4/24 Readings

The most interesting information in this week’s Kubota article was the perhaps inadvertent comparison of Japan’s ESL struggles to America’s. From the information provided in the article, it seems like Japan has been going through many of the same struggles as America – a drastic increase in immigration beginning in the mid-1990s, leading to increased need for “Japanese language support” (15) in Japanese schools. Somewhat oddly, as of 1997, a large percentage of their non-Japanese population was from Portugal, but they also had significant percentages from China and Spain, as well as small percentages from more than fifty other nations. (16) However, also like America, “these diversities are not sufficiently reflected in language education [in Japan]” (15). Japan could also be compared to America in that it schools are highly focused on teaching one foreign language – English – just as our schools are focused primarily on teaching Spanish as a foreign language.

The Matsudas’ article was more interesting to me, as a non-ESL teacher. It is important (for me) to note that the problems identified with regard to ESL writing instruction in this article are really universal writing instruction issues. I don’t think the difficulty is just a misunderstanding of how to help ESL writers, but how to help all writers. Too many teachers of every type classroom focus too heavily on the identification of almost meaningless grammar errors in student writing. They focus so closely on the mechanics that they sometimes forget to consider whether the piece of writing met its overall goal, which is simply to communicate. Writing teachers of every kind should be more focused on helping their students communicate effectively, which often requires ignoring mechanical errors that don’t really matter in order to favor an emphasis on the bigger picture. ESL learners do need to know when their communication has been unsuccessful, as do all learners, but they do not need the discouragement of having every single error being pointed out.

The authors actually address part of this idea, with relation to nondominant forms, when they say “teachers need to help students understand the perceived boundary … between what works (variations) and what doesn’t (errors)” (372). They suggest that teachers show their students examples of writing that adhere closely to standard conventions, those that deviate without hampering communication, and those that deviate too far to be successful. This is precisely what I do with my Language Arts students in my traditional middle school classroom. I also encourage my students to experiment with writing that deviates to help them better understand the differences and when/why difference might be appropriate.

I’ll close by agreeing with Matsuda and Matsuda in that “… as long as dominant varieties prevail … we … have the obligation to make those discursive resources available … to not make the dominant codes available to students who seek them would be doing a disservice to students …” (372). Still, the authors assert that “ … teachers can also help students understand that language users naturally deviate from the perceived norm …” (372) which echoes what was already said above.