In our recent workshop on how to grade ESL student writing, we focused on a number of strategies for reading past a student’s accent through to the content of their work, and for designing writing assignments that do not presume a level of culture-specific knowledge that they might not possess. As an example, we created a mock writing-prompt that might be used in a psychology class in which the concept of “cognitive dissonance” is being taught. It went something like this: “How might the celebration of Thanksgiving be construed as an example of cognitive dissonance?” The issue related to our workshop is fairly clear. For a student who has not grown up in a culture that celebrates Thanksgiving, the writing assignment, ostensibly on a topic in psychology (cognitive dissonance), becomes additionally a research assignment on North American cultural history. Our solution was to provide an alternative form of the same question or task that did not rely on such specifically American content that was not part of the content for the class. Such an alternative could look like this: “Can you think of an experience in your life that illustrates the issue of cognitive dissonance?” The task is essentially the same. It asks the student to synthesize the class material in order to effectively demonstrate its reality in the world, and to tie that meaning to his or her own personal experience.
I would like to suggest that offering alternatives to the same assignment is an effective strategy for the benefit of all students including ESL students. Alternative versions of the same task can both reinforce the motivation for the prompt, and offer insights to its solution. Even minus the specific cultural background, the ESL student responding to the double prompt given above might discern some basic contours to the problem at hand. How, he or she might ask, might celebration be a bad thing? (Well, of course, if you are celebrating a bad thing!). This context can then inform their selection of a suitable experience for the illustration of the concept at hand, encouraging a more integral learning experience. The native English speaker as well can benefit from this decoding of the premise and can select his or her own relevant context for the problem.
Further, research has shown that tying information to prior experience, like understanding that information in different contexts, is the most effective means of grasping and internalizing its conceptual integrity, creating deep structural learning as opposed to short-term learning (Alexander and Jetton, 2000). It all comes down to the notion that the goals we have for our students are the same regardless of their background, and that deep structural understanding is the scaffolding both for their continued ability to incorporate new information and for their effective writing.
