Neutralizing the impact of "scare words" in L1 and L2 composition studies

For my second blog post, I reviewed the article "Sidestepping Our 'Scare Words': Genre as a Possible Bridge Between L1 and L2 Compositionists" by Kimberly A. Costino and Sunny Hyon. This article provides a thought-provoking discussion of the (negative) power of certain loaded words in influencing composition pedagogy. For L2 compositionists, these "scare words" include ideology, power and critical, terms often invoked by L1 compositionists. L1 compositionists, on the other hand, are often intimidated by the words skills and practice, common terms in the TESOL lexicon. According to the authors, the negative associations these words bring to the minds of composition instructors often prevent the merging of the two sub-fields in a way that would be beneficial to students. In order to address this problem, the authors, an L1 compositionist and an L2 compositionist, respectively, design lessons for their respective classes using genre as a pedagogical tool to help each borrow teaching strategies from the other while avoiding the use of "scare words."

Despite a lack of clarity in the paper showing how the authors arrive at this idea, its application seems to come off swimmingly. Each instructor teaches a lesson in her respective composition class whose purpose is to familiarize the students with a particular genre; in this case, that of the book review. The L1 instructor borrows the L2 instructor's teaching of specific structural "moves" and calls attention to specific lexical choices endemic to the book review genre, while the L2 instructor is subtly able to co-opt the concepts of purpose and audience in order to get her students to think more about authorship, readership, and the agendas of the different parties involved in producing a book review. Both lessons are successful: in avoiding the other's "scare words," and having something central such as genre to focus on, each instructor is able to appropriate some of the other's methods, if not her terminology.

One of the interesting things about this article is the resonance it has with one of this week's course readings, "Between Theory with a Big T and Practice with a Little p" by Dwight Atkinson. Indeed, there is quite a bit of overlap between the two articles in terms of how each posits the prototypical L1 composition stance as liberal and theoretical, and the prototypical L2 composition stance as more conservative and practice-oriented. Roughly, the L2 compositionists' "scare words" evoke the dense and necessarily political theory (with a big T or a little t?) often employed by L1 compositionists in their classrooms. The L1 compositionists' "scare words," on the other hand, suggest a divorcing of theory from practice, or at the very least, letting theory lead practice, a view that many L1 compositionists are uncomfortable with.