This four-week writing course is offered for high-intermediate and/or advanced students during the summer and winter sessions at an Intensive English Program at a university in the southeastern United States.  Students in this course will either matriculate to the university in the subsequent semester or enter the advanced level of the Intensive English Program in preparation to eventually matriculate into the university.  Because the students will soon be participating in a demanding academic program comprised of a diverse student body, the instructors have two primary objectives for the students: (1) to improve students’ academic writing skills; and, (2) to promote cross-cultural awareness.  Thus, during the course, students engage in a series of four projects that assist students in exploring issues related to cross-cultural contact and breaking down stereotypes through the use of fine art techniques in photography and expanding this into a written digital media with the creation of a personal “Blogger” diary.

 

In this curriculum, students learn to about new practices of seeing and photography and then incorporate photos that they have taken into personal blogs as a means of improving their second language writing.  Second language writing research has demonstrated that while second language writers often are competent, if not excellent, writers in their first language(s), they struggle not only with sentence-level errors in grammar and vocabulary but also with genre, organization, and register (Hyland, 2003; Leki, 1992).  Furthermore, the types of genres that second language writers must learn has increased with the explosion of Web 2.0 (New London Group, 1996; Warschauer, 2000).  Second language writers can no longer limit themselves to learning to write basic correspondence and academic essays; e-mail, blogs, and wikis present new challenges for basic and second language writers.  Students, therefore, learn photographic techniques to capture vocabulary and organization that they would otherwise be unable to express writing in a second language.  Learners then incorporated their photographs into one of the new multi-modal genres: personal blogs.  Student blogs supplemented with photographs are more structured and contained more elaborate details than the more traditional written assignments submitted for class.

 

References

 

Hyland, K. (2003). Teaching and research writing. Harlow England: Longman.

Leki, I. (1992).  Understanding ESL writers: A guide for teachers. Portsmouth, NH:

Heinemann.

The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures.

Harvard Educational Review, 66 (1), 60-92.

Warschauer, M. (2000). The changing global economy and the future of English

teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 34(3), 511-535.