CCCC 2007 L2 Writing Meeting

Here is the information about the CCCC Committee on Second Language Writing Open Meeting at the 2007 meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

Committee on Second Language Writing
Co-chairs: Paul Kei Matsuda and Susan Miller-Cochran
Day: Saturday, March 24, 2007
Time: 9:00 am–12:00 pm (Open)
Location: Concourse H, Concourse Level
Announced in program as an open meeting.

We will discuss the status of L2 writing issues at CCCC. We will also plan panels, workshops, Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting, and other L2-writing events for CCCC 2008.

Everyone is welcome--you don't have to be a committee member to join us! Please feel free to drop by anytime during the meeting.

UNH Commencement Speakers

I just found out that the keynote speakers at this year's commencement are George H. W. Bush (aka GWB's Dad) and Bill Clinton.

Rumor Has It

Someone just emailed me and asked if it was just a rumor--that the Ph.D. Program in Composition Studies at UNH was phasing out.

Well, it's just a rumor.

shirin

I just received a brilliant question about writing assessment from someone named "shirin," a Ph.D. student at Tehran University. I wrote a response, but the email address wasn't working. Shirin, if you see this message, please contact me again and give me an alteranative email address.

CFP: Asian Journal of English Language Teaching

CALL FOR PAPERS

Submission Guidelines

The Asian Journal of English Language Teaching (AJELT) encourages submission of manuscripts that (1) link ESL/EFL theory, research, and pedagogy and (2) relate specifically to teaching English to Asians at the university level. Reviews of books and multimedia resources and reports of ongoing projects are also welcome.

Manuscripts. Submissions should no more than 20-pages double-spaced in length; reports should be no longer than 12 pages. Authors should include a cover page with the full title of the paper, the author’s name, e-mail address, postal address, phone number, and if available, the fax number. The author’s name should not appear elsewhere in the article.

Articles and reports should be sent as e-mail attachments (i.e., Microsoft Word documents) to AJELT Editors, Gwendolyn Gong and Peter Gu .

Review essays should be sent as electronic submissions to Review Editor, Lixian Jin .

It is important to include a statement indicating that the submission is neither currently being reviewed nor will be submitted for review at the same time the manuscript is being considered by AJELT.

References. In the text, references should be cited using the author’s last name and year of publication. If quotations are used, these should additionally have page numbers (Wong & Lam, 1993, p. 291). The reference list should be arranged alphabetically following the guidelines of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (5th ed.). TESOL Quarterly and English for Specific Purposes Journal follow these guidelines.

Abstracts. All articles should have an abstract between 100 and 200 words in length.

Tables and Figures. Numerical tables can be typeset. Figures (graphs, illustrations, symbols) must be submitted as camera ready.

You should receive acknowledgement of receipt of your article, followed by comments from referees. Articles accepted for inclusion in the next volume should be revised and returned in two forms: on paper and in electronic form.

The editors reserve the right to make minor changes within articles prior to publication.

Plans

Here are my (still very tentative) plans for the next year and a half--my sabbatical year.

Since I have received the Center for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship, I will be on a year-long leave from June 2007 to August 2008. In general, I won't be available to anyone except those who are collaborating with me on a research project or whose dissertations I am chairing.

I will still be available for talks and consulting, but no more than usual because I will need to work on my writing projects.

In June, I will be traveling to various parts of Asia--Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto, Kobe, and possibly Beijing. From July through the end of September, I will be in Japan in preparation for the Symposium in mid-September. I will likely be a visiting researcher at a university in Japan--assuming that everything goes as planned.

I will be back in the States for the UNH Conference in October and NCTE in November. For the rest of the year, I will be working on my research and writing projects. I will, of course, attend a few conferences in Spring 2008.

AILA will be in late August, possibly during the first week of school. But it'll be in Essen, Germany. How could I possibly miss it?

Some of these plans are still very tentative because a few big pieces are missing. Not knowing exactly where I will be or what I will be doing is both exciting and unsettling at the same time.

CCCC 2007 and International Participants

Cheryl Glenn, the CCCC Convention Chair, is interested in finding ways to help international participants to get the most out of the 2007 CCCC Convention in New York (March 21-24, 2007). Below, I have attached her message to the Executive Committee with a list of sessions with an international theme.

Each year, CCCC hosts a morning reception for first-time CCCC attendees from 7 a.m. to 8:15 a.m.--before the Opening General Session. If this is your first CCCC, you'll receive an invitation to this social event, where you will get to meet other first timers as well as many seasoned participants. I will be there to meet many of you as well.

To recognize the presence and contribution of all international participants, Cheryl has also asked me to compile a list of names and email addresses of international participants, including international students and faculty who are studying and/or teaching in North America. If you come from a country other than the United States, please visit the following web site to get on the list of international participants at CCCC 2007.

http://matsuda.jslw.org/cccc/committee/international.html

Also, the CCCC Committee on Second Language Writing will host an annual open meeting Saturday morning. Susan Miller-Cochran and I have requested a room from 9 to 12 on Saturday, March 24, 2007. As usual, it will not appear on the session schedule in the program because it is a committee meeting; instead, the time and room will be listed under committee meetings. At the meeting, we will discuss the status of L2 issues at CCCC and plan activities and sessions for the following year. Please feel free to drop by even for a few minutes just to say "hi" to a friendly community of L2 writing people at CCCC and to learn about various professional opportunities.

From: Cheryl Glenn
Sent: Saturday, January 20, 2007 8:04 AM
To: CCCC Executive Committee.
Subject: [cccc-executive-committee] Sessions with International Perspectives at CCCC 2007


Dear Colleagues,

As you all probably know by now, this year's convention will host folks from every state in the union as well as from twenty countries outside the USA. I very much hope that our international guests will have a productive time with us--and that they'll return next year. Meeting in midtown Manhattan is a financial burden for all of us, to be sure, but for folks from Turkey, Lebanon, and China, the financial investment is even greater. So I'm thinking that if we work together to make the convention worth their investment, we'll also be enriching our own convention experiences and professional perspectives.

To that end, I am enlisting your support in introducing yourself to these folks, many of whom will be first-time attendees. You may recognize them by their institutional affiliation or their burgundy ribbon. I also encourage you to make the time to attend one of their sessions, which I've listed below. (I think I've located all of them and apologize ahead of time if I've missed any. Please feel free to emend and/or circulate my list.)

Thank you for considering my request.
I'm looking forward to seeing you all in March!

Cheryl

International Perspectives

A.03 The Circulation of Discourse across Institutional Boundaries: How (New) Genres (Re)Shape the Practices of Placement, Assessment, and Public Discourse
A.16 Still Fighting After All These Years?: Reflections on Jane Tompkins’ “Fighting Words”
B.03 Cultures of Writing and Writing Instruction: Toward Expressing Identity in an International Context
C.13 Transnational Rhetorics and Pedagogies
C.33 The Literature of Everyday Life: Teaching Creative Writing and Screen Plays with History and the Obscure
E.29 Re-thinking Voice(s)
F.00 Double Trouble: Misunderstanding Chinese Rhetorics
F.10 Individually and Institutionally Constructed Language Identities: Lessons from Multilingual Students
F.20 Pacific Islander Rhetorics: Language, Nationhood, and De/colonization
F.32 Interrogating Theory and Practices with ESL and Writing
H.25 Re-presenting Language Identities in Jamaican Composition Classrooms
I.12 Writing a Scholarly Identity: Disciplinary Identities, Discursive Cultures, and Rhetorical Agency
I.10 Trans-National Rhetoric: Queering Heteronormative Stated Identities
I.32 The Power of the People's Language and the Culture of Literacy
J.00 False Identities and the Lost Honour of Rhetoric
J.18 Forging Community Identities through Service Learning: The Complicated National and International Conversations in an Era of Immigration, Gentrification, and Migration
J.25 Grounded Theory in Practice
J.30 Advancing the Multiliteracy of ESL/EFL Students
K.29 Preparing Students to Communicate as Professionals through Grant Writing, Engineering Design, and 'Reality-Based' Approaches
L.04 Secret Identities Unmasked: Composition Meets Creative Nonfiction Face to Face
L.29 Discriminatory Institutions and Resistant Identities
M.04 The Visual Rhetoric of Ethnic Identity
M.10 Crafting Rhetorical Space: Public Discourse and the Forging of Complex Identities
M.29 Where the Bloody Hell Are We? Subverting and Resisting the Dominant Discourse through Hip Hop, Oral Tradition, and Online Text
O.12 Genre, Language, and Identity: Multiple Perspectives on the Study and Teaching of Genre
O.16 Escape from Flatland: Towards a Multi-Dimensional Identity
O.29 Assigning and Assessing Student Writing Across the Curriculum
P.01 Visual Constructions and Disciplinary Identity
P.06 Composition, Civic Responsibilities, and Situated Identities: Historical, Theoretical, and Pedagogical Perspectives on Teaching for Citizenship
P.09 (Re)Presenting Toulmin
P.30 Cultures of Writing and Writing Instruction: Toward Expressing Identity in an International Context
P.32 Perspectives on the Writing-Intensive Classroom
P.34 Identity, Ethnography, and Literacy Biographies

Cheryl Glenn
Professor of English
Associate Chair, Conference on College Composition and Communication
Co-director, Center for Civic Engagement and Democratic Deliberation
232 South Burrowes Building
The Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA 16802-6201
814/863-0271 (o)
814/863-7285 (fax)

Visit the CCCC 2007 Convention Preview: www.ncte.org/cccc/conv

Locating ESL Sections of First-Year Composition

A friend of mine, who has just gotten a WPA job asked me about an interesting institutional arrangement in U.S. higher education, which has not been discussed widely in the literature. Since I wrote a fairly extensive response that might be interesting to some people, I thought I'd post it here as well:

I don't think there has been enough discussion of issues surrounding having mainstream and ESL composition courses in two separate departments, but the arrangement itself is not that unusual. Many institutions have mainstream composition courses in the English Department and ESL sections in foreign language, linguistics, applied linguistics, and even communication departments, and the departmental affiliation often changes overtime. (See, for example, Stephanie Vandrick's description of changes that took place at University of San Francisco.)

As with anything else in higher education, the reason has mostly to do with disciplinary and institutional (and sometimes personal) politics rather than pedagogical effectiveness. ESL composition, just like mainstream composition, is a major cash cow that ensures enrollment, especially where department budgets have been dependent on the FTE at one point or another. They might even use it as an excuse for creating another tenure-track position--often with no real intention of hiring anyone with the necessary expertise.

My hunch, based on what I've seen, is that, if there is a department that has a TESOL program, that department would usually claim it; if not, linguistics would grab it; foreign language department is next on the list. If none of them claim it, then the English Department would reluctantly hire someone to teach one. If the English Department really doesn't want to bother, then communication department might seize the opportunity.

Unless there is someone in the department who specialize in ESL writing, none of these departments are really equipped to do an adequate job, but the sad truth is that there still aren't enough ESL writing specialists to go around, so the practice goes on. And if anyone with a specialization were to arise or to be hired into a department, it would be the existing department--whatever it happens to be--that has the ESL writing courses. On occasion, they are hired into a new administrative unit being created that does not have a department status, such as an independent writing/communication unit. In rare cases, people who have a strong background in ESL writing have found themselves in a different department for reasons other than the programmatic needs of the ESL sections per se. You seem to fit into this category.

But then again, this is how composition at most institutions ended up in the English Department. Few people in the emerging departments of English in the early part of the 20th century had an expertise or strong interest in teaching composition, but no one else seemed to be more qualified (or interested) than those who dealt with written English, albeit on the consumption side (or "creative" production side, which rarely gets mentioned in this discussion).

Had the new rhetoric of composition arisen a few years earlier, things might have been different. There were a number of historical moments when composition could have moved to communication along with rhetoric (which may have made more sense), but, according to Diana George and John Trimbur, so-called "expressivists" like Ken Macrorie tried to make sure that composition had nothing to do with what they saw as the pseudo scientists.

The irony is that composition became established as a discipline at around the same time partly because of the rise of social scientific research, but then again, that strand of composition has become somewhat alienated by those with strong humanist inclinations and anti-utilitalian sentiments--in what Bob Connors would have described as the Englishization of composition.

Revelant Sources

Connors, Robert J. "The Erasure of the Sentence." College Composition and Communication 52.1 (2000): 96-128.

George, Diana, and John Trimbur. The "Communication Battle," or Whatever Happened to the 4th C?" College Composition and Communication 50.4 (1999): 682-698.

Vandrick, Stephanie. "Shifting Sites, Shifting Identities: A Thirty-Year Perspective." The Politics of Second Language Writing: In Search of the Promised Land. Ed. Paul Kei Matsuda, Christina Ortmeier-Hooper and Xiaoye You. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor, 2006. 280-293.

When Do You Stop Reading?

You don't, of course.

But it's impossible to have read everything, and at some point, we need to start publishing--otherwise no one will ever be able to publish anything.

Some of my grad students in the research methods course last semester asked, "When can we say we've read enough?"

This may seem like a complicated question, but here is my rule-of-thumb answer: When you know more than your audience.

Then, read as you write and read more after you write, always keeping in mind that what we can say at any given moment is limited by what we know, and that there is always more to read if we were to reach a wider audience and to continue to be a viable voice in the field.

It also keeps me humble to think that my audience is always reading more and more to catch up with me. In order to stay current in the field, I must read on.

Relevant past posts:

Read Widely
Read Everything Again
Read Everything

CFP: 2007 UNH Composition Conference

Call for Conference Proposal
Literacies--Personal, Professional, Academic
October 12-13, 2007

The University of New Hampshire is offering a composition conference with keynotes Ellen Cushman (Michigan State University), Paul Kei Matsuda (University of New Hampshire), Gwendolyn D. Pough (Syracuse University) and Stuart Selber (Penn State University). The focus will be on exploring literacy as it is learned inside and outside of school, and its multiple uses.

We invite proposals for 75-minute concurrent sessions. Sessions can be proposed by an individual or a group of presenters. We prefer interactive sessions and hope to avoid the reading of papers. Among the possible topics to be addressed are: literacy, technology and accessibility; multi-media literacies; virtual reading and writing communities; non-school sponsors of literacy; literacy norms and second language learners; literacy and popular culture; and new discourse conventions in academic writing.

Proposals should include: Session Title; Proposal Type (individual or group); Complete contact information of each presenter including name, address, daytime phone and email address; A 400-word session description as well as a 50-word summary.

Send to:

UNH English Department
Attn: Composition Conference
95 Main Street
Durham, NH 03824

Postmark deadline: Monday, May 14, 2007

Please direct all questions to Sabina Foote.

http://www.unh.edu/composition/conference/

Proposal Writing

Happy New Year to you all!

Nagoya Symposium is coming up in about 9 1/2 months, and the deadline for proposals--January 31, 2007, is fast approaching. I'm glad to report that a good number of people have submitted their proposals, but given the general tendencies, many people will likely wait until the last few weeks of January to submit their proposals.

Even writing teachers and researchers are subject to procrastination, I guess.

I'm hoping to see a good representation of regulars--people who have participated in past symposia. But I'm also looking forward to receiving many proposals from new people--people who have not been able to attend previous syposia.

Some of them may have been unable to participate because of the location or timing. Others may have become interested in L2 writing only recently.

I also have heard from a few people that they thought--or they had been told--their study was not worth presenting at an international forum. No, not in terms of the quality of research or the methodological rigor, but in terms of their generalizability. They are not sure if the particular population of students they are working with or the institutional context is generalizable to other countries.

Well, if that's the concern, that's all the more reason to get it out there. People from certain dominant countries (e.g., U.K. and U.S.) publish their studies in international forums all the time--often without thinking about their implications for other countries. (I'm not saying this is good, but that's the way it has long been in some fields.)

What is important, however, is the effort to use the studies from unique situations by relating to the existing generalizations and abstractions (i.e., theories) that came from those dominant contexts. If you believe the context is different from those dominant countries, use the study to document what the differences are in a more concrete terms. Are the differences real and significant enough to matter? If so, how can that context challenge, endorse, or shed light on the existing insights?

A conference presentation is a step before publication where this kind of discussion can take place because there will be people who represent various contexts. Even if you can't see what is (or isn't) particularly unique about your own context, you might be able to find out by sharing your work with others who can point out what's interesting and unique about your work.

I hope this year's Symposium will provide an opportunity to many presenters and participants to think through these issues.

In Memoriam: Don Murray

In Memoriam
Donald Morison Murray (1924-2006)


Donald Morison Murray, Professor Emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, died of heart failure in the morning on Saturday, December 30, 2006. He was 82.

After returning from World War II, where he served as a paratrooper, Don attended the University of New Hampshire on a G. I. bill, majoring in English. He became a journalist and, as an editorial writer for Boston Herald, received Pulitzer Prize at the age of 29. After a brief career as a freelance writer, he joined the University of New Hampshire faculty in 1963, where he established himself as one of the most prominent leaders of the writing process movement in composition studies.

His short 1972 article, "Teach Writing as a Process, Not Product" provided an influential catch phrase that stimulated the development of the process movement in composition studies. Various editions of A writer teaches writing, first published in 1968, also inspired generations of writing teachers.

Even after his retirement, he served as a writing coach to many while continuing to produce books as well as regular columns for the Boston Globe. He was also a neighborhood hero. Everyone knew Don Murray when he came into the Bagelry or Young’s Restaurant for breakfast.

He lost his second wife, Minne Mae, in February 2005, after years of fighting Parkinson’s disease. But he continued to cope with the joys and sorrows of his life by taking people out to dinner, by buying bigger and bigger computer monitors, by driving around in a new red Volvo, and by writing.

Don's favorite quote from Roman poet Horace (65-8 B.C.E.) was "nulla dies sine linea" (never a day without a line). He did indeed write everyday. He kept a log of the number of words he produced each day, taking particular pride in the fact that he kept up even in hospital bed.

In what has become his last Globe column, Don reflected on the reason he never took a job as an editor: “I'm a writer. I want to stay a writer. No promotions please.”

The Globe quotes Don’s daughter Anne as saying: "He basically lived through his writing. In some ways that was more real to him than his real life. Everything had to be sifted through his writing—the good and bad. His whole life was writing."

He was a writer indeed. Even those who have never met him will remember him through his writing.

http://www.unh.edu/journalism/donmurray.htm