Temple University Japan:

Controversies in Teaching Second Language Writing

Date: Saturday, November 8th, 2003 Time: 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Speaker: Christine Pearson Casanave (Teachers College, Columbia University)

Description:
In order to make sensible decisions in the L2 writing class and to build a coherent belief system about teaching and learning, teachers benefit from understanding some of the controversies that surround writing instruction. The controversies pertain to both L1 and L2 writing, and include questions about the following issues: the incompatibility of fluency and accuracy, the contrastive rhetoric debate, the process-product debate, ways to define and assess improvement, the purpose and value of error correction, issues of audience and plagiarism, and the dilemma of helping marginalized or disempowered writers accommodate or resist the way language is used in dominant cultures. Many of these debates among writing scholars remain unresolved or unresolvable. Still, because they deal with issues that L2 writing instructors face on a daily basis, they must be acted on in some way.
In this seminar we will review some of the debates about L2 writing. This review is designed to help teachers take a reasoned position on them within the realities of their own classrooms and in light of their own underlying beliefs and assumptions about teaching and learning. Our discussions are intended to help writing teachers become both more knowledgeable and more reflective about the decisions they make in their teaching as well as more aware of their agency as decision-makers in their own settings.
Topics:

  • Beliefs and Realities: A Framework for Decision-Making;
  • Contrastive Rhetoric;
  • Improvement (including the fluency-accuracy dilemma, the process-product debate, and the role of error correction);
  • Assessment;
  • Interaction (focusing on audience -- writers' interaction with readers, and on plagiarism -- writers' interaction with the words of others);
  • Politics and Ideology (emphasizing the debate between accommodationist pragmatism and critical pedagogy; the cultural politics of critical thinking, and the politics of Internet technology.

This seminar is part of TUJ's Distinguished Lecturer Series. Note that each seminar is actually 2 days long, apx. 7 hours per day. The first three hours of each seminar are free and open to the public. To attend both days of the weekend seminar costs 10,500 yen for the general public (free for M.Ed. and Ed.D. alumni of Temple University Japan). Please see the TUJ Tokyo web site for full details.

Organization: Temple University Japan

Cost: TUJ Members: free for M.Ed. and Ed.D. alumni of Temple University Japan
Non-members: free (first three hours)

Venue: Temple University Japan, Tokyo Center, 2-8-12 Minami Azabu; Minato-ku, Tokyo

Location: Tokyo, Tokyo Metropolis, Japan

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Contact Temple University Japan

Website: www.tuj.ac.jp/tesol/seminars/

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