipline. More appropriate

is an academic literacies approach which recognises “literacies as social practices,”

student writing at the level of “epistemology and identity,” institutions as “constituted in, and sites of, discourses and power,” and “student writing as being concerned with the process of meaning-making and contestation around meaning” (p. 159). The diversity they discovered “was at a more complex level than genre, such as the ‘essay’ or ‘report,’ but lay more deeply at the level of writing particular knowledge in a specific academic setting” (p. 163).

Such an approach puts some responsibility for literacy education on teachers within

the disciplines. Lea and Street (1998) found, however, that they rarely recognise these

differences themselves, see their own writing practices as “commonsense,” and are categorical in insisting on their adoption. An example cited is the different views of the place of personal pronouns in academic writing. This situation is exacerbated for students by multi-discipline courses (such as the BBS, which has nine core courses).

Other studies echoing the diversity of requirements include Harwood and Hadley

(2004), Kutz (2004), Lea and Stierer (2000) and Moore and Morton (2005).

3.1.2.1.2.

Core values as applied to writing

Writing is a key site of the “mystery” discussed above. Ramanathan and Atkinson (1999) identify the failure to make explicit the notions of voice, critical thinking, peer review and ownership of texts, pointing out that they are “culturally specific norms of thought and expression which non-mainstream writers of English may have little social training in and thus real difficulty accessing” (p. 46). Making matters more complex are areas of apparent permissiveness which turn out to have significant limitations, bounded as they must be by what constitutes “knowing” within the discipline, (Lea & Street, 1998). One example is the invitation to creativity or originality which co-exists confusingly with instructions to adopt a specified style. Allison (2004) suggests that this can be an “illusory freedom” to those who “lack access to … how to innovate acceptably in writing” (p. 195).

An aspect of writing that has been given wide attention in recent years, and in which international students have often been implicated, is that of plagiarism (e.g., Holmes, 2004; Le Ha, 2006; Liu, 2005; Sowden, 2005; Walker, 1998). It is a notion which seems

straightforward to western academics. However, a little investigation reveals not only that other cultures have different relationships with these factors (e.g., Handa & Power, 2005; Sowden; Le Ha), but that the western concept of ownership and plagiarism is

fraught with inconsistencies and that textual borrowing is a widespread norm. One of

the ways that academic writers demonstrate their central participation within a discourse is by drawing on “the repertoire of voices they have encountered in their experience of participating in genres and discourses” and by uniquely recombining “a selection of the resources at their disposal for the purposes of the writing task at hand” (Ivanič _&

Camps, 2001, p. 6). Pennycook (1996) discusses lucidly the resultant confusions: undergraduate students,

while constantly being told to be original and critical, and to write things in their ‘own words,’ are nevertheless only too aware that they are at the same time required to acquire a fixed canon of knowledge and a fixed canon of terminology to go with it. (p. 213)

Under such circumstances, the “moral outrage” (p. 204) shown by many academics at apparent plagiarism seems often to have dubious justification, and Pennycook suggests a more defensible stance would be distinguishing between instances of good and bad plagiarism, “between those who reused parts of texts very well and those who seemed to randomly borrow” (p. 226), thus adopting a flexible response to the question he poses, “on what grounds do we see certain acts of textual borrowing as acceptable and others as unacceptable?” (p. 202). A cause of the difficulty is the dependence that students new

to a discipline inevitably have on authoritative sources, as Lea and Street (1998) found.

The UK students they spoke to felt “that they as students had little useful to say” from their own understanding (p. 167).

Lea and Street note that although plagiarism is one of the few aspects of academic writing overtly addressed in course instructions, it is generally addressed in very legalistic terms, rather than by trying to unpack the underpinning philosophy. This is often, too, the focus of writing teachers, rather than questions of how to assess knowledge and decide what to incorporate (Wingate, 2006, p. 463).

3.1.2.1.3.

Voice in academic writing

While we might see the question of plagiarism as one of voices in one’s writing, an important issue in discussion of writing is that of “voice” in the singular, the sense of some kind of personal presence in a text.

Ivanič _{and Camps (2001) look at two potential meanings encompassed by the term}

“voice.” The first of these is voice as self-representation, which they see as inevitable in

any text, as it is created by the choices that writers make at the level of elements of syntax, lexis, and so on, which result in writing that represents them as adopting some sort of stance. As Bakhtin (1986, p. 124) says, “there are no voiceless words that belong to no one.” There are social constraints in the choices open to students: “the version of self that will be rewarded may be determined by the tutor who will be assessing the

work” (Ivanič _{& Camps, p. 6). However, most writers in the critical academic literacies}

tradition advocate introducing students to an awareness of the choices that they have in constructing this voice and of the voice they construct through their choices (e.g., Baynham, 2000; Benesch, 1999). Many, though, share Gee’s (2004) view that there is a greater possibility of transforming discourses from a position of central participation. For example, Harwood and Hadley (2004) advocate Critical Pragmatic EAP, acknowledging the importance of exposure to dominant norms, but stressing “that students have choices and should be free to adopt or subvert the dominant practices as they wish” (p. 357).

The other meaning of voice Ivanič _{and Camps (2001) discuss is voice as having}

something to say. This is a more specific presence, that of “the writer’s own views, authoritativeness, and authorial presence” (p. 7) within the text. Ramanathan and Atkinson (1999) claim that a common expression of this meaning aligns it with a “neo- romantic” movement in education” associated with teaching which seeks to “allow for the full expression and further development of … individuality” (p. 49). This movement, Atkinson (2001) suggests, is driven by a cultural view of individualism to which students educated thus far in a culture which values interdependence have limited access. On the other hand, a milder version of the same sense is the requirement for developing a position, and this one Lea and Street (1998) found to be a requirement across disciplines.

One way in which students might seek to develop a position is by calling on their own experience and that proves to be another area of confusingly curtailed permission and difficulty within writing. Students need to learn to move beyond personal opinion and autobiographical experience to “redefine everyday experience by creating a frame drawn from the concepts and ideas they have learnt in the course” (Hoadley-Maidment, 2000, p. 168). Once again, this is rarely made explicit (Creme, 2000).

The two senses of voice examined here have clear links to the notions of agency and autonomy. That agency is, of course, constrained by what one’s role allows one to say or do (Johns, 2005).

3.1.2.1.4.

Inventing the university

Bartholomae’s (1985) cogent phrase reminds us that voice always assumes an addressee:

Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion -- invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like history or anthropology or economics or English. The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. (p. 134)

The choice of verb is significant. The university is not a fixed entity waiting to be

discovered. An inventor is a person with imagination who builds on existing knowledge to find new ways of doing things in the world, which will inevitably alter existing situations in some way. This is the mutually constitutive process that Lave and Wenger (1991) refer to. Of course, inventions can fail if they are based on false premises. Bartholomae points out that being able to accommodate readers’ expectations involves “a writer who can both imagine and write from a position of privilege … She must be either equal to or more powerful than those she would address” (p. 139). She must, in other words, have a sense of legitimacy. This proves a powerful image not just in terms of students in the act of writing, but in all their dealings with the university.

One reason for the need to ‘invent’ the university is the lack of overt induction to it, as we have seen. Many writers in this field advocate what Maybin (1994 cited in Lillis, 2001, p. 10), refers to as “long conversations,” multiple opportunities for engagement in discourse (spoken or written) allowing teachers to develop awareness of the students’ present state of understanding and to provide feedback helping to align them with the discourse of the discipline in question. Laurillard (2002) sees teachers’ access and response to knowledge of how their students conceptualise their subject as an essential ingredient of university teaching. This does not need to be a one-to-one process. The reframing Haggis (2006) refers to in 2.3.6 is a “collective inquiry into the nature of specific disciplines” (p. 531, italics in the original), in-class sessions where the teacher’s leading questions and guidance, eliciting student discussion, reveal how enquiry is done in the discipline. University teachers’ accounts in Zamel and Spack (2004) of their

growing expertise as mediators of international students’ learning in their courses (e.g., Alster, 2004; Fishman & McCarthy, 2004; Sieber, 2004; Srikanth, 2004) reveal how creating such opportunities allows both teacher and learner to respond appropriately to new dimensions of the learning situation for the benefit of all. It is unfortunate, then, that the first year experience is unlikely to provide such conversations (see 2.4.1).

3.1.2.1.5.

Developing writing strategies

Nevertheless, longitudinal studies do reveal that highly motivated international students can find personal resources to compensate to some degree. In her study of five postgraduate and undergraduate students which focuses on writing, Leki (e.g., 1995) recounts their experience grappling with the challenges of writing over the period of their first semester. They encountered many of the difficulties signalled above (such as the challenge of critical analysis and finding an appropriate voice), but used a range of strategies to overcome them which Leki collected into ten categories. Some of these, such as clarifying and focusing strategies, were from repertoires they brought from previous educational experience, but others were developed in response to the current context, such as accommodating or resisting teachers’ demands.

Evident, though not highlighted in the article, are issues of agency (choosing to resist teacher’s demands in cases where they seemed to impose too great a burden on the writer, for example), identity, participation and membership. One of the students successfully used her identity as “other” by using Taiwanese examples as major elements in her writing, even when asked by a teacher not to, rendering her point of difference cultural capital. Another, having struggled unsuccessfully to imagine and accommodate her teacher’s demands, lamented that she was clearly an “outsider” (p. 245). Although at times they struggled and were disappointed with results, Leki recognises their agency: “the students in this study nevertheless did successfully ferret out their own pathway toward completion of their work” (pp. 254-255).