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Teaching Turkish and Turkish-language writing in the U.S.: A descriptive report
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Journal of Second Language Writing 21 (2012) 71–75
Short communication
Teaching Turkish and Turkish-language writing in the U.S.: A descriptive report Nur Yigitoglu a,*, Melinda Reichelt b a
Okan University, College of Arts and Sciences, 34959 Akfirat-Tuzla, Istanbul, Turkey b English Department, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH 43606, USA
Keywords: Foreign language writing; Turkish-language writing; Genre-based approaches to foreign language writing; Less-commonly-taught languages
Introduction In this report, we describe Turkish-language writing instruction in one U.S. university, focusing on the students in the program, their needs for writing in Turkish as a foreign language (FL), and the curricular decisions that the instructor made about teaching writing in Turkish, including the implementation and outcome of a genre-based, writing-related, consciousness-raising activity. With this report, we intend to shed further light on FL writing in a lesscommonly taught language – a particularly neglected area of the L2 writing literature – including an assessment of the benefits of some instructional practices relevant for the context and population in focus. Several L2 writing specialists have drawn our attention to the role and uses of writing in foreign language contexts, but most of those have been English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts (e.g., Cimasko & Reichelt, 2011; Lee, 2011; Mancho´n, 2009; Reichelt, 2005). While the attention to EFL writing is a welcome trend in the field of L2 writing, there is also a need for increased attention to writing instruction in foreign languages other than English, as recently discussed by Byrnes, Maxim, and Norris (2010). Most research on FL writing in non-English FLs focuses on the more commonly taught languages: French (Conroy, 2004; Schultz, 2011), Spanish (De Haan & van Esch, 2005), and German (Reichelt & Bryant, 2001; Thorson, 2011). A small amount of work focuses on writing in less-commonly taught languages, including work on Arabic by Khaldieh (2000) and work on Japanese by Haneda (2005) and Hatasa (2011). However, few of these studies provide detailed information about classroom practices relating to FL writing instruction. This report addresses FL writing instruction in a less-commonly taught FL. In addition, we also address a particularly important but surprisingly neglected area of L2 writing: actual instructional practices. As Leki, Cumming, and Silva (2008) point out, in the literature about L2 writing in general, including ESL, EFL, and other FLs, ‘‘curriculum and instructional praxis has been a perplexingly overlooked and underreported aspect of research’’ (81). While some research within FL does provide descriptions of classroom activities and their outcomes, virtually all of these studies focus on writing in the more-commonly taught languages of French, Spanish, and German.
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +90 2166771630. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (N. Yigitoglu), [email protected] (M. Reichelt). 1060-3743/$ – see front matter # 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jslw.2011.11.001
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N. Yigitoglu, M. Reichelt / Journal of Second Language Writing 21 (2012) 71–75
Our work explores how learners’ needs shaped writing-related curricular decisions in the Turkish-language program at Georgia State University (GSU). In particular, we focus on the following issues: (1) The characteristics of students in this newly established Turkish program, including their motivations for writing. (2) The approaches that the instructor adopted to teaching Turkish-language writing in this context. (3) The usefulness of an English for Specific Purposes (ESP)-focused, genre-based pedagogy to address students’ needs for writing in Turkish in this instructional context. Instructional context and students The Turkish program described here was a part of the Middle East Studies program at Georgia State University, an urban public research university with six colleges offering 55 degree programs and 250 fields of study. According to the American Association of Teachers of Turkic (AATT) website (http://www.princeton.edu/turkish/aatt/default.htm), there are 58 academic institutions in the U.S. and Canada that offer Turkish. One of them is the Turkish program at GSU, which was first launched in fall 2005 when a three-credit beginning-level course was established in the Middle East Studies Program. Since then, the program has tried to offer elementary- and intermediate-level Turkish courses regularly. The program included 19 students who were enrolled in the Turkish program at the time that the Turkish instructor implemented the pedagogical approaches described below. Thirteen students were enrolled in Elementary Turkish 1 and six students were enrolled in Intermediate Turkish 1. Their ages ranged from 19 to 40. Some had not declared their majors at the time of the study while others were majoring in various disciplines, including applied linguistics, journalism, political science, and psychology. Learner characteristics and motivations for writing According to a needs analysis that was administered when developing and revising these Turkish language courses, the enrolled students included true beginners as well as heritage language learners, i.e., learners having had a familial or cultural connection to the language but not fully fluent or fully literate in it. While the majority of them were heritage learners in the intermediate level, there were mostly true beginners in the elementary level. At both levels, students indicated that they were motivated to learn Turkish for a variety of reasons, including visiting Turkey, working in Turkey, or pursuing graduate study there. Regarding writing in Turkish, some students indicated that writing was beyond their needs at the time, preferring to focus on listening and speaking. However, just as most students had specific reasons for studying Turkish, many of the students enrolled in this program expressed clear reasons for wanting to learn to write in Turkish. These purposes included the following: (1) writing specific genres such as academic papers or job application letters in Turkish, according to Turkish rhetorical conventions, for work and study in Turkey; (2) writing in order to communicate for interpersonal/cultural contact with native Turkish speakers, via electronic means; and (3) writing to reinforce vocabulary, grammar, and phrases in Turkish. Learners’ expressed needs for writing in Turkish, then, were diverse. In this program, learners’ sense of their needs for writing varied according to level, with intermediate students expressing a better understanding of their needs than beginning students. It is possible that students developed a clearer understanding of their needs over time, through extended exposure to the Turkish language and to Turkish cultural activities, or that they felt more comfortable expressing their needs to their teacher as they got to know her better over more than one semester of instruction. It is also possible that students who persist past the beginning level are more focused. Another factor at play, though, is that most of the intermediate learners in the group were also heritage language learners of Turkish. The instructor perceived that these learners were especially motivated to write because they felt that their writing skills lagged behind their speaking skills, due to problems with grammar in writing. Therefore, it is possible that being a heritage language learner, or some combination of being a heritage language learner and being at a stage beyond the beginning level, contributed to the students’ increased motivation to write. Approaches adopted to teaching writing In the Elementary Turkish classes, writing assignments usually were drawn from the context of the textbook chapter being studied. At this level, the intention was for students to learn the basics of sentence construction so as to be able to
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express their thoughts in the future. For this reason, they were required to write no more than one paragraph on topics such as oneself, one’s relatives, and familiar locations, as the instructor believed their writing skills in Turkish were not developed enough to compose essays and/or specific genres given the grammatical challenges of the Turkish language for English speakers. The instructor’s belief about this aligned with the preferences expressed by beginning-level students for a type of writing that supports target-language development rather than writing for its own sake–in other words, a writing-to-learn language orientation (see Mancho´n, 2011). (Of course, it is difficult to know how these beginning-level students would have reacted to more authentic assignments, had they been given.) The instructor felt that by the intermediate level most students had the language tools necessary to communicate in writing–in other words, a learning-to-write orientation. Most writing activities were developed in an effort to address students’ expressed needs and desires regarding writing instruction and to raise their intercultural rhetorical awareness. At this level, students expressed their interest in producing specific genres in Turkish. Thus, the instructor guided intermediate students in consciousness-raising activities that employed some ethnographic methods and genre analysis in their learning processes. In implementing a genre-based approach, the instructor required intermediate students to choose a topic of their own interest and read two web-based news articles on the topic, one in Turkish and one in English. Students were then asked to interview their Turkish relatives or friends about the differences in one genre (i.e., a news article) in two languages (e.g., Turkish and English) and report their findings to the class. As a follow-up for this activity, students wrote a short report in Turkish about a recent event for a Turkish newspaper of their choice. Other writing assignments at the intermediate level included writing personal letters or e-mails to a friend and to a professor, keeping weekly language journals of extensive readings on current topics, and writing thank-you notes for various events. The intended purpose for these assignments was to give students opportunities to use and recycle the structures they learned as well as to raise their awareness of certain genres in their foreign language (for both writing-to-learn and learning-to-write purposes). A similar consciousness-raising task was developed as an integrated writing assignment that involved reading job advertisements and writing cover letters in Turkish. The two jobs advertised were for an assistant to a finance director and for a salesperson. This job application assignment was included as a response to students’stated needs and motivations for writing in Turkish. In addition, the use of job advertisements was well suited to the overall flow of the class because previous class sessions had focused on relative clauses in Turkish, which are commonly used in job advertisements. The assignment about job advertisements, then, was designed to provide students with exposure to an authentic genre and to recycle previously covered grammar structures. The students were first asked to write the initial drafts of the letters and afterward were given sample English and Turkish versions of cover letters, taken from English and Turkish composition textbooks. First in small groups and later as a class, students worked on these letters to come up with a table comparing the two versions. The students found differences in tone, indications of the writer’s personality, verb choice, and paragraph structure. The instructor’s perception was that students were highly motivated to complete this activity. As a broader goal of this activity was to equip students with necessary tools to unpack genres in the future, the students were also told that they could use this kind of text analysis for other types of writing they might encounter in the future. The usefulness of a genre-based pedagogy to address students’ writing needs in this context As described earlier in the report, these intermediate learners of Turkish in this context expressed very clear motivations to learn Turkish language in general, and Turkish writing in particular, including both writing to learn language and learning to write. Given the specific goals students had, we believe that an ESP-oriented, genre-based approach to writing instruction met the students’ needs and motivation for this context. As Gentil (2011) reports, it is of great importance to focus on crosslinguistical transfer of genre knowledge in writing classes. The students in this class, however, did not have enough knowledge in their L1 (English) regarding the genres they were interested in writing in Turkish, including the job application cover letter. This was partially because at the time of this report, some students were just beginning their undergraduate studies, or were at early stages in their undergraduate degrees, and thus they had not yet been asked to write a cover letter for job applications in English. Still, their interest and motivation for writing in Turkish continued because the activity in which they compared cover letters written in English and in Turkish helped them realize some of the conventions that they may not have even been aware of in English. After the consciousness-raising activity, the students changed the format of their letters significantly from the first draft to the second draft. From the instructor’s perspective, these changes made their cover letters more formal and acceptable to Turkish readers.
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N. Yigitoglu, M. Reichelt / Journal of Second Language Writing 21 (2012) 71–75
We believe that perhaps students who enroll in less-commonly taught languages have very specific reasons for choosing that language beyond simply fulfilling a foreign language requirement; thus, they may have a clearer sense than other students of their overall goals for learning the target language, including a clear understanding of their needs for writing in the target language. If this is the case, then needs analyses, including discussions with students about their goals for writing, are especially important when teaching less-commonly taught languages. Concluding remarks We noticed that intermediate students, most of whom were heritage language learners, not only expressed clearer needs than beginners for writing in the target language, but they also showed awareness of cultural differences in writing, such as differences between English-language and Turkish-language e-mails, academic papers, cover letters, CVs, and news stories. Given that these Turkish learners did not have immediate needs for writing in Turkish in the U.S. (unlike most language learners in ESL contexts, for instance), their interest in learning to write in Turkish was remarkable. We believe that students’ awareness of these practical needs resulted from their extended exposure to the Turkish language and Turkish cultural activities. This may be because many of them were heritage language learners. We recommend, therefore, that foreign-language learning, especially less-commonly taught language learning, be contextualized by providing students with authentic goals that may motivate them to learn writing in target language contexts. In the context analyzed here, in order to generate interest in writing Turkish, the instructor created several opportunities for students to interact with native speakers of Turkish. Some of these activities included weekly Turkish coffee hours, a Turkish conversation partners program, and a Turkish lecture series, as well as Turkish film screenings. It could be argued that having a real connection with the language and culture increased the students’ interest in writing in Turkish and in producing certain genres such as e-mails. In addition, their interaction with native speakers may have helped them take the language outside the classroom and think about some possible contexts in which they might need to use written Turkish. Besides helping students become aware of any instrumental needs for writing in the target language, we suggest that foreign language writing instructors encourage students’ interest in interpersonal written exchanges via electronic means, especially since not all students will desire to live in the target culture. Based on the apparent success of the use of contrastive rhetoric consciousness-raising activities, as exemplified in this descriptive report as well as other research studies (e.g., Xing, Wang, & Spencer, 2008), we believe that these are promising strategies that should be further investigated. However, care should be taken when implementing contrastive rhetoric strategies. As Kubota and Lehner (2004) write, ‘‘traditional contrastive rhetoric legitimates the norm as a given, into which the marginalized are to be acculturated’’ (p. 15). This criticism was raised mostly about assimilation of ESL writers. In the consciousness-raising activity described in this article, however, the two-fold goals included (1) to help the students explore differences between writing in Turkish and English and (2) to empower them by raising their awareness of such differences. When one student submitted her second draft via e-mail, she commented that she was sending the ‘‘Turkified’’ version of her letter; we believe that simply understanding that there are ‘‘Turkified’’ versions of genres alone may empower her in her future written communications in Turkish. In addition, in the classic contrastive rhetoric view, it is often taken for granted that students will bring some L1 genrerelated knowledge to the L2 writing context. Very rarely, however, do studies discuss learners who, for various reasons, have limited L1 genre-related knowledge. In this Turkish program, for instance, some students indicated that they had never written a cover letter in English. We found that, in such cases, when the students have limited or no experience in the particular genre they learn to write in their L2, they seem to acquire genre knowledge simultaneously in both their L1 and L2. In some cases, if student-writers’ L2 genre knowledge exceeds their L1 genre knowledge, they may even use their L2 genre knowledge in their L1 writing. Future studies should investigate the relationship between L1 and L2 genre knowledge in other language learning contexts, as well. It is hoped that the present report has provided readers with insight into the context, curricular decisions, and writing activities in this specific program, which may be quite different compared to other L2 or FL settings. As is the case with any descriptive report such as the present one, it is hard to generalize these findings to other FL writing programs in general, or other Turkish programs in particular, because of the contextual differences in different settings. Despite these differences, we hope that this report on writing instruction in Turkish will provide fodder for reflection and directions for future research about students’ needs and motivations regarding FL writing, as well as the role that writing and writing instruction might play in the broader L2 curriculum – not only in the teaching of Turkish, but also in the teaching of other L2s, including but not limited to less-commonly taught languages.
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References Byrnes, H., Maxim, H., & Norris, J. (2010). Realizing advanced foreign language writing development in collegiate education: Curricular design, pedagogy, assessment. [Monograph]. Modern Language Journal, 94, 203–221. Cimasko, T., & Reichelt, M. (2011). Foreign language writing instruction: Principles and practices. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Conroy, P. (2004). E-mail or blackboard: Teaching advanced French composition. The French Review, 77, 550–559. De Haan, P., & van Esch, K. (2005). The development of writing in English and Spanish as foreign languages. Assessing Writing, 10, 100–116. Gentil, G. (2011). A biliteracy agenda for genre research. Journal of Second Language Writing, 20, 6–23. Haneda, M. (2005). Investing in foreign language writing: A study of two multicultural learners. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 4, 269–290. Hatasa, Y. A. (2011). L2 writing instruction in Japanese as a foreign language. In T. Cimasko & M. Reichelt (Eds.), Foreign language writing instruction: Principles and practices (pp. 98–117). Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Khaldieh, S. (2000). Learning strategies and writing processes of proficient vs less-proficient learners of Arabic. Foreign Language Annals, 33, 522–533. Kubota, R., & Lehner, A. (2004). Toward critical contrastive rhetoric. Journal of Second Language Writing, 13, 7–27. Lee, I. (2011). Issues and challenges in teaching and learning EFL writing: The case of Hong Kong. In T. Cimasko & M. Reichelt (Eds.), Foreign language writing instruction: Principles and practices (pp. 118–137). Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Leki, I., Cumming, A. H., & Silva, T. (2008). A synthesis of research on second language writing in English. Kentucky: Taylor & Francis. Mancho´n, R. (2009). Foreign language writing: Learning, teaching, and research. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Mancho´n, R. (2011). The language learning potential of writing in foreign language contexts: Lessons from Research. In T. Cimasko & M. Reichelt (Eds.), Foreign language writing instruction: Principles and practices (pp. 44–64). Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Reichelt, M. (2005). English-language writing instruction in Poland. Journal of Second Language Writing, 14, 215–232. Reichelt, M., & Bryant, K. (2001). Writing in a second-year German class. Foreign Language Annals, 34, 235–245. Schultz, J. M. (2011). Foreign language writing in the era of globalization. In T. Cimasko & M. Reichelt (Eds.), Foreign language writing instruction: Principles and practices (pp. 65–82). Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Thorson, H. (2011). Student perceptions of writing as a tool for increasing oral proficiency in German. In T. Cimasko & M. Reichelt (Eds.), Foreign language writing instruction: Principles and practices (pp. 255–284). Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Xing, M., Wang, J., & Spencer, K. (2008). Raising students’ awareness of cross-cultural contrastive rhetoric in English writing via an e-learning course. Language Learning & Technology, 12, 71–93. Nur Yigitoglu is an assistant professor of linguistics in Okan University, Istanbul, Turkey. She teaches courses in linguistics and contrastive linguistic analysis. She received her PhD from the department of Applied Linguistics and ESL, Atlanta, USA. Her current research interest focuses on second language writing and second language writing teacher cognition. Melinda Reichelt is Professor of English at the University of Toledo, where she directs the ESL writing program and teaches courses in TESOL and linguistics. She has published multiple articles on second language writing and is co-editor, with Tony Cimasko, of a forthcoming collection of chapters on foreign language writing entitled Foreign Language Writing: Principles and Practices (Parlor Press).
Journal of Second Language Writing 21 (2012) 71–75
Short communication
Teaching Turkish and Turkish-language writing in the U.S.: A descriptive report Nur Yigitoglu a,*, Melinda Reichelt b a
Okan University, College of Arts and Sciences, 34959 Akfirat-Tuzla, Istanbul, Turkey b English Department, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH 43606, USA
Keywords: Foreign language writing; Turkish-language writing; Genre-based approaches to foreign language writing; Less-commonly-taught languages
Introduction In this report, we describe Turkish-language writing instruction in one U.S. university, focusing on the students in the program, their needs for writing in Turkish as a foreign language (FL), and the curricular decisions that the instructor made about teaching writing in Turkish, including the implementation and outcome of a genre-based, writing-related, consciousness-raising activity. With this report, we intend to shed further light on FL writing in a lesscommonly taught language – a particularly neglected area of the L2 writing literature – including an assessment of the benefits of some instructional practices relevant for the context and population in focus. Several L2 writing specialists have drawn our attention to the role and uses of writing in foreign language contexts, but most of those have been English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts (e.g., Cimasko & Reichelt, 2011; Lee, 2011; Mancho´n, 2009; Reichelt, 2005). While the attention to EFL writing is a welcome trend in the field of L2 writing, there is also a need for increased attention to writing instruction in foreign languages other than English, as recently discussed by Byrnes, Maxim, and Norris (2010). Most research on FL writing in non-English FLs focuses on the more commonly taught languages: French (Conroy, 2004; Schultz, 2011), Spanish (De Haan & van Esch, 2005), and German (Reichelt & Bryant, 2001; Thorson, 2011). A small amount of work focuses on writing in less-commonly taught languages, including work on Arabic by Khaldieh (2000) and work on Japanese by Haneda (2005) and Hatasa (2011). However, few of these studies provide detailed information about classroom practices relating to FL writing instruction. This report addresses FL writing instruction in a less-commonly taught FL. In addition, we also address a particularly important but surprisingly neglected area of L2 writing: actual instructional practices. As Leki, Cumming, and Silva (2008) point out, in the literature about L2 writing in general, including ESL, EFL, and other FLs, ‘‘curriculum and instructional praxis has been a perplexingly overlooked and underreported aspect of research’’ (81). While some research within FL does provide descriptions of classroom activities and their outcomes, virtually all of these studies focus on writing in the more-commonly taught languages of French, Spanish, and German.
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +90 2166771630. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (N. Yigitoglu), [email protected] (M. Reichelt). 1060-3743/$ – see front matter # 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jslw.2011.11.001
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N. Yigitoglu, M. Reichelt / Journal of Second Language Writing 21 (2012) 71–75
Our work explores how learners’ needs shaped writing-related curricular decisions in the Turkish-language program at Georgia State University (GSU). In particular, we focus on the following issues: (1) The characteristics of students in this newly established Turkish program, including their motivations for writing. (2) The approaches that the instructor adopted to teaching Turkish-language writing in this context. (3) The usefulness of an English for Specific Purposes (ESP)-focused, genre-based pedagogy to address students’ needs for writing in Turkish in this instructional context. Instructional context and students The Turkish program described here was a part of the Middle East Studies program at Georgia State University, an urban public research university with six colleges offering 55 degree programs and 250 fields of study. According to the American Association of Teachers of Turkic (AATT) website (http://www.princeton.edu/turkish/aatt/default.htm), there are 58 academic institutions in the U.S. and Canada that offer Turkish. One of them is the Turkish program at GSU, which was first launched in fall 2005 when a three-credit beginning-level course was established in the Middle East Studies Program. Since then, the program has tried to offer elementary- and intermediate-level Turkish courses regularly. The program included 19 students who were enrolled in the Turkish program at the time that the Turkish instructor implemented the pedagogical approaches described below. Thirteen students were enrolled in Elementary Turkish 1 and six students were enrolled in Intermediate Turkish 1. Their ages ranged from 19 to 40. Some had not declared their majors at the time of the study while others were majoring in various disciplines, including applied linguistics, journalism, political science, and psychology. Learner characteristics and motivations for writing According to a needs analysis that was administered when developing and revising these Turkish language courses, the enrolled students included true beginners as well as heritage language learners, i.e., learners having had a familial or cultural connection to the language but not fully fluent or fully literate in it. While the majority of them were heritage learners in the intermediate level, there were mostly true beginners in the elementary level. At both levels, students indicated that they were motivated to learn Turkish for a variety of reasons, including visiting Turkey, working in Turkey, or pursuing graduate study there. Regarding writing in Turkish, some students indicated that writing was beyond their needs at the time, preferring to focus on listening and speaking. However, just as most students had specific reasons for studying Turkish, many of the students enrolled in this program expressed clear reasons for wanting to learn to write in Turkish. These purposes included the following: (1) writing specific genres such as academic papers or job application letters in Turkish, according to Turkish rhetorical conventions, for work and study in Turkey; (2) writing in order to communicate for interpersonal/cultural contact with native Turkish speakers, via electronic means; and (3) writing to reinforce vocabulary, grammar, and phrases in Turkish. Learners’ expressed needs for writing in Turkish, then, were diverse. In this program, learners’ sense of their needs for writing varied according to level, with intermediate students expressing a better understanding of their needs than beginning students. It is possible that students developed a clearer understanding of their needs over time, through extended exposure to the Turkish language and to Turkish cultural activities, or that they felt more comfortable expressing their needs to their teacher as they got to know her better over more than one semester of instruction. It is also possible that students who persist past the beginning level are more focused. Another factor at play, though, is that most of the intermediate learners in the group were also heritage language learners of Turkish. The instructor perceived that these learners were especially motivated to write because they felt that their writing skills lagged behind their speaking skills, due to problems with grammar in writing. Therefore, it is possible that being a heritage language learner, or some combination of being a heritage language learner and being at a stage beyond the beginning level, contributed to the students’ increased motivation to write. Approaches adopted to teaching writing In the Elementary Turkish classes, writing assignments usually were drawn from the context of the textbook chapter being studied. At this level, the intention was for students to learn the basics of sentence construction so as to be able to
N. Yigitoglu, M. Reichelt / Journal of Second Language Writing 21 (2012) 71–75
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express their thoughts in the future. For this reason, they were required to write no more than one paragraph on topics such as oneself, one’s relatives, and familiar locations, as the instructor believed their writing skills in Turkish were not developed enough to compose essays and/or specific genres given the grammatical challenges of the Turkish language for English speakers. The instructor’s belief about this aligned with the preferences expressed by beginning-level students for a type of writing that supports target-language development rather than writing for its own sake–in other words, a writing-to-learn language orientation (see Mancho´n, 2011). (Of course, it is difficult to know how these beginning-level students would have reacted to more authentic assignments, had they been given.) The instructor felt that by the intermediate level most students had the language tools necessary to communicate in writing–in other words, a learning-to-write orientation. Most writing activities were developed in an effort to address students’ expressed needs and desires regarding writing instruction and to raise their intercultural rhetorical awareness. At this level, students expressed their interest in producing specific genres in Turkish. Thus, the instructor guided intermediate students in consciousness-raising activities that employed some ethnographic methods and genre analysis in their learning processes. In implementing a genre-based approach, the instructor required intermediate students to choose a topic of their own interest and read two web-based news articles on the topic, one in Turkish and one in English. Students were then asked to interview their Turkish relatives or friends about the differences in one genre (i.e., a news article) in two languages (e.g., Turkish and English) and report their findings to the class. As a follow-up for this activity, students wrote a short report in Turkish about a recent event for a Turkish newspaper of their choice. Other writing assignments at the intermediate level included writing personal letters or e-mails to a friend and to a professor, keeping weekly language journals of extensive readings on current topics, and writing thank-you notes for various events. The intended purpose for these assignments was to give students opportunities to use and recycle the structures they learned as well as to raise their awareness of certain genres in their foreign language (for both writing-to-learn and learning-to-write purposes). A similar consciousness-raising task was developed as an integrated writing assignment that involved reading job advertisements and writing cover letters in Turkish. The two jobs advertised were for an assistant to a finance director and for a salesperson. This job application assignment was included as a response to students’stated needs and motivations for writing in Turkish. In addition, the use of job advertisements was well suited to the overall flow of the class because previous class sessions had focused on relative clauses in Turkish, which are commonly used in job advertisements. The assignment about job advertisements, then, was designed to provide students with exposure to an authentic genre and to recycle previously covered grammar structures. The students were first asked to write the initial drafts of the letters and afterward were given sample English and Turkish versions of cover letters, taken from English and Turkish composition textbooks. First in small groups and later as a class, students worked on these letters to come up with a table comparing the two versions. The students found differences in tone, indications of the writer’s personality, verb choice, and paragraph structure. The instructor’s perception was that students were highly motivated to complete this activity. As a broader goal of this activity was to equip students with necessary tools to unpack genres in the future, the students were also told that they could use this kind of text analysis for other types of writing they might encounter in the future. The usefulness of a genre-based pedagogy to address students’ writing needs in this context As described earlier in the report, these intermediate learners of Turkish in this context expressed very clear motivations to learn Turkish language in general, and Turkish writing in particular, including both writing to learn language and learning to write. Given the specific goals students had, we believe that an ESP-oriented, genre-based approach to writing instruction met the students’ needs and motivation for this context. As Gentil (2011) reports, it is of great importance to focus on crosslinguistical transfer of genre knowledge in writing classes. The students in this class, however, did not have enough knowledge in their L1 (English) regarding the genres they were interested in writing in Turkish, including the job application cover letter. This was partially because at the time of this report, some students were just beginning their undergraduate studies, or were at early stages in their undergraduate degrees, and thus they had not yet been asked to write a cover letter for job applications in English. Still, their interest and motivation for writing in Turkish continued because the activity in which they compared cover letters written in English and in Turkish helped them realize some of the conventions that they may not have even been aware of in English. After the consciousness-raising activity, the students changed the format of their letters significantly from the first draft to the second draft. From the instructor’s perspective, these changes made their cover letters more formal and acceptable to Turkish readers.
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N. Yigitoglu, M. Reichelt / Journal of Second Language Writing 21 (2012) 71–75
We believe that perhaps students who enroll in less-commonly taught languages have very specific reasons for choosing that language beyond simply fulfilling a foreign language requirement; thus, they may have a clearer sense than other students of their overall goals for learning the target language, including a clear understanding of their needs for writing in the target language. If this is the case, then needs analyses, including discussions with students about their goals for writing, are especially important when teaching less-commonly taught languages. Concluding remarks We noticed that intermediate students, most of whom were heritage language learners, not only expressed clearer needs than beginners for writing in the target language, but they also showed awareness of cultural differences in writing, such as differences between English-language and Turkish-language e-mails, academic papers, cover letters, CVs, and news stories. Given that these Turkish learners did not have immediate needs for writing in Turkish in the U.S. (unlike most language learners in ESL contexts, for instance), their interest in learning to write in Turkish was remarkable. We believe that students’ awareness of these practical needs resulted from their extended exposure to the Turkish language and Turkish cultural activities. This may be because many of them were heritage language learners. We recommend, therefore, that foreign-language learning, especially less-commonly taught language learning, be contextualized by providing students with authentic goals that may motivate them to learn writing in target language contexts. In the context analyzed here, in order to generate interest in writing Turkish, the instructor created several opportunities for students to interact with native speakers of Turkish. Some of these activities included weekly Turkish coffee hours, a Turkish conversation partners program, and a Turkish lecture series, as well as Turkish film screenings. It could be argued that having a real connection with the language and culture increased the students’ interest in writing in Turkish and in producing certain genres such as e-mails. In addition, their interaction with native speakers may have helped them take the language outside the classroom and think about some possible contexts in which they might need to use written Turkish. Besides helping students become aware of any instrumental needs for writing in the target language, we suggest that foreign language writing instructors encourage students’ interest in interpersonal written exchanges via electronic means, especially since not all students will desire to live in the target culture. Based on the apparent success of the use of contrastive rhetoric consciousness-raising activities, as exemplified in this descriptive report as well as other research studies (e.g., Xing, Wang, & Spencer, 2008), we believe that these are promising strategies that should be further investigated. However, care should be taken when implementing contrastive rhetoric strategies. As Kubota and Lehner (2004) write, ‘‘traditional contrastive rhetoric legitimates the norm as a given, into which the marginalized are to be acculturated’’ (p. 15). This criticism was raised mostly about assimilation of ESL writers. In the consciousness-raising activity described in this article, however, the two-fold goals included (1) to help the students explore differences between writing in Turkish and English and (2) to empower them by raising their awareness of such differences. When one student submitted her second draft via e-mail, she commented that she was sending the ‘‘Turkified’’ version of her letter; we believe that simply understanding that there are ‘‘Turkified’’ versions of genres alone may empower her in her future written communications in Turkish. In addition, in the classic contrastive rhetoric view, it is often taken for granted that students will bring some L1 genrerelated knowledge to the L2 writing context. Very rarely, however, do studies discuss learners who, for various reasons, have limited L1 genre-related knowledge. In this Turkish program, for instance, some students indicated that they had never written a cover letter in English. We found that, in such cases, when the students have limited or no experience in the particular genre they learn to write in their L2, they seem to acquire genre knowledge simultaneously in both their L1 and L2. In some cases, if student-writers’ L2 genre knowledge exceeds their L1 genre knowledge, they may even use their L2 genre knowledge in their L1 writing. Future studies should investigate the relationship between L1 and L2 genre knowledge in other language learning contexts, as well. It is hoped that the present report has provided readers with insight into the context, curricular decisions, and writing activities in this specific program, which may be quite different compared to other L2 or FL settings. As is the case with any descriptive report such as the present one, it is hard to generalize these findings to other FL writing programs in general, or other Turkish programs in particular, because of the contextual differences in different settings. Despite these differences, we hope that this report on writing instruction in Turkish will provide fodder for reflection and directions for future research about students’ needs and motivations regarding FL writing, as well as the role that writing and writing instruction might play in the broader L2 curriculum – not only in the teaching of Turkish, but also in the teaching of other L2s, including but not limited to less-commonly taught languages.
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