Internationalization, English L2 Writers, and the Writing Classroom: Implications for Teaching and Learning

• Published in: College composition and communication Vol. 65; no. 4; pp. 650 - 658
• Main Authors: Zawacki, Terry Myers, Habib, Anna Sophia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Urbana National Council of Teachers of English 01.06.2014
• Subjects: Academic Language; Basic writing; Cultural heritage; English; English (Second Language); Feedback; Foreign Students; Globalization; Grammar instruction; Language; Language acquisition; Learning; Linguistics; Literary style; Medium of instruction; Multilingualism; Pedagogy; Second language writing; SYMPOSIUM ON INTERNATIONALIZATION; Teachers; Teaching; Teaching Methods; Writers; Writing; Writing Across the Curriculum; Writing instruction; Writing Processes; Writing teachers; Written composition; United States > US
• ISSN: 0010-096X; 1939-9006

The authors said when Kathleen Yancey invited them to contribute to this symposium, based on our research with international student writers, she asked them to consider what the increasing presence of these students in the writing classrooms implies for how they in writing studies do their work. While they accepted this invitation, they did so with some reservations about what meaningful observations they could make in the few thousand words available, especially in light of the international students' enormously varied linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds. As Paul Kei Matsuda shows in his review of the issues around teaching language in context, explicit grammar instruction has the potential, depending upon the individual student's stage of development, to raise language awareness and facilitate language development, whether that instruction occurs through feedback on individual students' papers, through lessons focused on learnable rules informed by usage-based descriptive grammar, which he calls pedagogical grammar, or through teaching genre as a clustering of language resources.