blog # 5

One thing that I found really interesting while reading Connor’s article was the conflict for Senegalese students when it came to writing in English for their course ESL course in the university (230-232). First of all, I actually liked the structure of the French “dissertation”. The four parts (introduction, thesis, antithesis and synthesis) seem very straight forward and to the point when compared to the five paragraph essay that we are used to writing in English. However I think it’s really odd that they don’t voice a position in their writing when they write a dissertation. I feel like most writing that we do in English is to convince our audience to agree with the stance we are taking. I feel like the whole idea of rhetoric is how someone uses language effectively to persuade readers or the audience. A lot of times in English-essay writing we focus on who the audience is. If you are writing a dissertation and aren’t taking any particular position I feel like the audience isn’t as important of a factor to distinguish. Dissertations are definitely a very different form of writing than a five paragraph essay. I do however think that if I grew up writing dissertations rather than essays I would find dissertation writing more understandable. I can see why Senegalese students would have trouble writing an essay in their ESL course since it is a form of writing that they are not used to. It took me a lot of practice in writing to become an effective persuasive writer. For a student who never had to pick a position in their native language writing, I can imagine that the Senegalese students probably struggled not only in writing in their second language, but also taking on a completely different writing style than they were used to. I know that in my bilingual education we talk a lot about BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills) and CALP (Cognitive-Academic Language Proficiency) in a student’s second language. There is a big difference in being able to have a casual conversation with someone (BICS) and writing an academic essay at the university level (CALP). Developing CALP in a second language is a lot more difficult than developing BICS. In fact, I believe that for a lot of people, CALP can even be difficult to develop in a person’s native language since it is not language that people use on a daily basis and it isn’t language that comes natural. That being said, I don’t think it’s fair that the Senegalese students were assessed by the essays that they wrote in their ESL class. If they were assessed on their essay writing and then were not able to test out of ESL classes I don’t think that is fair. Not only are they having to use CALP, which I already mentioned is very difficult, but they are also writing in a style that is foreign to them and is not something that they have practiced throughout their native schooling. I do think that CALP is something that does need to be developed in an L2, however I don’t think that the style of writing should be that much of a factor. What the writing says and the research and support presented should be more important than the writing style used.