Praxis Blog 3: Working with ESL students

This week, the reading I connected most with was Vivian Zamel’s “Strangers in Academia.” I have a couple of ESL students in my section, and I’m sure I will encounter many more in my time at Emory and throughout my career. I found Zamel’s article a useful breakdown of beliefs I already hold, but that I can see getting lost in the day-to-day of classroom interaction. Zamel reminds the reader not to equate language fluency with cognitive abilities (3). In the example she uses of a positive engagement with an ESL student, an English professor focuses on content over mechanics when grading ESL students’ papers (4). The ESL students rose to the challenge, elevating their thinking and their language skills. Zamel also reminds the reader to treat ESL students with compassion and understanding– a suggestion that seems obvious but get lost in frustration for some. Zamel’s best advice is encapsulated when she urges teachers to “read students’ texts for what is there instead of what isn’t;” a helpful phrase to keep in mind I make my way through grading this semester (14).

Switching briefly to Young’s article, I’m not sure I’m convinced code-switching is such a bad idea. Can’t code-switching be presented as something we all do, regardless of home language, to adjust to different situations? Is there a way to make code-switching a discussion of audience and genre, rather than “correctness?” I’m also hesitant to buy into Young’s argument because I’m unsure how code-meshing would actually work in the composition classroom. What would assignments look like, and how would they be assessed? While I’m not sure how to incorporate code-meshing in the classroom, I think that an assignment that examined the ideas of codes more broadly would be useful for all. For example, perhaps students could write two versions of the same essay (personal narrative would work best, I think): one for a home audience, and one for an academic or professional audience. For my class on travel, I could have the students write a travel memoir of a childhood vacation for their parents, and then write a different version of the same essay for a tourism board. Ideally, an assignment of this nature would not only force an awareness of codes and code-switching, but also prompt a discussion of audience and generic conventions.