Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

The Internationalization of US Writing Programs
The Internationalization of US Writing Programs
The Internationalization of US Writing Programs
Ebook459 pages6 hours

The Internationalization of US Writing Programs

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook

The Internationalization of US Writing Programs illuminates the role writing programs and WPAs play in defining goals, curriculum, placement, assessment, faculty development, and instruction for international student populations. The volume offers multiple theoretical approaches to the work of writing programs and illustrates a wide range of well-planned writing program–based empirical research projects.

As of 2016, over 425,000 international students were enrolled as undergraduates in US colleges and universities, part of a decade-long trend of increasing numbers of international students coming to the United States for both undergraduate and graduate degrees. Writing program administrators and writing teachers across the country are beginning to recognize this changing demographic as a useful catalyst for change in writing programs, which are tasked with preparing all students, regardless of initial level of English proficiency, for academic and professional writing.

The Internationalization of US Writing Programs is the first collection to focus specifically on this crucial aspect of the roles and responsibilities of WPAs, who are leading efforts to provide all students on their campuses, regardless of nationality or first language, with competencies in writing that will serve them in the academy and beyond.

Contributors: Jonathan Benda, Michael Dedek, Christiane Donahue, Chris W. Gallagher, Kristi Girdharry, Tarez Samra Graban, Jennifer E. Haan, Paula Harrington, Yu-Kyung Kang, Neal Lerner, David S. Martins, Paul Kei Matsuda, Heidi A. McKee, Libby Miles, Susan Miller-Cochran, Matt Noonan, Katherine Daily O’Meara, Carolina Pelaez-Morales, Stacey Sheriff, Gail Shuck, Christine M. Tardy, Stanley Van Horn, Daniel Wilber, Margaret Willard-Traub

LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 2, 2018
ISBN9781607326762
The Internationalization of US Writing Programs

Related to The Internationalization of US Writing Programs

Related ebooks

Language Arts & Discipline For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for The Internationalization of US Writing Programs

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    The Internationalization of US Writing Programs - Shirley K Rose

    The Internationalization of US Writing Programs

    The Internationalization of US Writing Programs

    Edited by

    Shirley K Rose

    Irwin Weiser

    Utah State University Press

    Logan

    © 2018 by University Press of Colorado

    Published by Utah State University Press

    An imprint of University Press of Colorado

    245 Century Circle, Suite 202

    Louisville, Colorado 80027

    All rights reserved

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    AU Presses logo The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of the Association of University Presses.

    ∞ This paper meets the requirements of the ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper)

    The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Regis University, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, Utah State University, and Western State Colorado University.

    ISBN: 978-1-60732-675-5 (paperback)

    ISBN: 978-1-60732-676-2 (ebook)

    https://doi.org/10.7330/9781607326762

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Names: Rose, Shirley K, editor. | Weiser, Irwin, editor.

    Title: The internationalization of U.S. writing programs / edited by Shirley K Rose, Irwin Weiser.

    Other titles: Internationalization of United States writing programs

    Description: Logan: Utah State University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references.

    Identifiers: LCCN 2017037690| ISBN 9781607326755 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781607326762 (ebook)

    Subjects: LCSH: English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching (Higher)—United States. | English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching (Higher)—Foreign speakers. | Students, Foreign—Education (Higher)—United States. | Multilingual persons—Education (Higher)—United States.

    Classification: LCC PE1405.U6 I58 2017 | DDC 808/.042071173—dc23

    LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037690

    The University Press of Colorado gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Purdue University’s Office of Research and Partnerships and Department of English toward the publication of this book.

    Cover illustration © SuriyaPhoto/Shutterstock.

    Contents


    Introduction: Internationalized Writing Programs in the Twenty-First-Century United States: Implications and Opportunities

    Irwin Weiser and Shirley K Rose

    Part I: Contexts, Definitions, and Heuristics

    1 Writing Program Administrators in an Internationalizing Future: What’s to Know?

    Christiane Donahue

    2 Writing Programs and a New Ethos for Globalization

    Margaret K. Willard-Traub

    3 Administrative Structures and Support for International L2 Writers: A Heuristic for WPAs

    Christine M. Tardy and Susan Miller-Cochran

    Part II: Program Development

    4 Confronting Superdiversity in US Writing Programs

    Jonathan Benda, Michael Dedek, Chris W. Gallagher, Kristi Girdharry, Neal Lerner, and Matt Noonan

    5 Contending with Difference: Points of Leverage for Intellectual Administration of the Multilingual FYC Course

    Tarez Samra Graban

    6 It’s Not a Course, It’s a Culture: Supporting International Students’ Writing at a Small Liberal Arts College

    Stacey Sheriff and Paula Harrington

    7 Expanding the Role of the Writing Center at the Global University

    Yu-Kyung Kang

    Part III: Curricular Development

    8 I Am No Longer Sure This Serves Our Students Well: Redesigning FYW to Prepare Students for Transnational Literacy Realities

    David Swiencicki Martins and Stanley Van Horn

    9 Holding the Language in My Hand: A Multilingual Lens on Curricular Design

    Gail Shuck and Daniel Wilber

    10 Intercultural Communication and Teamwork: Revising Business Writing for Global Networks

    Heidi A. McKee

    Part IV: Faculty Development

    11 Building the Infrastructure of L2 Writing Support: The Case of Arizona State University

    Katherine Daily O’Meara and Paul Kei Matsuda

    12 Developing Faculty for the Multilingual Writing Classroom

    Jennifer E. Haan

    13 Internationalization from the Bottom Up: Writing Faculty’s Response to the Presence of Multilingual Writers

    Carolina Pelaez-Morales

    Part V: Conclusion

    14 Infusing Multilingual Writers: A Heuristic for Moving Forward

    Libby Miles

    About the Authors

    The Internationalization of US Writing Programs

    Introduction


    Internationalized Writing Programs in the Twenty-First-Century United States

    Implications and Opportunities

    Irwin Weiser and Shirley K Rose

    Setting the Context

    Universities in the United States are becoming increasingly attractive to undergraduate students from other countries. According to the 2016 Open Doors report from the Institute for International Education (released November 14, 2016, and the most recent at the time we are writing), there are 58 percent more international students in the United States now than there were a decade ago, and there have been ten consecutive years of steady increase (Institute for International Education 2016). The 7.1 percent increase between 2014–15 and 2015–16 represents sixty-nine thousand more students, bringing the total number of international students studying in the United States to over one million for the first time. While historically the majority of international degree-seeking students enrolling in US colleges and universities were pursuing graduate degrees, in 2015–16, for the fifth year in a row, there were more international undergraduate students than international graduate students in the United States (all statistics from Open Doors 2016)¹

    These increasing enrollments, as we have seen on our own campuses and as a number of our authors have noted, have come about for several often intertwined reasons. From the perspective of the students and the families of the students who come to the United States to study, the strong reputation of US higher education is an important draw. In many countries, having studied in the United States, and particularly earning a degree from a US college or university, carries with it prestige that enables returning students to get the most desirable jobs. Connected to the reputational and prestige attractiveness is the globalization of business, which not only makes it desirable for students from other countries to come to the United States but also is an important factor in the increasing emphasis on study-abroad experience for US students. Economic prosperity in their home countries is another factor contributing to increasing numbers of international undergraduate students coming to the United States to study, especially those from China who, despite a slowing of the rate of increase, constitute nearly one-third of the 1,043,839 international students in the United States. Put simply, there are not only more families in China who recognize the importance of an international educational experience for their children but there are also more families who can afford the cost of that experience. According to the Open Doors report, the primary source of funding for 66.5 percent of international students falls in the category of Personal and Family (Institute for International Education 2016).

    Revenue plays an important part in the desire of US institutions to recruit and admit international students. These students typically pay full tuition. In public universities where there is a differential between in-state and out-of-state tuition, international students pay either out-of-state tuition or a higher tuition, as is the case at both our institutions. As several of our authors mention, revenue generation is a major motive for both public and private institutions, which are seeing traditional sources of revenue declining. There is, we believe, an element of charging what the market can bear, and as some of the authors note, these higher costs raise an ethical issue, particularly if there is no evidence that the increased tuition or special fees are being used to provide improved services, including writing and other language support, for international students.

    A second reason US institutions seek international students is to globalize or internationalize or diversify their campuses. Just as globalization underlies the desire of many international students to come to the United States, many US institutions want to create opportunities for domestic students to become more globally aware and more prepared to live and work in what is often referred to as an ever more interdependent world. And, as Libby Miles points out in the final chapter of this collection, international students help institutions that have struggled to attract a more diverse domestic student population become more racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse.

    The Internationalization of US Writing Programs contributes to a relatively recent conversation about writing program administration and second language writers. Of this recent work, David Martins’s (2014) edited collection Transnational Writing Program Administration is most closely aligned with the work we present. However, with the exception of two chapters on writing programs on the US-Mexico border, Transnational Writing Program Administration is concerned with the various ways writing is taught and administered in other countries, often as a version of a US-based writing program. The Internationalization of US Writing Programs, including a chapter by Martins and his coauthor Stan Van Horn, complements Martins’s project by focusing on writing programs in US institutions and the way those programs respond to a student population that is both linguistically and culturally diverse. Other recent scholarship that has implications for the administrative and programmatic responsibilities of teaching nonnative speakers in mainstream postsecondary composition courses includes Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda’s Cross-Language Relations in Composition (Horner, Lu, and Matsuda 2010) and Jay Jordan’s Redesigning Composition for Multilingual Realities (Jordan 2012). In addition, Terry Myers Zawacki and Michelle Cox’s WAC and L2 Writers (Zawacki and Cox 2014) serves to bring awareness of L2 student writers’ perspectives to work in writing-across-the-curriculum pedagogy and curriculum. Each of these books represents important scholarship relevant to understanding the increasing diversity of college and university student populations and by extension the writing and writing-intensive courses those students take. This present collection focuses specifically on the evolving roles and responsibilities of writing program administrators who are leading efforts to provide all students on their campuses, regardless of nationality or first language, with competencies in writing that will serve them in the academy and beyond. By emphasizing the impact on writing programs of this multilingual, multicultural, multinational student population in US colleges and universities, The Internationalization of US Writing Programs offers an extended discussion that contributes to this increasingly important component of WPA preparation and work.

    Our impetus for this collection came from our observations of the growth in the international student population at our own institutions. Currently, Arizona State University has the third largest international student enrollment in the United States and Purdue has the eighth largest (our institutions rank first and fourth in international student enrollments among public universities), so we have daily witnessed the quite literally changing faces of our campuses. We have participated in conversations, both informal and formal, about ways our campuses, and especially our writing programs, can better support international students and contribute to a positive campus culture. Further observations and conversations with colleagues at other institutions, articles in the higher education and popular press, and the examination of data from the Institute on International Education persuaded us we were not alone in thinking about how this demographic change affects our campuses and our writing programs. As the chapters in this collection demonstrate, writing program administrators and writing faculty across the country, in institutions of all kinds with large and with small international student enrollments, are conducting research, developing theories, and revising practices and are coming to similar conclusions. Most notable among those conclusions are

    • that we must adopt and advocate for a perspective on language that acknowledges and respects the multi- and translinguality of both international and domestic L2 students,

    • that we must better support our faculty who are committed to teaching all their students effectively, and

    • that a review and revision of our practices motivated by the desire to respond to a changing student population can lead to improved practices for all students.

    Our contributors discuss the role college and university writing programs have played in realizing the multiple reasons discussed earlier that are driving the increase in international students in US colleges and universities. Four key themes emerge in the discussion carried out in these chapters: productive change, seeing differently, supporting faculty, and language instruction versus writing instruction. In the following section, we will elaborate on each of these themes prior to our presenting a more detailed overview of the collection as a whole.

    Key Themes
    The Increase in International Students Motivates Productive Change.

    Our premise for this collection is that the dramatic increase in international undergraduate students in US universities is changing—or should be changing—college writing programs because writing courses are among the first courses required of virtually every first-year student on every campus and writing plays an important role in students’ success during and beyond that first year. While it may have been possible in the recent past either to offer a sufficient number of sections of second language writing (SLW) courses or to absorb a small number of nonnative speakers and writers of English (henceforward L2 students) into our composition courses, as the numbers of international undergraduate students attending US universities increase, in some institutions to as high as 20 percent of the total undergraduate population, writing programs and writing program administrators are having to—or will have to—consider how this changing demographic serves as a catalyst for change throughout entire programs and alters conventional ways of seeing the presence of international students² on the campuses of US colleges and universities.

    Change throughout programs is a consistent theme in the chapters in this collection. WPAs such as Christine Tardy and Susan Miller-Cochran, David Martins and Stan Van Horn, and Gail Shuck and Daniel Wilber emphasize that thinking about a changing student population has led them to recognize that revised administrative structures, curricular revisions, and new professional-development programs improve teaching and learning not just for international students but for all students. Such has been the case, as several authors including Christiane Donohue and Yu-Kyung Kang note, whenever major changes in student populations occur, from the increased number of veterans who attended college with support from the GI Bill after World War II to the open-admissions movement of the 1960s and 1970s and its continuing influences. And while such changes may bring about anxiety and sometimes even a sense of crisis (as was the case with the publication of Why Johnny Can’t Read by Rudolph Flesch [1955] and Newsweek’s Why Johnny Can’t Write cover story in 1977), contributors to this collection take this change in stride. They see the new reality of a much more linguistically, culturally, ethnically, geographically diverse student population as a challenging opportunity to review and revise their curriculum and pedagogy, the professional-development opportunities provided to their faculty, and their campus-wide collaborations. They reject the idea that addressing the needs of this growing student population lowers standards, as some on their campuses suggest, and instead consider benefits to all students, regardless of language background. Good pedagogy, they argue, is good pedagogy.

    The chapters in this collection present the responses of writing program administrators (WPAs) and writing faculty as institutions of higher education become increasingly invested in recruiting undergraduate degree-seeking international students. These changes in the larger higher education landscape impact college and university writing programs and their administrators because, as mentioned above, these programs are expected to prepare students for academic and workplace writing through courses that are typically required for graduation and, in the case of first-year writing, that are assumed to provide the foundation for students’ further academic coursework. In addition, as several authors point out, writing program administrators and writing faculty can do important cultural work in our universities. In their chapters, Jennifer Haan and Carolina Pelaez-Morales discuss how their research and experiences in faculty development across campus and within their own departments have not only revealed challenges underprepared instructors face in working with international students but have also suggested that participation in research can be an impetus for self-reflection that leads to greater cultural awareness. Both Tarez Graban and Yu-Kyung Kang find that their responsibilities, as a coordinator for multilingual writing courses and an associate director of a writing center, respectively, involve them in interactions with academic staff and administrators from across campus that have the potential to increase support for writing instruction, enable new collaborations, and shape the way others think about international students and language difference. Perhaps most obviously, especially when international and domestic students are enrolled in the same courses, the kind of exposure to language and cultural differences that is an oft-stated reason for internationalizing our campuses benefits both groups of students, even if at times, as Heidi McKee points out, students both voice and must face stereotypes about one another.

    Encountering Difference Helps Us See Differently.

    Difference, especially language difference, emerges as another important theme for this collection, not unexpectedly. Authors make the case that increasing numbers of international students for whom English is not a first language (though it may be a frequently used second language or one of several languages these students use) draws our attention to questions about multi- and translinguality, about what English is, about what the appropriate goals of language instruction are, about what proficiency means, and so on. Indeed, it may be, as implied by both Margaret Willard-Traub and Carolina Pelaez-Morales, that increased numbers of international L2 students make us more conscious of the number of multilingual domestic students or domestic students whose home English differs from the traditional standard taught and expected in school. The obvious difference of having larger numbers of international students can make us more aware of other kinds of differences, even perhaps those invisible to us. The recognition of difference, language and otherwise, underlies the argument made by Jonathan Benda and his colleagues in their discussion of superdiversity, in which they argue that our conventional way of thinking about people as domestic or international, native speakers or L2, and so forth masks differences. While it is convenient to think in large categories such as these, the research, theoretical arguments, and experiences of our contributors remind us that recognizing difference is not some kind of misguided effort to be politically correct but rather is a challenge to see students, our most important stakeholders, as diverse individuals, not as a homogeneous group defined by their student status and our assumptions of what a college and university student is, should know, and so forth. Our authors point out that our international students have not a deficit but rather, as Margaret Willard-Traub put it, a surplus of linguistic, cultural, and life knowledge that puts them at an advantage (45). We must learn to recognize, appreciate, and tap into that surplus, knowing that doing so contributes to the understanding of others that a globalized university is supposed to support.

    Faculty Want Professional-Development Support for Working with Linguistically Diverse Students.

    These chapters raise a number of points about the professional development of faculty who find themselves, generally with little or no background, teaching an increasingly linguistic and culturally diverse group of students. While some of these faculty are full time and some are on the tenure track or tenured, our authors point out that many, not surprisingly, are full time non-tenure track, part time, or graduate students. They are committed to teaching, including to teaching the new population of students who enroll in their courses, but they are also conscious that their lack of background in L2 theory and practice, and frequently in composition theory as well, has left them ill-prepared to work with diverse students. In their research at two different institutions, both Jennifer Haan and Carolina Pelaez-Morales found that faculty often try to compensate for what they perceive to be their own deficiencies and their students’ needs by spending more time in individual conferences with international students or more time reading and responding to their writing. Stacey Sheriff and Paula Harrington explain that faculty want help, support, and professional-development opportunities, but as Pelaez-Morales points out, resources are frequently scarce. And as Katherine Daily O’Meara and Paul Matsuda remind us, building a community of faculty able to take advantage of such opportunities is difficult when many of them are part-time employees who may be teaching at several different institutions or may have other work and family responsibilities that make participation impossible.

    While contributors offer a number of ideas about ways to support faculty through professional-development programs, one of the most compelling points raised in several chapters is that second language writing theory and practice must become part of every instructor’s preparation and professionalization. Although scholarship by second language writing scholars has appeared in WPA: Writing Program Administration, including in the fall 2006 special issue Second Language Writers and Writing Program Administrators, there must be further integration between second language writing scholarship and composition scholarship; and as Christine Tardy and Susan Miller-Cochran point out in their chapter, second language writing and ESL program administrators and composition program administrators must be active collaborators. The CCCC Statement on Second Language Writing and Writers (2009, reaffirmed November 2014) points out that second language writing scholarship and practice contribute to composition studies. The statement emphasizes that second language writers have become an integral part of writing courses and programs and urges writing teachers and writing program administrators to [among other recommendations] recognize and take responsibility for the regular presence of second language writers in writing classes, to understand their characteristics, and to develop instructional and administrative practices that are sensitive to their linguistic and cultural needs.

    Which Language(s)? or Writing Instruction Is Not the Same Thing as Language Instruction.

    In the discussions of multilinguality and translinguality referred to above in our discussion of seeing differently, several authors point to ways that providing spaces for students to use their first language is beneficial. Yu-Kyung Kang writes about the single-language writing groups (SLWGs) she, a native speaker of Korean, facilitated for Korean students. She and the students frequently used Korean in their group work, even though they were discussing projects written in English. Stacey Sheriff and Paula Harrington discuss the benefits of recruiting international undergraduate tutors for the writing center Harrington directs. Heidi McKee notes the benefits of recruiting a Mandarin-speaking research assistant working with her and her Mandarin-speaking subjects. Jennifer Haan discusses the initial resistance of faculty to having students speak in Arabic and their eventual realization that the students were able to discuss their writing more easily and effectively when they used their first language. Their examples remind us that there is a distinction between writing instruction and English-language instruction and that the former may be facilitated by allowing or encouraging students to use their first language in situations where that is possible.

    Overview of the Collection

    The essays in this collection present a variety of perspectives on the roles of writing programs and writing program administrators who recognize that approaches to defining program goals, curriculum, placement, assessment, and faculty development and teacher preparation must be responsive to an internationalized student population. The chapters demonstrate multiple approaches to theorizing the work of writing programs and/or illustrate a range of well-planned empirical writing program-based research projects, as we have advocated for and illustrated in our first two edited collections, The Writing Program Administrator as Researcher and The Writing Program Administrator as Theorist (Rose and Weiser 1999, 2002). Our contributors work in a wide range of institutions, from public to private, from urban to rural, and from liberal arts colleges to research universities, including the three public universities with the largest international enrollments in the United States and institutions with such small numbers of international undergraduate students that no specific programs exist to address their needs.

    Following this introduction, the collection begins with three chapters that establish a global context, set out definitions, elaborate on the motivations for internationalization of US postsecondary institutions, and suggest a heuristic approach for thinking about the administration of internationalized writing programs that is exemplified implicitly in the chapters that follow. In chapter 1, Writing Program Administrators in an Internationalizing Future: What’s to Know?, Christiane Donahue addresses the question of what WPAs, and by extension the teachers with whom they work, need to know about global politics and economics, language and writing in higher education in other countries, and trends in internationalizing higher education in order to reimagine the local linguistic work of their programs in a global context. She also argues that all students, not only the traditional L2 students (some of whom are international but not all), will benefit from a differently imagined writing curriculum in our sure-to-be internationalized future. This argument is one that carries throughout the collection and is made explicitly by many of the contributors. The economic perspective raised by Donahue is continued by Margaret Willard-Traub in chapter 2, Writing Programs and a New Ethos for ‘Globalization.’ Using a feminist rhetorical lens, she offers a critique of the university-as-corporation and argues for a change toward (or perhaps return to) a feminist ethos of care in teaching and administration. In the final chapter of this introductory section, Administrative Structures and Support for International L2 Writers: A Heuristic for WPAs, Christine Tardy and Susan Miller-Cochran explore the strengths and challenges of different models of writing program administrative structures with the goal of offering WPAs (broadly defined) a heuristic for assessing and revising structures that might best suit the needs and goals of their increasingly diverse student populations, programs, and institutions. Their heuristic, along with that offered by Libby Miles in the concluding chapter of this collection, provides WPAs with tools for reimagining their programs in response to changing student demographics.

    We have grouped the next ten chapters according to their major focus: program development, which often requires collaboration with people outside the writing program (Benda, et al.; Graban, Sheriff and Harrington; and Kang); curriculum development, primarily within the specific writing program (Martins and Van Horn; Shuck and Wilber; McKee); and faculty development (O’Meara and Matsuda; Haan; and Pelaez-Morales.) In some ways, this grouping is artificial, implying a clear distinction among programs, curriculum, and faculty when in fact these three elements of writing program administration are intricately interrelated elements of what Edward White, Norbert Elliot, and Irvin Peckham have characterized as the ecology of a writing program (White, Elliot, and Peckham 2015, 7). We hope, however, that this structure guides readers to particular emphases within each section.

    In the first of four chapters focusing on program development, the authorial team of Jonathan Benda, Michael Dedek, Chris Gallagher, Kristi Girdharry, Neal Lerner, and Matt Noonan from Northeastern University argues that their students exemplify what Jan Blommaert and Ben Rampton (Blommaert and Rampton 2011) describe as superdiversity, characterized by an explosion of identity categories brought about by increased mobility in a globalizing world. The authors describe three initiatives they are taking to revise their writing program to better acknowledge superdiversity by becoming better attuned to the diverse language, literacy, and cultural experiences and practices of all their students. While Benda and his colleagues work primarily within their writing program, the next three chapters in this section offer insights into the strategies used by administrators to find collaborators and to work across their campuses to bring about changes in programs that serve multilingual writers. In chapter 5, Contending with Difference: Points of Leverage for Intellectual Administration of the Multilingual FYC Course, Tarez Graban describes three points of leverage (Melzer 2013)—in the department, across disciplines, and in the institution—that enabled arguments for intellectual resources and pedagogical change during the five-year period she oversaw the multilingual composition curriculum at Indiana University. In chapter 6, It’s Not a Course, It’s a Culture: Supporting International Student s’ Writing at a Small Liberal Arts College, Stacey Sheriff and Paula Harrington focus on two central aspects of their work to build partnerships across campus to improve conditions for all students. The final chapter in this section examines the role writing centers can play in supporting international students. In Expanding the Role of the Writing Center at the ‘Global University,’ Yu-Kyung Kang explains how the rapid increase in the number of international students at the University of Illinois and the university’s underpreparedness in supporting them heightened and altered the role of the writing center, making it a hub for international student support and a central source for administrator and teacher training.

    The next section is comprised of three chapters that illustrate how WPAs employ research in their work to revise curriculum. The first two chapters in this section, by David Martins and Stan Van Horn and by Gail Shuck and Daniel Wilber, examine changes in first-year writing curriculums, while the third, Heidi McKee’s Intercultural Communication and Teamwork: Revising Business Writing for Global Networks, focuses on an upper-division business writing program. Martins and Van Horn describe an internationalized curriculum for first-year writing and offer preliminary findings of a research study on the redesigned curriculum. Following a brief description of the curriculum they designed, they discuss a pilot offering of the course and the findings of an assessment of that pilot. In ‘Holding the Language in My Hand’: A Multilingual Lens on Curricular Design, Gail Shuck and Daniel Wilber present research designed to address Ilona Leki’s (2001) concern that student voices are rarely featured in research on second language writers. Shuck and Wilber’s research complements recent studies of multilingual students’ placement decisions by examining how such decisions play out within a curricular structure that does not offer parallel multilingual and mainstream tracks. In the final chapter of this section, Heidi McKee details the research methods and findings that led to the revision of the curriculum of Miami University’s business writing program in response to changing student demographics. The new curriculum includes direct instruction in intercultural communication and teamwork in order to prepare all students for communicating in global networks. All three of these chapters describe programs in which domestic and international students enroll in the same courses and learn to work across language and cultural differences.

    Faculty development is the concern of the next three chapters. Katherine Daily O’Meara and Paul Kei Matsuda, in Building the Infrastructure of L2 Writing Support: The Case of Arizona State University, present an institutional case study of an effort to nurture the culture of L2 writing among instructors at Arizona State University, which, as we mentioned earlier, has one of the largest enrollments of international students in the United States. In contrast to the Arizona State context, the next two chapters are set in institutions where the numbers of international students are small in comparison with the overall student population and where there are limited resources to support faculty with little or no second language teaching preparation. In Developing Faculty for the Multilingual Writing Classroom, Jennifer Haan describes a long-term study of faculty response to internationalization in a university writing program at a midsized private university that has experienced a 350 percent increase in international student enrollment over the last eight years and reports on the faculty-development approach that resulted from that research. Concluding this section, Carolina Pelaez-Morales describes research into the tensions faculty members with little or no background in second language writing experience in their work with L2 writers. Her discussion is particularly relevant to administrators looking to address small, gradual increases in L2 enrollment in institutions that do not offer ESL writing sections.

    We conclude this collection with Libby Miles’s Infusing Multilingual Writers: A Heuristic for Moving Forward because the chapter provides an exemplary case of how the use of a heuristic can help WPAs explore multiple perspectives as they grapple with changing conditions in their institution and writing programs. Miles explains how her use of Richard E. Young, Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike’s tagmemic heuristic for systematic inquiry (Young, Becker, and Pike 1970) helped her respond to the tripart exigency of how to support a rapidly increasing number of international students and their instructors while also developing a university culture enhanced by the differing perspectives, assumptions, backgrounds, and values a

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1