Reflections on The Politics of Second Language Writing Chapters Three, Four and Six

Reflections on The Politics of Second Language Writing Chapters Three, Four and Six

Personally these three chapters, especially Chapter 6, were very interesting and tackling “real-life”, academic issues. The fact that writing courses, ENGL 101 in particular, are made compulsory for university students to take, indicates and fosters Rose’s (1985) concept of utilitarianism in designing and teaching writing courses. This is to say writing is viewed as a skill that only a few, a privileged few, can teach and only some can learn it. I also appreciate mentioning the “dichotomy” between writing and communication in spite of some reservations. Writing is portrayed as distinguished from speaking and reading insofar the last two, unlike writing, are communication-based.

For me, writing is as communicative as speaking or any other language skills. Interestingly and ironically at the same time, why are L2 language courses are credit-free and other foreign language courses (Arabic, French, Spanish and so on) are not? There might be some (P)political (institutional or otherwise) underpinnings for such tendency. In most of the writing courses I have taken, this question above and this one are always discussed. There is no one-to-one relationship between ELI’s, or ALI’s, writing improvement and ENGL 101 students’ writing achievement.

This would raise a frightening question: what use is what we are doing? In a class last week, one of my classmates was “brave” to ask a daring question I had always thought of. “Why teach writing?” was her question. A similar question is raised by Leki: Why is writing is so privileged? There was some discussion on that; however, I felt I was not satisfied. Is teaching writing nothing but a political game, a process filtering the “literate” from the illiterate” (a gate-keeper)?

Unfortunately, I was not able to come across the word “required” in describing why students would come to the Writing Center. It is suggested and also required that some students show up at the writing center, and if they fail to do so they will not be given a bonus grade. The emphasis is always on “help with grammar”, and this is what tutees, both L1 and L2, ask me to do. Grammar is looked upon and viewed as the only thing students need though they might not need any “help with grammar” but rather help with organization, developing ore even generating ideas. It is very sad that mechanics and formalist issues are prioritized at the expense of other equally, or even more important, writing issues.

Both teachers and students, I am afraid, have become so mechanistic and form-driven. I highly appreciate the idea that writing centers should not be seen as “remedial” nor “developmental” sub-institutions but rather centers of learning. So it seems that the WC mission statement is not foregrounding the Deficit Model, but how to put that in practice remains the hard-to-crack question, I believe. We say we are not providing remediation and do the opposite (we are here to help, you need help, we need to work on some of your language problems, I need help with grammar … etc.).

I work at the writing center, and I feel there is a “cold war” existing between teachers and the writing center in general. Teachers suggest the writing center is the place to get help, the place where students can get their writing problems fixed and “diseases” cured or at least offered medicine and remedy. The Writing Center people, on the other hand, feel this belittles their role of promoting learning and think it is the teacher and the student (the tutee) that are supposed to solely responsible for their own learning.