Dominic Lopez-Blog Post: First Entry

            This week, I thought it was interesting that the Shen piece pointed out how learning English composition affects students who are learning English as a second language or lived in another country before coming to America. It was a powerful reminder to me that there are so many factors that can go into why a student is struggling to improve in their writing that we often don’t take into consideration. It makes me wonder how often the method of allowing students to write freely and in their own voice at the beginning of the writing process can cause challenges for students if their cultural and language background has different ideas about what it means to write freely and in their own style. I think it’s important for teachers to get to know each student as much as they can so that they can take into account the variety of factors that can affect a student’s motivation for learning how to write and learning style. Additionally, taking the time to learn a bit about how other cultures learn to write and the writing style of other cultures could assist in this process. We can even learn from these other styles of writing and see how we can incorporate them into our writing and how we teach writing. I think that students should be allowed to retain to some degree their style of writing that comes from their culture as it would give them a unique writing voice. If they still apply the rules of good academic writing afterwards, it could make for an interesting and effective combination.  

I was also thinking this week about the literacy narratives that we have been reading and critiquing along with the Diagnosing Problems document. I noticed that it was challenging for me at times to figure out what it was exactly that each sample needed to improve. This is where the idea of freewriting and authentic voice is confusing for me because I definitely think students need their own writing voice and space to write out their ideas and passions, but I’m not sure how you balance that with getting them to write in the “accepted” formal academic style and format later on in the writing process. At what point do we interrupt their freewriting style if it is lacking in things like detailed descriptions or an effective sentence structure? I wouldn’t want to be harsh when looking at a student’s draft as I would always focus on the strengths first and as a draft it isn’t meant to be complete anyways. It would be interesting to see how this would play out in an actual classroom because I like this process of teaching student’s writing but I would still want to make sure they learn about proper academic writing as well. The Diagnosing Problems document did have helpful suggestions for critiquing student papers like identifying if the student seems engaged with what they are writing or  seeing what understanding they have about what academic writing is. 

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