The editors and authors of Changing Practices: Moving Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay in L2 Writing (Michigan, 2019) are going on the road! You can catch us at these conferences during the academic year:
Continue reading “The Five-Paragraph Roadshow (or some kind of show)”
I’m making some detours off my usual routes this spring, and I’m excited to be speaking at… Continue reading “Conference circuit 2019”
Here’s my speaking schedule for the coming year. Come join me!
Kansas State University Intensive English Program (professional development workshop), December 15
EAP Conference at St. Andrew’s University, Scotland, February 24-25, 2017
AAAL Conference, Portland, March 17-19, 2017
TESOL Convention, Seattle, March 21-24, 2017 (handouts & slides here)
TESOL’s annual convention returns to Baltimore in April for its 50th birthday party (TESOL’s, not Baltimore’s). I’ll be greeting and speaking:
Wednesday April 6, 5:00-5:45pm, room 328: Beyond the EAP Border into Graduate Studies: Cross-Institutional Curricular Models (Jin Kim and Nigel Caplan)
Thursday April 7, 10-11am: Meet the authors coffee hour: Chris Feak and I will be on hand to drink coffee and talk about our textbooks and graduate student education in general. At the University of Michigan Press booth in the exhibit hall.
Friday April 8, 1:00-2:45pm: Getting on the Same Page — transitions from IEP to First-Year Composition (panel).
Friday April 8, 3:00-4:45pm, room 343: Discovering and Teaching the Grammar of Academic Writing (Sandra Zappa-Hollman, Nigel Caplan, Ryan Miller, Thomas Mitchell)
Handouts from my sessions are available here.
Hope to see you there!
Please visit this page for my handouts and slides from the fabulous Symposium on Second Language Writing, November 13-15, 2015, at Arizona State University.
TESOL 2014 handouts and references are now online here!
Do you teach or advise (post-)graduate students? Join the Graduate Educators Roundtable discussion list!
I have an exciting year of conferences and workshops ahead. Here are the highlights and handouts!
My short essay/conference review From Generic Writing to Writing Genres has been published in TESOL’s Second Language Writing Interest Section Newsletter (October 2013). In it, I argue (again!) in favor of a genre-based writing pedagogy as an antidote to the five-paragraph essay. I also summarize my 2012 and 2013 conference blitz, and you can find all the PPTs and handouts here: CCCC 2012, TESOL 2012, Genre 2012, SSLW 2012, EATAW 2013, and TESOL 2013.
Talking about the five-paragraph essay (as I so often seem to be), there was a great article in Slate recently denouncing the (five-paragraph) essay component of the SAT (one of the standardized tests taken by American high-school students as part of their university application). The title says it all: “We are teaching high school students to write terribly.” The article quotes Professor Anne Ruggles-Gere of the University of Michigan writing center:
“For those trained in the five-paragraph, non-fact-based writing style that is rewarded on the SAT, shifting gears can be extremely challenging. “The SAT does [students] no favors,” Gere says, “because it gives them a diminished view of what writing is by treating it as something that can be done once, quickly, and that it doesn’t require any basis in fact.”
The result: lots of B.S.
As Professor Gere says elsewhere in the article, the result is that college writing teachers like me have to un-teach what students have “learned” about writing — and it’s not just American students. International students trained to pass the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) or other English language proficiency tests also arrive with what Linda Flower has called a “limited literacy.”
Lest you think we exaggerate, here is a horrifyingly amusing blog post by Jed Applerouth, a teacher and doctoral student who takes the SAT regularly to help him tutor high school students to ace/beat the test. Since SAT essay raters are explicitly trained to ignore the veracity of the writing, here’s how to get a top score:
I stuck John Fitzgerald Kennedy in a Saxon war council during the middle ages, grappling with whether to invade the neighboring kingdom of Lilliput. Barrack Husein Obama shared a Basque prison cell with Winston Churchill, and the two inmates plotted to overthrow General Franco. Cincinnati’s own, Martin Luther King Jr. sought out a political apprenticeship with his mentor, Abraham James Lincoln, famed Ontario prosecutor.
Finally, an example of writing with absolutely no communicative value whatsoever. The SAT essay as anti-genre?!
(Hat tip to my Facebook friends and friends-of-friends for these links.)
I just returned from a wonderful few days in the beautiful Hungarian capital for the European Association of Teachers of Academic Writing (EATAW) conference. And congratulations to the organizing team for such an interesting and well-run event.
My workshop (developed with Chris Feak from the University of Michigan) was called University English is No-one’s First Language: Teaching the Genres of Postgraduate Writing, and you can find the PowerPoint, references, and related links to corpus and concordancing sites here.
Many papers at the conference considered the relationship between English and other languages in higher education and (especially scientific) publishing. This put my contribution in an interesting light: I argue that the genre-based pedagogy we use gives students/scholars access to “cultural capital” that will enable them to participate in the knowledge-making work of their disciplines. But it could be argued that we are instead spreading the hegemony of English and forcing writers with their own cultural and rhetorical traditions to subjugate themselves to anglo-saxon domination. I still think that you can’t change a system — or even participate in it — until you can speak its language. What do you think?
I’ve just finished polishing my presentation for my first conference across the pond: the European Association of Teachers of Academic Writing (EATAW) in the beautiful city of Budapest, Hungary. My presentation, developed with Chris Feak, is University English is no-one’s first language: Learning the genres of postgraduate writing. You can see the abstract and PowerPoint slides (to follow) on this page.
Fortunately, Budapest appears to have survived the record floods in central Europe with little damage so far. The corner of Germany where I spent five wonderful summers, Wust in Sachsen-Anhalt, has sadly fared far worse and is underwater at this time.
Nigel Caplan 