Teaching Reading and Writing Week One

In this post, we briefly set out the main points from, and respond to two articles: How to Research Second Language Writing, by Charlene Polio, and chapter six from The Globalization of Scholarship, by John Flowerdew and Yongyang Li. Polio's article is practical. Flowerdew and Li's is almost pointless.

Polio's paper is her attempt to classify the world of second language writing instruction. She divides up research performed in the field into several categories. She analyzes concepts connected to these methods, and finally provides a general template for how to conduct research, with (her running commentary also contributing to this end.

We learn at the paper's onset that there are eight ways to research: surveys, interviews, meta-analysis, classroom observation, ethnography, content analysis, text analysis, and process search. A couple highlights: content analysis hopes to describe the texts L2 writers will have to produce. People rarely employ meta-analysis due to the sheer volume of material required. Research issues include the reactivity problem, and the veridicality problem. Basically, how students react to their own think aloud processes, and how accurately they can portray these processes are problems for several research methods.

Reading research on research has nice benefits. Novices gain a bird's eye view of the design space they hope to master by one who is well traveled. Green experimenters might not realize all the different ways to conduct research, or the problems they will encounter. It would be devastating to lose a month of data and effort due to some subtle structural hiccup. More over, the particular case studies she has highlighted and set aside contain exemplary research questions.

What changes could be identified in the students’ general L2 proficiency?

What changes could be identified in their L2 composition quality?

What changes could be identified in their L2 writing fluency?

What changes could be identified in their L2 writing strategy use?

What changes could be identified in their L2 writing style?
What characteristics of L2 writing experts did they acquire?

These are focused and definite, and we fully expect to ask them in the future. Yet we have learned that even in strongly formulated questions, key terms and metrics in writing analysis are devious to pin down. How devious are they? Are we just not clever enough? Or can we pin them to a range of acceptable values? How important is it that we clearly define the data? How does this affect the legitimacy of teaching English writing? What exactly are you teaching? While beyond the scope of Polio's paper, these questions are a nice product of our engagement with it.
(Flowerdew and Li will have to wait until class. Whoops.)