Joan G. Carson’s research while affiliated with Georgia State University and other places

This study investigated Chinese and Spanish-speaking students' perceptions of their interactions in peer response groups in an ESL composition class. In a microethnographic study, three peer response groups in an advanced ESL composition class were videotaped for six consecutive weeks. After videotaping, researchers met with individual Chinese (N = 3) and Spanish-speaking (N = 2) group members. In each session, the researcher and the student viewed the videotapes of the peer response group in which the student had participated, and the students answered researcher questions about the group's interactions. The interviews were audiotaped, and the tapes were transcribed. The transcripts from the interviews were examined recursively by the researchers, and patterns were noted. This analysis yielded a description of the key participants' perceptions of their construction of peer response interaction. The analysis indicated that both the Chinese and Spanish-speaking students preferred negative comments that identified problems in their drafts. They also preferred the teacher's comments over those of other students and viewed grammar and sentence-level comments as relatively ineffective. The Chinese and Spanish-speaking students had different views, however, about the amount and kind of talk that was needed to identify problems.

Reacts to Ruth Spack's commentary "The Rhetorical Construction of Multilingual Students." Each reaction is followed by a response from the author. (Author/VWL)

This article argues for the need for both intensive and extensive reading in an EAP reading curriculum, and further argues that a principled curricular approach to combining both is through Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT). Given the need for academic preparation programs that focus on college and university requirements so that students are taught literacy skills which are transferable to academic contexts, this paper argues that both intensive and extensive reading are necessary to prepare students for the task and texts they encounter in college. Intensive reading with a focus on skills/strategies instruction has been shown to yield positive effects on second language reading. At the same time, students need the practice of extensive reading in order to orchestrate, coordinate and apply intensively acquired skills/strategies over the larger texts and multiple reading sources that are required in all academic course work. TBLT, which focuses on specific tasks, such as evaluated products in academic contexts (e.g. testtaking, report writing), allows students to acquire relevant skills and strategies in the context of tasks they will eventually encounter in academic courses. Furthermore, TBLT provides a principled approach to the determination of relevant content.

In this article we (a) argue that mainstream composition studies is at present too narrow in its scope and limited in its perspective and (b) offer some thoughts, from our unique interdisciplinary position, that we feel could help mainstream composition professionals improve this situation. In our article, we first provide evidence that we feel suggests an unfortunate pattern of neglect in mainstream composition studies of writing in English as a second language (ESL) and writing in languages other than English. We then introduce a number of concepts from second language studies (primarily from second language acquisition and second language writing instruction) that we believe could help mainstream composition studies address its limitations; develop a more global and inclusive understanding of writing; and thus avoid being seen as a monolinguistic, monocultural, and ethnocentric enterprise.

One source of information that should inform decisions about English for academic purposes (EAP) writing courses is students' experiences in those courses and beyond. A survey of ESL students in the U.S. (Leki & Carson, 1994) has indicated that they experience writing differently depending on the source of information drawn on in writing a text: general world knowledge or personal experience; a source text or texts used as a springboard for ideas; or a source text (or other external reality), the content of which the student must display knowledge. This article, based on interview data, reports on how ESL students experience writing under each of these conditions in their EAP writing classes and their academic content classes across the curriculum. The findings suggest that writing classes require students to demonstrate knowledge of a source text much less frequently than other academic courses do. We argue that EAP classes that limit students to writing without source texts or to writing without responsibility for the content of source texts miss the opportunity to engage L2 writing students in the kinds of interactions with text that promote linguistic and intellectual growth.To explain and understand any human social behavior … we need to know the meaning attached to it by the participants themselves. (Nielsen, 1990)

This study investigated Chinese students' interaction styles and reactions to one particular pedagogic technique: peer response groups in ESL composition classes. In a microethnographic study, three peer response groups in an advanced ESL composition class were videotaped for 6 consecutive weeks. After videotaping, the interviewers met with individual Chinese-speaking (n = 3) and Spanish-speaking (n = 2) group members. The Spanish-speaking students were interviewed in order to have a point of comparison. In each of the sessions, the interviewer and the student viewed the videotapes of the peer response group in which the student had participated and discussed the group's interactions. The interviews were audiotaped, and the tapes were transcribed. The transcripts from the interviews were examined recursively by the researchers; emerging patterns or themes were noted; the data were analyzed again using these themes as coding categories; and the data were organized according to these codes. This analysis yielded a description of the key informants' perceptions of their construction of peer response group interaction. The analysis indicated that the Chinese students' primary goal for the groups was social—to maintain group harmony—and that this goal affected the nature and types of interaction they allowed themselves in group discussions. The Chinese students were reluctant to initiate comments and, when they did, monitored themselves carefully so as not to precipitate conflict within the group. This self-monitoring led them to avoid criticism of peers' work and to avoid disagreeing with comments about peers' or their own writing.

Writing tasks assigned in 162 undergraduate and graduate courses in several disciplines at eight universities were collected. Using a sample of the assignments, key dimensions of difference were identified, and a classification scheme based on those dimensions was developed. Application of the classification scheme provided data on the prevalence of various types of assignments and, for essay tasks, showed the degree to which the assignments were characterized by each of several features. Differences in the kinds of writing tasks assigned in different groups of disciplines were examined.

As English for academic purposes (EAP) writing instructors and writing curriculum planners, we need to know the degree to which ESL writing courses have been successful in gauging and providing for ESL students' writing needs across the university curriculum. However, making this determination is difficult because many academic writing requirements may be implicit in the curriculum of the disciplinary course and thus not amenable to ready description by the outsider. Furthermore, we also need to know how much carryover from ESL writing courses occurs with ESL students—that is, what elements of their ESL writing instruction have they found useful and available to them as students in content courses? This article reports on a survey of former ESL students now in university-level content courses that is designed to investigate students' perceptions of the relationship between the writing instruction the students received in ESL writing classes and the actual writing tasks they found in courses across the disciplines. The results of the survey include indications of which writing skills taught in ESL writing courses students found most useful in dealing with the writing demands of other content courses. In their answers to open-ended survey questions, ESL students also described their perceptions of their ongoing writing needs beyond the ESL writing curriculum.

It may appear that writing groups, used in many English as a Second Language (ESL) composition classrooms, would be familiar to ESL students from collectivist cultures where group work is common in school both as a means of knowledge acquisition and as a vehicle for reinforcing the group ethic. However, writing groups may be problematic for students from collectivist cultures (e.g., Japan, the People's Republic of China) in at least three ways. First, writing groups, as used in composition classes in the U.S., function differently than groups in collectivist cultures: instead of functioning for the good of the collective, writing groups more often function for the benefit of the individual writer. Second, as a result of the dynamics of ingroup relationships in collectivist cultures, ESL students may be concerned primarily with maintaining group harmony at the expense of providing their peers with needed feedback on their composition drafts. Finally, the dynamics of outgroup relationships for ESL students from collectivist cultures may result in behavior that is hostile, strained, and competitive—behavior that is likely to work against effective group interactions.