Please cite as:

Ortega, L. (2009). “Context” in L2 Writing Pedagogy and Research: Emergent and Dynamic. Paper presented in the invited Academic Session of the L2 Writing Interest Section “Contexts of Second Language Writing,” Christine Tardy convener. The TESOL Convention, Denver CO, March 28.

Copyright © Lourdes Ortega, 2009

“Context” in L2 Writing Pedagogy and Research: Emergent and Dynamic

Lourdes OrtegaUniversity of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Christine Tardy, Colloquium ConvenerTESOL, Denver March 28, 2009

=Experience

Context

L2 writing

Context matters

Socialcircumstances

Linguisticcircumstances

Personalcircumstances

Different thingswith words

With different people

In different placesAt different times

WE DO…

We experience

We become writers

WE WRITE

Different understandings of “context”

“Context” = “experience”

Externally documented................................................Lived

Post-process era (Matsuda et al., 2003)

Sociopolitical turn (Casanave, 2003)

“Context” = “experience”

raw/given...............perceived/constructed

etic..........................................................emic

general...........................................particular

homogeneous...................................variable

inherited~birth....................made~history

Context as dynamic & emergent influence

RESEARCH

Cognitivism Sociocognitivism Socioculturalism

Reality = socially constructed

Subjective interpretations matter

Subjective interpretations are socially influenced

Social = source of learning

Contexts = processual, emergent, distributed

Language/text = center

Cognition = internal site of learning

Non-linguistic context = container, with separable influences that create “Individual Differences”

Social context, external or lived?

Textual-linguistic analyses

Ratings of writing quality

Think-alouds

Interviews

Microgenetic

method

Discourse analysis

Feedback, for example

[L2 graduate student’s free writing, cited with permission:]

[…] I did not think I was weak in my grammar but when I got comments from a lot of professors about my grammar, I still feel I’m not legitimate academic writer. Their comment make me to think I’m not academically appropriate, but still need to go to ESL English classes to fix my grammar. I feel often I’m a long-term patient in a hospital to get a 10 year long surgery. [...]

[college EFL student journal to her writing teacher, cited with permission:]

"I know my writing is better now than to compare to the beginning of this year and the middle of it too. Because you wrote many thank you and happy like comment in my writing journal before now. After winter you stop praising too often. Then you gave some negative feedbacks, which means I should know the right, academic way to write”

Feedback in L2 writing, always

a social act(Goldstein, 2004; Hyland

& Hyland, 2006)

[same ESL graduate student’s free writing:]

[My other weakness is] Academic voice. I’m getting into post-modernism. But I don’t have post-modernist’s academic voice in my writing. So, I really wish I can get their voice in my writing. So that I can be part of their community .

Identity, for example

Writing development is always implicated with

one’s and others’ sense of self (identity) and always contested

(e.g., Matsuda & Tardy, 2007)

Context as dynamic & emergent influence

PEDAGOGY

Don’t generalize, particularize feedback

You need to introduce the participants to your readers in a separate section, called “Participants.” You can summarize there who they are and give your readers enough information so that they can “imagine” each participant and remember them when you later present the data.

You have listed two chapters, both by Dörnyei, and both in the same year. Therefore, you need to list them as (2009a) and (2009b), so that when you cite them in your main text, readers know which one you are referring to in each case.Please make sure you mention

each Appendix in your text, so readers see them and “visit”

them.

[L2 graduate student’s email, cited with permission:]

[…] Your comments made me think of readers more than anything, which I did not care much before. That perspective brought me to reconsider my writing, which was hard but fun! It also took me time. Yet, this struggling process served me many “ah-ha” moments at the end too. [...]

Don’t generalize, particularize feedback

Don’t stop at conventions, show variability in genre

Book review as a genre•1st paragraph introduction, e.g., book's purpose and intended audience, organization of the book•Next several paragraphs chapter by chapter summary, occasionally supplemented by some evaluative comments.•Last couple paragraphs balanced discussion of both strengths and weaknesses

Analyze “good” published models, where the genre template is instantiated at its best.

Show students “atypical” published model and analyze reasons that made it into a

book review (purpose) without a recognizable structure

(context: who-whom-where)

Context as dynamic & emergent…Anything missing?

Dynamic & Emergent Context

Intentionality Identity

Power

ConsciousnessGoals

Regulation

Relations with othersSenses of self

Positionalities by self & othersSocial and cultural worlds

DialogueResistanceAffiliations

Imagination

sociocognitivetransformational sociocultural

Lived experience is variable, heterogeneous, and multiple across and within writers, in the face of the same “context” (that is, even when the external experience is the same).

E.g., socioculturally oriented investigations of study abroad (e.g., Kinginger, 2004; Kinginger & Blattner, 2008) and of motivation (e.g., Gan, Humphreys, & Hamp-Lyons, 2004, in China; Lamb, 2007, in Indonesia).

“Same study abroad / Same EAP course / Same macro-context”...????

Focusing on context as lived experience

... The discursive construction of contextsand the power of ideologies

must be addressed too...

So, third dimension of context...

Focus on multilingual writers and their mutiplicity of contexts, not only texts

Focus on versatility as much as consistency

Keep social transformation (resistance-in-accommodation) as an educational goal

Canagarajah’s (2006) shuttling across languages suggestions:

1. Rhetorical repertoires are not a fixed property of a writer’s “native” languages and cultures, but emerge from the multiplicity of contexts which he or she travels/inhabits

2. Rhetorical accommodation and rhetorical resistance are both possible in the same writing

Canagarajah’s (2006) shuttling across languages suggestions:

The unbearable ineluctability of the social context

“[Researching/teaching L2 writing] is in many ways similar to painting a chameleon. Because the animal’s colors depend on its physical surroundings, any one representation becomes inaccurate as soon as that background changes.”

Adapted from Tucker (1999, pp. 208-209),who found it in Donato (1998),

who took it from Hamayan (n.d. given).Chamaleon and books in Kafue National Park, Zambia.

Photo from http://www.knoware.co.uk/Travelogues/Zambia%20and%20Botswana/Day%2001.htm

Thank Youlortega@hawaii.edu

References: Canagarajah, A. S. (2006). Toward a Writing Pedagogy of Shuttling between Languages:

Learning from Multilingual Writers. College English, 68, 589-604. Casanave, C. P. (2003). Looking ahead to more socio-politically-oriented case study

research in L2 writing scholarship (But should it be called "post-process"?). Journal of Second Language Writing, 12, 85-102.

Donato, R. (1998). Assessing foreign language abilities of the early language learner. In M. Met (Ed.), Critical issues in early second language learning: Building our children's future (pp. 169-197). Glenview, IL: Addison-Wesley. Ellis, R. (1985). A variable competence model of second language acquisition. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 23, 47-59.

Goldstein, L. M. (2004). Questions and answers about teacher written commentary and student revision: teachers and students working together. Journal of Second Language Writing, 13, 63-80.

Hyland, K. & F. Hyland (2006). Interpersonal aspects of response: Constructing and interpreting teacher written feedback. In K. Hyland & F. Hyland (Eds.), Feedback in second language writing: Contexts and issues. (pp. 206–224). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Matsuda, P. K., Canagarajah, A. S., Harklau, L., Hyland, K., Warschauer, M. (2003). Changing currents in second language writing research: A colloquium. Journal of Second Language Writing, 12, 151-179.

Matsuda, P. K., & Tardy, C. M. (2007). Voice in academic writing: The rhetorical construction of author identity in blind manuscript review. English for Specific Purposes, 26, 235-249.

Tucker, G. R. (1999). The applied linguist, school reform, and technology: Challenges and opportunities for the coming decade. CALICO Journal, 17(2), 197-221.

Please cite as:

Ortega, L. (2009). “Context” in L2 Writing Pedagogy and Research: Emergent and Dynamic. Paper presented in the invited Academic Session of the L2 Writing Interest Section “Contexts of Second Language Writing,” Christine Tardy convener. The TESOL Convention, Denver CO, March 28.

Copyright © Lourdes Ortega, 2009