*revisions made for accuracy regarding SQ 2025
Students in Dr. Jason Schneider’s WRD 543: Teaching ESL Writing course learned to better understand the theoretical and practical issues connected to writing studies in an increasingly diverse world.
WRD 543 is a graduate-level course, open to all MA in WRD students, and is offered every other year. It provides concentration credit for students in DePaul’s Teaching Writing and Language concentration of the MA in WRD and counts for Methods credit for those students pursuing the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) certificate. Structured around readings and weekly discussion posts, the course helps students to understand the teaching of writing to multilingual students.
Professor Schneider sees the course as essential not only for students in the TESOL certificate program, but for anyone who wants to teach writing.
I feel anyone who wants to teach writing needs to have a basis for understanding students who use English as a second or additional language. You’re always going to find multilingual writers in your courses and you need to have the knowledge to draw upon to make supportive choices for these students.
What Students Do in WRD 543
Each week, WRD 543 students will help lead some of the class discussions and even design practice lessons based on concepts and methods from class readings. There will also be practical activities. For example, in a couple different weeks students may be given sample essays written by ESL students and decide either how they would give feedback and guidance to the student, or to assign what they believed to be an appropriate score on the basis of a rubric. Exercises such as this allowed students to hone their feedback and assessment process through hands-on practice and collaboration.
Professor Schneider who has a book forthcoming on the topic of international college students, sees this application of theory in practical ways as essential to both students’ learning and his own. “It’s always interesting to me to let people bring in their own experience as learners. It expands my own understanding of how people go about language learning, and what kinds of teachers people aspire to become.”
At least once during the quarter, Professor Schneider also lets students read and discuss a recent academic book from the field of ESL/EAL writing.
New Perspectives for Teaching in a Diverse World
Ultimately, WRD 543 encourages students to embrace the reality of linguistic and cultural diversity in the writing classroom.. It’s also a course that can open students’ eyes to the challenges and possibilities of teaching writing in a diverse city like Chicago.
A lot of teachers and tutors feel they don’t know what to do with multilingual students, and sometimes this can even lead to feelings of anxiety. A class like this can help both teachers and tutors move away from that viewpoint, and realize that students who speak other languages and who are from other cultures are absolutely a positive resource in the classroom.