by Fernán Cerrón-Palomino

This semester I took on the challenge of assisting a professor in a course that was a part of the Writing Intensive Program. As a Spanish instructor, I had taught up to 3000 level classes but this one was a 4000 level course, so I didn’t know what to expect. To be able to reach this level, students had to have taken many prerequisites. Where would their motivation come from?  How would grading papers for this class be different from previous levels? Should the focus be on writing, or was the fact that this was a WIP class going to affect the students’ requirement to speak in Spanish during class?  Many questions came to my mind because I realized early on that this would be a challenge to not only me and  the professor but, most importantly, the students as well. Luckily, I wasn’t going to be left on my own because I would be attending WIPP7001.

Even though I had previously taught conversation and composition classes in Spanish, teaching as part of the Writing Intensive Program was a whole new experience for me. One of the principles of my teaching philosophy is that a teacher never ceases to learn and should never cease to learn. Through my training as a writing coach, I learned a great deal about principles such as writing across the disciplines, understanding writing as a process and scaffolding, peer reviewing and conferencing, among many other topics. The readings, discussions, workshops, lecturing and exemplary presentations altogether were extremely helpful and made my semester a lot easier.

One of the principles of my teaching philosophy is that a teacher never ceases to learn and should never cease to learn.

When it came to the class for which I was TAing, I knew that the professor had the last word regarding any policy to be implemented in the class. However, I was able (and excited) to share what I had learned with her. One of the first things that I became aware of was that a writing coach should focus on the structure of the students’ writing rather than their grammar: we are not supposed to be editors.

Nonetheless, my suspicions that teaching writing conventions in a second language classroom can be quite the challenge were confirmed. The fact that most of the literature was in English and mostly oriented toward and intended for subjects that were actually taught in English, made me feel a little bit out of place sometimes. After all, if students were taking the course to become more proficient in Spanish, how could they be graded solely on their writing skills? I was also worried that some of the writing conventions in Spanish would clash at some point with the principles that I was being trained in. To give a brief example, it is well known for Spanish instructors that sentences in Spanish tend to be a little bit longer than they are in English. How could this be suggested to my students without falling in the territory of “run-on sentences”?

In A TA’s Guide to Teaching Writing in All Disciplines, Beth Finch Hedengren points out when she addresses teaching writing to international students that even the most “basic assumptions about writing vary from culture to culture.” There are cultural differences regarding writing and the American academic system’s method of organization is only one way of writing (2004, p.135-36.)  So, basic writing conventions in Spanish such as which letters to capitalize in a title were challenging for some students.

The bottom line is that even though there may be cultural differences that need to be pointed out, the basic structure of good academic writing must be taught clearly. At the end of the semester, many students in the class faced the challenges of the course successfully. They improved their speaking abilities by participating in class and in discussions. In addition, students gained confidence in their writing by receiving feedback from their classmates in peer reviews.

Works cited

Hedengren, B. F. (2004). A TA’s Guide to Teaching Writing in all Disciplines. Macmillan.