I have tried, with each of these blog posts, to begin my post with an anecdote from personal experience--something closely related to the topic, a story or an example from my own life (and usually relating to Spanish acquisition). But for this one, I have been having trouble coming up with anything from my personal experience, and I have been trying to work through why.
Chapter 9 of the text brings up some excellent points about tailoring student writing tasks to reflect and expand upon the writing that students do on a regular basis. It's so interesting to think about the ways in which the structured writing that school often requires widely differs from the authentic compositions that students may create on their own. When I was in high school, I actually participated in the NaNoWriMo challenge--I still have the shirt that I got when I finished. I didn't have a computer, so I handwrote a 50,000 word novel in the course of one month. (That's not to say that my work was any good--it was pretty awful. But maybe if my teachers had known I was interested in writing fiction they would have been able to encourage my creative writing). Yet we did very little "fiction" type writing in any of my English classes; they were focused on teaching grammar (there was actually very little composition at all until I got into my AP classes; even then it was largely centered around text analysis rather than original composition, which I think may be a flaw in my own education.).
So why is it I couldn't come up with a relevant personal example? Because none of my Spanish classes have ever asked me what I like to write. Even at Olivet, where my knowledge and abilities in the language have grown and flourished, I have not been given the option to write what I want to write. No one has asked me to write a poem or a journal entry or even to free-write about a topic; we haven't completed interest surveys. In high school, we rarely if ever focused on writing that I can remember (and it would likely not have happened in an authentic context if it did happen).
It's a challenge for me, therefore, to come up with writing tasks that are relevant to students' experiences. In my content area methods class, we have had some discussion over it, actually; Dr. Bonilla is a big advocate for intro surveys to gauge students' interests and abilities. We have talked about what students are writing about now and come up with some ideas: they could compose tweets (either to inform or express their opinions), they could write journal entries throughout the class, they could write poems. But all of that is pretty limited to the grammar forms that they are able to work with, which (again) makes it frustrating to implement in class.
Let's talk now about text comparisons. I think this is a skill that is lacking for so many people in our world--students, adults, second language learners, college students, that random aunt that posts articles from FOX News like they're the gospel itself. People simply don't know how to check the credibility of a text (and I don't know if I want to say "these days", because really, hasn't this always been an issue and it's just so much more obvious now that we have access to so much information--and so many opinions--all at once?). I have heard it said (and been guilty of the same) that people tend to look for sources that echo their own beliefs, rather than challenging them. This is a tendency that is far too common, especially when it comes to current events (but even shapes how we think of history and science and other fields). It is so easy to find an article that holds the same viewpoint as one's self, but that should not be the only news source that a person reads; he or she should read works from the opposing viewpoints as well, and compare them for accuracy and credibility.
This skill is just as applicable in the language classroom--as a language skill, for sure, but even more when it comes to culture. I think that many students come into our classes holding biases or prejudices or believing harmful stereotypes without knowing the damage that these things can cause. Students will come to class from many different backgrounds; some will think that immigrants are stealing American jobs and leeching off of our healthcare system, while others come from immigrant families and know how hard their parents or grandparents have worked with very little in return. Some may think that all Spanish-speakers in the States are Mexican, or that all Spanish-speaking countries like spicy food. The more diverse texts students are able to absorb, the more they will learn and the better their worldview will be--and the more informed their writing will be, both in school and in the world.
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