A Combined Basic Writing/English as a Second Language Class: Melting Pot of Mishmash?

JEW considers one of its primary roles to provide feedback on submitted manuscripts that will help colleagues meet the demands of publication with confidence and realism.Having said this, we now turn to a brief description of the articles appearing in the current issue.Overall, the essays take to task some of the cherished metaphors and assumptions behind our conception of basic writers and the teaching of basic writing, and offer an enlarged view informed by a broad awareness of cultural and historical difference.In the first article, Carol Severino shows how the principle metaphors used to describe cultural literacy (the melting pot, the salad bowl) and those used to acquire academic literacy (the bridge, the gap, the journey to join the literacy club), fail to acknowledge any common ground between the two.She proposes cultivating this common ground as a basis for students to expand their abilities to comprehend the arguments and experiences of others.Moreover, instead of trying to "transport" students to academic culture, teachers would orchestrate the sharing of knowledge, perception, and experience.Starting from Polanyi's premise that "we can know more than we can tell," Harvey Wiener considers nontraditional (remedial/ basic) students as enabled learners, endowed with "sentient literacy," and possessing considerable knowledge in using inference in countless nonverbal and visual situations in their own lives.Wiener suggests numerous ways to build on this wealth of experience in the teaching of inference in reading and writing classes.Marilyn Middendorf offers various innovations to create effective writing classrooms inspired by the ideas of M. M. Bakhtin about the dialogic nature of human discourse.Starting with the question "What is good writing?"Middendorf has students move away from their initially fixed, abstract, standardized, monologic definitions toward an awareness of the dialogic nature of discourse, which is inherently relative, ongoing, multivoiced, and interactive.Students move on to discover the primacy of this dialogic discourse in shaping the reality of our lives.John Mayher critiques the commonly accepted metaphors of "skills" and "remediation" which lie behind much of the thought and practice taking place in writing and skills centers today.He goes on to offer uncommon sense alternatives, fundamentally holistic, constructivist, and transactional, where the primary activity would be having students learn how to learn.