The Politics of Second Language Writing.

The contributors to this edited collection point to a varied landscape in which this combination of factors complicates second lan-guage L2 writing teaching, administration, and research

The Politics of Second Language Writing.

Paul Kei Matsuda, Christina Ortmeier-Hooper, and Xiaoye You (Eds.) West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2006 Pp xiii + 320

䡲 Students in writing courses at all levels of schooling are becoming more culturally and linguistically diverse In addition to the challenges this development poses for writing instructors, the institutional, govern-mental, and cultural structures beyond classrooms also affect classroom instruction The contributors to this edited collection point to a varied landscape in which this combination of factors complicates second lan-guage (L2) writing teaching, administration, and research Despite some

misgivings about the book’s scope, I believe The Politics of Second Language Writing is an important addition to the expanding conversation about L2

writing, especially given the increased population of L2 writers in schools

The book is divided into five sections and includes a coda written by Barbara Kroll, whose presentation at the 2004 Symposium on Second Language Writing (Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA,

September 30 to October 2, 2004) provided the promised land metaphor

that drives the collection Chapters in each section are revised versions of papers presented at the symposium The editors state that the collection proceeds roughly by instructional level, although contributors’ focus on political contexts means that each section addresses issues that transcend classroom concerns The first three sections address K–12 education, language support programs in higher education, and English for aca-demic and professional purposes, respectively The final two sections, addressing assessment and the state of the profession, respectively, are relevant to all levels of instruction

Each section includes chapters that discuss how politics at school and governmental levels configure the opportunities second language stu-dents have to develop broad literacy skills The two chapters in the first section, by Danling Fu and Marylou Matoush, and Kerry Enright Villalva, respectively, focus on biliterate and Generation 1.5 students in high schools Both chapters in this section detail interesting opportunities for students to develop multicultural and multilingual competencies for aca-demic and expressive writing However, they also identify specific con-straints that often short-circuit broader goals For Fu and Matoush, de-nying students opportunities to write in their first as well as their second language can restrict their expressiveness and progress For Villalva, a typically narrow focus on editing concerns can take attention away from students’ other textual competencies In the four chapters in the second section, Ilona Leki; Ryuko Kubota and Kimberly Abels; Angela M Dadak; and Jessica Williams explore topics of direct interest to college-level instruction, including support for international students, English as a

second language (ESL) program cuts, use of writing centers, and influ-ence of general first-year composition on ESL writing teaching In col-leges and universities, the needs of L2 students are often, in Leki’s words,

“entangled in other people’s lives, desires, and histories” (p 71), espe-cially since L2 writing teachers, tutors, and administrators often occupy distaff positions, even as compared with L1 composition colleagues De-spite the strictures, though, advocates for L2 writers, such as these au-thors, can and do maximize opportunities to assist L2 writers by drawing together relevant but often widely dispersed campus resources in an effort to promote sustainable practices Kubota and Abels propose a model in which their university could take advantage of existing re-sources, which would address a wide variety of L2 students’ needs, but bring them together to avoid fragmentation Dadak reports on similar efforts at her university to tie resources together as well as to provide support for writing faculty who are new to international student issues— all in the context of an effective ban on ESL teaching And Williams usefully sketches the complications of addressing L2 students in writing centers, suggesting that more empirical research on these complications

is necessary to define the role of the writing center

Section 3 explores contexts for L2 writing in more disparate sites: chapters by Wei Zhu, Guillaume Gentil, Kevin Eric DePew, and Xiaoye You address content-based U.S university courses, a bilingual Canadian university, a U.S class led by an international teaching assistant, and Chinese English-teaching policies, respectively Zhu outlines factors as diverse as the technical nature of some academic disciplines and the pressures of promotion and tenure that affect instructors’ responses to student writing across the curriculum Gentil exposes the problems that arise when institutional units with overlapping responsibilities fail to coordinate their assistance for multilingual students DePew argues that international teaching assistants write extensively as part of their teach-ing and that this writteach-ing ought to be specifically supported And You optimistically reviews current trends away from traditional English teach-ing in China What emerges from this section’s wide diversity of topics is

a sense that writing instruction is deeply affected by disciplinary, institu-tional, and national cultures

Sections 4 and 5 are concerned with issues of particular moment to L2 writing professionals In Section 4, which addresses assessment, Deborah Crusan and Sara Cushing Weigle each contribute chapters that discuss assessment with an eye toward ensuring fairness to L2 students Crusan seeks to build an online self-placement tool that honors L2 writers’ needs and agency, and Weigle seeks to develop state-mandated testing that equitably accounts for language background The three chapters in the final section, by Jessie Moore Kapper, Christine Norris and Christine

Tardy, and Stephanie Vandrick, are metacommentaries on the politics of the field itself Kapper’s chapter, and that of Norris and Tardy, call attention to unevenness in L2 writing studies in terms of geographical underrepresentation and of differences between researchers and teach-ers, respectively And Vandrick reflects compellingly on changes in her institution’s policies on ESL students during her 30-plus-year career

The Politics of Second Language Writing is at once both narrow and broad

in scope It would disappoint those looking for a discussion of L2 writing outside the context of English: only one chapter (Gentil, chapter 8) discusses L2 writing not in English, and that is not its key concern However, the field of composition studies is in many ways uniquely U.S based, so the book’s coverage represents the scope of the field at present

At the same time, the book covers such a broad range of concerns that

it is at times difficult to see its cohesion; sections do not really proceed by instructional level, and some chapters (such as Leki’s in the section on support programs and Norris and Tardy’s in the context of professional metacommentary) do not seem ideal fits for their sections Nevertheless, this is not a programmatic how-to as much as it is a realistic but also optimistic portrait of a complex terrain The contributors demonstrate where L2-related practices are working and where they are lagging, and they show how well-meaning teachers, researchers, and administrators make do with what they have as they argue for better, more sustainable resources As such, this collection should be a valuable resource for helping build the kinds of promised-land institutions for L2 writers that Kroll and the other contributors wish for

JAY JORDAN

University of Utah

Salt Lake City, Utah, United States