September, 9 Readings: Reflection, Comments and Questions

In her first chapter, Casanave (2003) starts off by giving important and critical questions in relation to how, why and what beliefs writing teachers have regarding the decisions and the choices they make in their teaching settings. She begins with the idea of planning and that teachers undergo this process many kinds and in different shapes and forms everyday. I especially like the idea on page 8 when the author discusses the “goodness” of certain books or teaching materials. Books are “good” if written by famous authors and published by good publishers. For instance, EFL teachers in Syria, my home country, are required to use the same book that is approved by the Ministry of Education and published by York Press, a leading publishing company. A teacher’s choices and beliefs can be articulated and translated into action, and thus making teaching “more principles” and “less random”. So beliefs, as I see them, seem to be driving actions and behavior.

This leads me to the dichotomy of theory and practice. Does theory drive practice? Does practice shape theory” Or do they both work hand in hand? A challenging and foundational question Casanave raises has to do with the source of writing teachers’ knowledge, and she gives an example of this source: institution. Institutional (experiential) knowledge is so important that it makes writing teachers become acquainted with ideas over time. My question, though, is: What is experience? Is it time-based? Can I call myself “experienced” if I have been teaching for 15 years and have been doing the same thing over and over again? For Casanave, writing is seen as a social process, a communicative process that happens on a number of levels (between the writer and the text (an Other), between the writer and the reader (another Other) and between the writer and the Self).

Atkinson (2003), Casanave (2003) and Matsuda (2003) examine composition theories or rhetorics from the second half of the 20^th century to the present time. Atkinson (2003) discusses very closely and elaborately the four components of Trimbur’s (1994) definition of “post process" that revolves around the social, post-cognitivism, ideology and cultural activity. “the social” refers to a reaction to Structuralism that views writing as a formalized, abstract and internal behavior in terms of binarisms: good and bad, especially in relation to errors and feedback issues. The word “internal” is very important insomuch as it sheds light on the fact that writing in the “pre-process era”, so to speak, was seen in the lens of a product or an artifact that is not shared by the writer, the reader, and fellow writers. Literacy is seen also as an ideology, because it is constructed within a larger context of power, society, politics, culture and so on. By “cultural activity”, the researcher means how different teaching and learning cultures define notions like “voice” and “critical thinking”, for instance. Also, special attention is given to 1)- the teacher-centered and student-centered writing classroom, and the roles of both students and teachers in each of them and 2)- issues of race, class and gender (mainstreaming) as is the case with Kubota who takes a non-essentialist approach.

Casanave (2003) takes a socio-political approach to L2 writing research. Throughout the article, I have sensed a mainstreaming tone characterized by power relations on the part of the researcher who teachers in Japan, an EFL context. However, towards the end the researcher, bravely I would say, confesses that linguistic minorities learn to write in mainstream contexts, and she seems totally against labeling. An interesting point that I have come across is that Casanave gives readers an example of how a Chinese student copies and pastes from the Internet into her paper. This is a cultural matter, and the same was done by the daughter of a friend of mine who is from Saudi Arabia, who one time went to school and told her teacher that she copied and pasted from Internet sources. What is seen as plagiarism in the US educational system might seem completely natural and right in other contexts.

I have found Matsuda’s (2003) article to be the most interesting and most information among the other three articles required for this class. Matsuda gives an extensive historical and practical background on current-traditional, process and post-process pedagogies. Current-traditional rhetoric, as the name suggests, was, and is still, used in the writing classroom, and it is based on positivist views, meaning that form is what matters and a written product is what it asks for. For Matsuda and the other two researchers, current-traditional writing pedagogy is seen as “feedbackless”, as it were. He also draws on Berlin’s theories of process pedagogy: Expressive, cognitive and social-epistemic as well as on Fulkerson’s four theories of composition. I like what he terms “the cognitive-social divide” between process and post-process with process being the cognitive and post-process being the social. Despite all that, he makes it clear that no unified theory has come to light in relation to what a post-process paradigm is like, or should be like.