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Keynote Speakers
George
Braine Chinese University of Hong
Kong
Linda Harklau
University of Georgia
Ryuko Kubota
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
John M. Swales
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
George
Braine
Overcoming
Barriers to Academic Publication: Hong Kong’s Success Story
Based on a survey which found American
and British scholars to be the least internationally minded, it has
been stated that researchers from other parts of the world may find it
quite difficult to gain acceptance in the competitive and insular
world of (Western) academic publications. Nevertheless, a glance at TESOL
Quarterly, English for Specific Purposes Journal, or the
Journal of Second Language Writing shows the emergence of Hong
Kong as a leading source of research in English language teaching. The
concentration of eight universities within a narrow radius, the
availability of generous funding and excellent research facilities,
the presence of renowned ELT specialists, the pressure to conduct
research and publish, and the open-mindedness of ELT journal editors
and reviewers may have contributed to this phenomenon. Nevertheless,
in the case of research and publications on writing, Hong Kong’s
rise to prominence has been doubly challenging because of the low
status given to writing instruction in local primary and secondary
schools and the general resistance to writing in most content courses
at tertiary level.
This presentation will summarize the
recent publications on second language writing to emerge from Hong
Kong, and analyze how the writers have succeeded in overcoming
barriers to academic publication. It will also point out existing
conditions in Hong Kong which, behind the facade of success, prevent
changes in the writing curriculum at primary and secondary schools and
obstruct the implementation of Writing Across the Curriculum programs
at tertiary institutions.
 George Braine is an
associate professor of English at The Chinese University of Hong
Kong, and has taught writing in ESL and EFL contexts for nearly 30
years. He has researched and published on engineering and scientific
writing, the placement of students in first year writing courses,
and writing on local area network (LAN) computers. He is an editor
of the Asian Journal of English Language Teaching and the
founding chair of the Nonnative English Speakers Caucus in TESOL.
His publications include Academic Writing in a Second Language (1994),
with Diane Belcher, and Non-Native Educators in English Language
Teaching (1999).
Linda
Harklau
Writing
Literacy into Second Language Acquisition Theory:
Lessons from U.S. High School Classrooms
Reading and writing play a prominent
role in school-based learning. As early as second grade, literacy
passes from being the object of instruction to a medium of
instruction. By the upper grades, reading and writing permeate every
aspect of students' academic and language learning experiences,
becoming tightly integrated into communicative practices.
Nevertheless, it is fair to say that since its inception, the field of
second language acquisition has tended implicitly to assume that
learning a language means learning to speak it.
In this paper I argue theoretical
perspectives on second language acquisition that do not incorporate
reading and writing as modes of language learning are seriously
incomplete. I illustrate how the lack of attention to the role of
literacy in second language acquisition can be traced to historical
circumstance and the ways in which the field has evolved over the past
three decades. Using examples from my research with adolescent second
language learners in American high school settings, I identify ways in
which reading and writing should take a more explicit and prominent
role in second language acquisition theory. I argue that literacy is
not an auxiliary issue of pedagogical interest, but rather that is it
central to processes of second language acquisition in older children
and adults in most contemporary societies.
 Linda Harklau is Assistant Professor
in the Teaching Additional Languages Program at the University of
Georgia. Her research focuses on the second language learning
experiences of adolescents in U.S. middle and high school settings.
Her work has appeared in TESOL Quarterly, Linguistics &
Education, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, and Educational
Policy. She is co-editor of a recent volume, Generation 1.5 meets
College Composition: Issues in the teaching of writing to
U.S.-educated learners of ESL.
Ryuko
Kubota
Politics
of Cultural Difference in Second Language Writing
The role of culture in various facets
of second language writing, from textual characteristics to ways in
which students approach writing groups, has long been a research and
pedagogical topic of investigation. While this exploration reflects a
well-meaning effort to recognize, instead of ignore, cultural
difference, it has essentialized cultural differences and viewed
students from the same culture as a homogeneous cultural product.
Although this essentialist view of culture has been recently
criticized, the critique tends to simply swing the pendulum to the
opposite end by arguing that students should be seen as individuals
and that cultural similarities should be explored, downplaying
cultural differences. The field needs to move beyond this binary
argument and politicize cultural difference by viewing culture as a
discursive construct. In this constructionist view, cultural images
reflect discursive construction implicated in power, politics, and
ideology rather than objective truths. This view allows us to see
cultural differences not as fixed, monolithic, and neutral but dynamic
and ideological, situated in particular relations of power. This view
also allows us to see the multiplicity of motivations and consequences
of cultural essentialism as a strategy to exercise, resist, or
negotiate power, without essentializing essentialism as an inevitable
problem. In this view, students are both cultural products and
cultural agents. A new approach to second language writing research
should take into account the discursive formation and transformation
of students’ identities by focusing on how students create,
interpret, appropriate, resist, or negotiate cultural and linguistic
norms in cross-cultural writing.
 Ryuko Kubota (Ph.D. from the Ontario
Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto), has
taught EFL in Japan and Japanese as a foreign language in American
and Canadian institutions. She has also been a teacher educator for
ESL and foreign languages. Her research interests include issues of
culture in second language teaching, multicultural education, and
critical pedagogy. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Canadian
Modern Language Review, Foreign Language Annals, Journal of Second
Language Writing, TESOL Quarterly, and World Englishes.
She currently teaches in the School of Education and the Curriculum
in Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
John M.
Swales
Further
Reflections on Genre and ESL Academic Writing
Although many would likely concur with
Bakhtin's dictum that "The better our command of genres, the more
freely we employ them," operationally genre remains a disputed
framework for ESL writing courses and approaches. Controversies
polarize around repression versus expression, individual voice versus
conventionalized pattern, imitative play versus contextual realpolitik,
specific guidelines versus general principles, and cultural
subordination versus cultural resistance. Recent work confirms the
contested nature of the theoretical ground. On the one hand, Johns
(2000) offers several example of genre-based approaches in effective
action; on the other hand, Freedman (2000) questions whether EAP
instructors can sufficiently escape their own classroom contexts to
offer real assistance with the genres of the wider academy. In this
presentation, I discuss these controversies through the lens of new
advanced materials for NNS graduate students (Swales & Feak, 2000)
premised on cross-disciplinary "difference," participant
disciplinary analysis, genre systems, and a task taxononmy privileging
rhetorical reflection. I argue that while border crossings may be
hazardous with undergraduate "school genres," and certainly
in preparing students for writing at work (Freedman, 1993), they are
less so in research genres. Reasons for this include the public nature
of many research genres, the established evaluative processes that
adjudicate them, and student capacity to assess the appropriacy of any
advice offered.
 John M. Swales is
Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan, where he was
also Director of the English Language Institute from 1985 to 2000.
In Winter 2000 he was the Velux Visiting Professor in the English
Department at the Business School in Aarhus, Denmark. His latest
book-length publications are Other Floors, Other Voices: A
Textography of a Small University Building (Erlbaum, 1998) and,
with Christine Feak, English in Today's Research World: A
Writing Guide (University of Michigan Press). His current
interests include genre theory, NNS writing, textual silence, and
corpus linguistics.
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