ESL

After reading the 4 articles for this week on the topic of working with ESL students and writing an essay on of them for my article response paper, I'm still surprised on how overwhelming I find the subject to still be. I never realized how detailed, complex, and extensive the realm of working with ESL students to be. All four articles made it pretty clear that culture and background indeed plays a roll in the overall structure, composition, and patterns of writing. When writing my article response essay, I found myself to agree with most of what the author, Carol Severino, was saying but I was bothered on how much she attributed the existence of "contrastive rhetoric" to cultural differences. I mean aren't all writers writers? It was really the reading of the Moujtahid article that clarified how distinct differences in writing style exist by culture and I think that may perhaps change my original feelings on the Severino article. I think that because Moujtahid used three different culture to get the point across, it was easier to understand. The Moujahid article also left me to consider if our culture attributes too much of our own style as "the best"...What makes these other styles so "wrong"? Is it just because they're different? I wonder how accepting professors would be to the suggestion that international students adhere to their known style and inform the grader ahead of time about the style and that way they are simply graded by quality of their ideas? Afterall, in life, we always have proofreaders and spell-check but ideas and content is what takes skill, knowledge and practice to develop.