Monthly Archives: April 2010

Learning TESOL by Doing

In Spring 2009 I volunteered to teach a conversational ESL class without any formal training. My class consisted of 10 students from 7 different countries. All of them tested at the basic level, but their speaking abilities ranged from an…

Rebel’s Dilemma

In “Rebel’s Dilemma”, bell hooks writes, “To a grave extent the academy has always been so similar to the dysfunctional patriarchal family hierarchy that hemmed me in as a child that I feel that I can never be truly healthy—well…

Cultural Snap Phooie

When you have so many opinions and cultures weighing in on how writing should be taught, it is hard to decide what should be done.  One over all questions I thought about as I read was, “Why don’t all educational…

fox and li

Nothing is “basic” about Tom Fox’s article on basic writing. While initiation theory attempts to bring students of all kinds into one homogenous group, it ignores the cultural differences of students and promotes a single-minded approach towards writing. This rings…

How to learn to write?

  This week reading is really interesting and thought provoking and raised one question will we ever have a consensus on anything in this world?   No one can deny the reality that English is the Lingua Franca of the world…

The Right Way to Teach Write

The readings of this week highlight the difficulty of teaching writing within a culturally diverse world and the problems students face transitioning from their secondary education to the university.  In Foster and Russell’s text “Rearticulating Articulation”, the authors create a…

Writing Culture Shock

Cultural variations in writing not only refer to differences across countries but across schooling systems as well. When I began college, I was lost. A first generation college student, I had limited guidance in what I could expect from the…