Composition Forum 43, Spring 2020
http://compositionforum.com/issue/43/

Review of Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser’s The Internationalization of US Writing Programs

Romaisha Rahman

Rose, Shirley K., & Irwin Weiser, eds. The Internationalization of US Writing Programs. University Press of Colorado, 2018. 282pp.

The growing population of international students in US institutions (Open Doors) in the recent decade has compelled writing programs to re-evaluate their student-learning-outcomes (SLOs). The SLOs that once made sense to writing faculties in teaching writing to their supposedly “homogenous” student body are now being challenged as writing classes are increasingly becoming multicultural with the presence of international students from across the world. Interestingly, many of these assumed homogenous institutions were never really homogenous to begin with, because of the varieties of English spoken by domestic students (Matsuda). To that end, it can be said that this aspect of linguistic and cultural difference has always existed in US classrooms, but it is only becoming more noticeable because of the addition of the international students. As more and more writing program administrators and faculties realize this issue at hand and work toward setting new goals to attend to the needs of their diverse classrooms, The Internationalization of US Writing Programs can be a very valuable resource.

Edited by Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser, this book stands as the first ever collection that specifically informs writing programs and writing program administrators (WPAs) on how to revise their goals, design multicultural curriculum, improve placement and assessment strategies, create faculty development opportunities, and re-examine methods of instruction that will help in meeting the needs of students in multicultural settings, mostly brought about by international student population. Although the chapters in this book are generally geared toward meeting the needs of international L2 population, some chapters do acknowledge the needs of the domestic L2 students as well; hence, the suggestions in this book are applicable for aiding both domestic and international L2 students.

The editors’ introduction intends to familiarize the reader with the main purpose and audience of the book and also gives an overview of what the reader will find in the different parts of the book. Besides introduction, the book has been divided into five different parts—namely, Contexts, Definitions, and Heuristics; Program Development; Curricular Development; Faculty Development; and Conclusion. The chapters in each of these parts are written by authors from different US higher educational institutions and are grouped together for their intended message. The authors hail from a wide range of US 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. To review this book, I am taking the part-by-part review approach. The reason why I selected this approach is because, as a reviewer, I want to help readers to decide if they need to read the book in its entirety or can choose to read only the parts that align the most with their areas of interest. This review provides a brief sketch of the information that is included in each of the parts, which will give readers an idea of what they can expect from each of the sections in the book and also the book as a whole.

Part I—Contexts, Definitions, and Heuristics

Part I of this book consists of three chapters that heavily focus on explaining what internationalization of writing classrooms in the US entails and what WPAs and writing instructors need to do to make their writing curricula more inclusive. Among the three chapters, the first one, written by Christiane Donahue, debunks the myths that writing instruction is not a common practice outside of US contexts and that no research has been done about writing in higher education until recently. She presents cases to disprove the misconception and argues that for WPAs and writing teachers to be able to design and teach a multicultural curriculum, they will need to learn about writing practices of their international students first.

Donahue’s article makes a big contribution to the writing field in that it highlights and discusses a very important yet underrepresented issue in North American college-writing pedagogy. The belief that international students do not receive any writing instruction before coming to the US is a false belief which can lead WPAs and instructors to misunderstand the writing expertise of the said students. To make writing classes productive for international students, WPAs and writing instructors have to take the time to talk to and learn about writing instructions that their students have received in their home countries; only then they can design a curriculum and teach a writing class that is effective for their international student writers.

In the second chapter, Margaret K. Willard-Traub discusses the bridge writing sections in her institution that they created to build ethos around globalization and internalization—to move away from the deficit view on international students’ English language skills. The bridge sections mentioned in her chapter allow WPAs to see how domestic and international students can develop understanding towards one another, despite their differences, through dialogues about their individual lived experiences.

The third chapter, written by Christine M. Tardy and Susan Miller-Cochran, lists the most common administrative structures of writing programs and outlines promising frameworks that WPAs can use to assess the effectiveness of the said structures in terms of meeting the needs of their multicultural student population. The heuristics are designed to help WPAs recognize how they should revise their structures to aid students in their internationalized classrooms.

Part II—Program Development

As the name of this part of the book suggests, the chapters in this section provide examples and suggestions on how to make writing programs more culturally inclusive. The common message in each of these chapters revolves around the idea that writing programs often need to team up with people outside of the writing program to be able to serve their superdiverse student population.

Chapter 4, which is the first chapter of this part, describes the three distinct approaches that the Northeastern University’s writing program has taken to “address the growing superdiversity of its students” (Benda, Dedek, Gallagher, Girdharry, Lerner, & Noonon 80). The first approach allows students to assess and place themselves in the writing class of their choice—standard or specialized. The second approach involves a multilingual writers’ project that seeks to find out the writing experiences of international students from different educational backgrounds in order to avoid broad categorizations of international students and their language and writing experiences. The third approach that the writing program has taken is that of piloting a multicultural section that allows students to reflect on their language learning and writing journey which in turn helps them to become more confident about their writing skills.

In the fifth chapter, Tarez Samra Graban describes the three points of leverage—namely, institutional agents, department agents, and disciplinary agents—that she discovered during her work with multilingual composition, whose responses helped her to reshape the program’s most critical aspects in attending to diversity and also to conduct critical conversations about difference. In Chapter 6, Stacey Sheriff and Paula Harrington describe the curricular, pedagogical, and research initiatives taken by a writing program and a writing center to understand and better serve the changing student body. Their initiatives involved reaching out to people outside of the writing program to gather information on how international students are admitted and placed into classes in order to be able to minimize erroneous placing and prepare support systems for students who need them.

The final chapter, by Yu-Kyung Kang, outlines a writing center’s efforts in revamping the center’s regular services like consultations, workshops, and tutor training and adding specialized services, such as—single language writing groups and ESL writing groups—in order to meet the needs of the changing demographics of its tutees. Kang’s idea of having single language writing groups is a fairly new idea in the arena of L2 writing instruction. Although new, her idea seems to be promising in that WPAs can utilize this method in numerous ways to promote writing skill development in their L2 students. For instance, writing instructors can provide extra-credit to L2 students who form single language writing groups, meet regularly, and submit reports of their meetings. The extra-credit can be an incentive for them and in the process can lead to their writing skill development. As Dworin’s research shows that first language usage during the writing process is crucial in the development of writing skills, this method will be very useful in institutions that see a high number of L2 students who share the same first language.

Part III—Curricular Development

The authors in this part summarize the research strategies that they have utilized in order to revise their writing curricula and make the curricula more suitable for their diverse student population. In chapter 8, David Swiencicki Martins and Stanley Van Horn mainly discuss two initiatives that they have taken: 1. The revision tactics that they implemented to revise the SLOs in their curriculum in order to incorporate the idea of language-as-a-resource; 2. The introduction of the “Literacy Writing Project” that provides students the opportunity to write essays on their and their classmates’ literacy journeys and to conduct research projects that highlight issues and aspect of internationalization of English and the impact it has on literacy and writing. The highlight for Chapter 9 is the six-credit Accelerated English first-year-writing course piloted by Gail Shuck and Daniel Wilber that provides international students with a platform to receive both language support and writing instruction within the same course. This new course gives international students the option to either go through the longer regular track in which they receive language support for two semesters before enrolling into a first year writing class or take the Accelerated course that allows them to skip one semester of language support as the Accelerated course has both the elements of language support and writing instruction.

In the last chapter, Heidi A. McKee emphasizes the importance of shifting the institution’s focus from how to help international students acculturate into US classrooms to how to make domestic students think positively about their international peers. Although the author discusses how she designed a business communication and writing course to teach students acceptance and tolerance toward one another in the business world, WPAs can extend this innovative idea of shifting focus to any writing classroom. The reason why shifting the focus, or rather balancing it, is important is because it reduces the one-sided pressure that is put upon international students to learn the ways of the domestic students. Mckee’s course expects equal effort from both groups to familiarize themselves with each other’s cultural values, thought processes, and world views and then write about them. This type of interaction helps the students to see things from different perspectives and in the process become better thinkers and writers.

Part IV—Faculty Development

Part IV presents research on faculty perception of international students and the strategies that these writing instructors use to teach and assess this said group of students. Almost all of this research proves that most writing instructors hold a deficit view about their international students’ writing and other skills only because these students speak and write with accented English. Hence, the chapters in this part provide suggestions on how to provide professional development to faculty in order to help them learn teaching and assessment strategies that will help supporting L2 writers in their classrooms.

In Chapter 11, Katherine Daily O’Meara and Paul Kei Matsuda describe how Arizona State University’s writing program offers a free L2 writing teaching practicum course to all of its writing instructors to acquaint them with the field of L2 writing, in addition to hiring L2 writing instructors and offering L2 writing courses for graduate students. Since higher educational institutions are seeing more and more L2 writers, offering L2 writing courses to graduate students and a free L2 writing course to writing instructors every semester helps to meet the growing need of L2 expertise in writing classrooms. WPAs in bigger institutions that see a large number of L2 writers, and who are not limited by budget, can offer such courses to their instructors to prepare them for teaching L2 writing. Smaller institutions, who have budget limitation, can also offer similar courses with reduced meeting hours and reduced frequency of course offerings.

Jennifer E. Haan, in Chapter 12, discusses three distinct professional development methods—i.e., week long salaried intensive workshops on L2 writing and instruction during summer, shorter workshops with lunch during the semester, and online resources—which assist writing instructors to recognize the capitals that L2 writers bring into their classrooms and how they can revise their pedagogical approaches to allow these students to make use of these capitals in writing classrooms. WPA’s in smaller institutions can use Haan’s professional development (PD) plan as an alternative of the course that O’Meara and Matsuda discuss in Chapter 11. As smaller institutions do not usually have a large population of L2 writers nor have a big budget to offer free courses to teachers, this PD plan can be useful in familiarizing writing instructors with the field of second language writing. The online component of the PD plan seems to add to the usefulness of the plan; it allows instructors to share L2 writing resources with one another easily and helps to build a community.

In Chapter 13, Carolina Pelaez-Morales, based on the study that she conducted in her institution, provides elaborate lists of suggestions for faculty and administrators who strive to make their classrooms multicultural. Some of the suggestions include information regarding how to form peer groups in multicultural classrooms and how to build support programs for writing teachers.

Part V—Conclusion

This final part of the book consists of only one chapter written by Libby Miles in which she emphasizes the importance of systematic inquiry and explains how it can help WPAs to analyze the implications of change on their campuses as well as investigate the options for developing strategies that can support the multicultural students, their teachers, and institutions as a whole.

As an L2 writer and researcher, who has L2 writing-tutoring and -teaching experience as well, I believe that this book can be a very informative resource for not only WPAs and writing centers but also for writing instructors, graduate students, teaching assistants, and L2 researchers. The authors of this book, through both longitudinal and short-term research, have found that instructors and domestic students, more often than not, see international students’ language and cultural difference as a liability. This negative perception among these said groups develop due to the monolingual perspective with which the US educational system operates. International students are not the only group that are affected by this monolingual perspective; domestic students who are multilingual or do not speak the dominant variety of English are also affected by this thought-process. In addition to providing effective tools for WPAs to address superdiversity in their programs, this book helps to raise awareness among instructors and students on how globalization is not a one-sided process—where only the visiting culture need to adapt the practices of the host culture; it is a two-sided process. Learning about and accepting language and cultural differences develops communication skills that are needed to operate in this growing multicultural and globalized world.

Personally, I feel that this book had the opportunity and platform to talk about graduate international L2 writers as well since many of these chapters suggested WPAs to team up with Intensive English or similar programs. As seen from the Institute of International Education’s report, the ratio of international undergraduate students to graduate students coming to US is almost equal; needless to say that among this huge number of graduate students, many of them attend Intensive English Programs and need writing support from writing centers as well. However, very few people make the effort to talk about them; their struggles are usually overlooked and go unnoticed in discussions related to curricular or professional development.

Similarly, this book, like so many other books, does not acknowledge the struggles of graduate L2 writers. International graduate students are often neglected in intellectual conversations about writing skill development. There are possibly two reasons for such negligence toward international graduate students. First, WPAs and writing instructors are not aware of the difficulties that international graduate students face with writing; second, they do not want to begin an entirely new conversation on L2 writing because they are already struggling to tackle the existing L2 writing issues. No matter which reason it is, the sufferers, admittedly, are international graduate students.

Since it was within the scope of this book and as internationalization occurs with both undergraduate and graduate students, I would have liked to read a chapter or two in which writing programs, writing across curriculum, international office, writing centers, and intensive English programs initiated a dialogue geared toward providing support for the international graduate student writers who often go unnoticed. Nonetheless, even with these omissions, The Internationalization of US Writing Programs overall is a brilliant read as it offers an important contribution toward helping WPAs, writing instructors, and other associated offices implement positive changes in their programs to help international and multicultural student writers.

Works Cited

Dworin, Joel. The Family Stories Project. Using Funds of Knowledge for Writing. The Reading Teacher, vol. 59, no. 6, 2006, pp. 510-520.

Institute of International Education. International Students by Academic Level, 2014/15 - 2015/16. Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange, 2016, http://www.iie.org/opendoors. Accessed 27 January 2020.

Matsuda, Paul K. The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition. College English, vol. 68, no. 6, 2006, pp. 637-651.

Open Doors. Enrollment. Institute of International Education, 2018, https://www.iie.org/Research-and-Insights/Open-Doors/Data/International-Students/Enrollment. Accessed 20 April 2019.