Week 6: Hinkel, Silvia and Kubota

It was interesting to read about the differences and similarities between NSL and ESL writing. Silva's article explains some of the differences ESL students can encounter and mentions some ways to help teachers aid their own students to notice these differences by applying it to the classroom. Teachers need to focus on sentence structure, create strategies to help with unfamiliar textual patterns, providing realistic strategies, help construct complex sentences, help ESL students increase their lexical resources, etc. Through writing and reading, ESL students can learn more about their own needs and increase their skills. These readings helped me see the importance of teaching diverse students how to explore their own culture and language as well as their second language and culture. Their culture depends on their language. Hinkel mentions contrastive rhetoric and the interesting variations of literacy as well as the importance of teaching students about cultural stereotypes. We need to help them become aware of these stereotypes and help them see the good and bad about these views. We need to aid students because no one else will be encouraged to help them realize how difficult it can be to assimilate to a new culture without receiving negative views. As an ESL student myself, I have encountered good and bad experiences but one needs to learn to overcome the bad ones and learn to understand how people have different views and try to avoid negativity. Also, as language teachers we need to help students connect with their own life experiences to the new culture. Kubota's article can clearly help us see cultural differences using the Japanese culture as an example. Teachers need to be open and encourage students to examine the cultural differences as a group. All three authors suggest teaching students how to reflect and examine the differences between dominant and minority cultures and help affirm cultural heritage. We need to help students embrace their own heritage as well as encourage them to examine the differences between both cultures. These students have to learn to assimilate to the new culture, so by helping them see the differences and similarities as well as stereotypes, they will be able to facilitate their assimilation to the new culture.