Questions pertaining to the readings for 1/20/11 to think about or discuss

1)      The article by Atkinson points out some of the problems ESL students and teachers experienced during the era of process pedagogy. Why was the process approach problematic for second-language learners?

2)      What elements should be addressed in considering how to teach writing in an ESL context?

3)      Assume that you are a teacher of ESL at the English Language Institute at a university somewhere in the Midwest. You are assigned to teach a course in academic writing.  Your students all hope one day to attend the university as undergraduate or graduate students. You have permission to design and structure the course as you see fit. Should you plan to explicitly teach patterns of paragraph and essay development and organization?

4)      How do writers’ sociopolitical purposes and the sociopolitical contexts in which they write influence their strategies and processes for writing? (from Casanave, p. 90).

5)      What are some of the “potential pockets of resistance to sociopolitically-oriented case study research” that Casanave warns about? Do you think her concerns are valid?

6)  What is your reaction to the following quote from the Matsuda article (p. 78-79): “Atkinson’s definition, which recognizes the continuation of many of the tenets of process pedagogy, seems congruent with Susser (1994), who argued that the notion of process is best defined not as a complete theory or a pedagogical approach but as a set of pedagogical practices that can be adapted to any pedagogical approaches. Post-process, then, is ultimately a misnomer, for it presupposes a certain conception of process and proclaims its end—after all, it literally means “after process.” Yet, I do not mean to suggest that we ban the term. Rather, my goal in this article was to show how such a term could mask the complexity of ideas to which it refers, and to caution against defining post-process as the complete rejection of all tenets of process pedagogy or theories. Instead, post-process might be more productively defined as the rejection of the dominance of process at the expense of other aspects of writing and writing instruction. If we can keep that definition in mind, the term may serve a useful heuristic purpose as the field of L2 writing moves toward the era of multiplicity.”