Teaching "Second Language Writing"

Where I sit, spending hour upon hour preparing for lectures

This, my penultimate semester at the Chinese University, I am teaching two courses in the MA program in Applied English Linguistics. The courses are taught from 6.30 to 9.15pm, not the best times for me. Being a long-term diabetic, my energy level is very low by late afternoon and exhausted by the end of class. But, I realize that teaching at the MA level where my students themselves are teachers has better long term effects than teaching undergraduates. My MA students may pick-up some effective teaching techniques which they might use in class and pass on to their students (the so called "trickle down" effect).

One of the courses is "Second Language Writing", which I hadn't taught in 5 years. My specialty is second language writing and this is a course I proposed and designed about 10 years ago. Among the four language skills--speaking, listening, reading, and writing--writing is the most neglected because of the assumption that learners become proficient in writing automatically, by a mysterious osmotic process, and therefore writing need not be taught. But the Americans changed all that, insisting that even native speakers of English needed to be taught how to write. When I first taught Freshman Writing at the U of Texas, I did not know how to teach writing and didn't fully trust that it could be taught. In the first few weeks, I walked into class with trepidation, lacking confidence and feeling like a fraud. As I taught writing to those eager American students, I, too, learned to write better. I went on to become a writing "specialist", with research and publications, including two textbooks, on writing.

Coming back to Hong Kong, most of my students are teachers in Hong Kong secondary schools, where the teaching is oriented to the HKCEE and the Advanced Level exams. Hong Kong classrooms have no time or patience with the process approach to writing because it is time consuming and cognitively demanding, and does not favor the rabid memorization that that passes for "education"in Hong Kong. The process approach came into fashion a good 35 years ago in the USA, but, in Hong Kong, it's still considered a novelty in many schools. So, in my course, I am winning the "hearts and minds" of my student-teachers, hoping to persuade them to adapt at least some of the features of the process approach in their teaching.

The last time I taught the course it was more or less stand and deliver, with quite a bit of discussion with students. But, now, the PowerPoint is king and I am compelled to prepare PP slides, spending about 15 - 20 hours of preparation on each lecture. But, this is time well spent because I am thinking again, and deeply, about the topics and learning to see them from new viewpoints.

Going by the electronic discussion among the students, some of them appear to have been converted. As we discuss topics such as teacher feedback, error correction, and peer reviews, the students contribute insights from their own practices as well as novel ideas that are pragmatic in the Hong Kong context. So, even after 40 years of teaching, I look forward to teaching this course. There's still some life left in this old teacher!