Response to inquiry: Teaching composition to heritage learners

[Scott McGinnis]

From: Alicia Sovich [mailto:asovich at csulb.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, March 12, 2002 3:39 PM

When dealing with the topic of teaching Composition, you are dealing
with several factors.  We, as instructors, often strive not only to
eliminate or lessen English interference and improve grammatical
structures and orthographic mistakes, but we also have the mission of
teaching our heritage learners what goes beyond and beneath esthetics.
We must teach them how to write effectively by coordinating ideas,
limiting their themes, creating effective thesis statements and so on.
Our job is complex and intricate because it is does not aim at a single
specific target.  There is many targets to aim at and we must be very
clear about what our priorities are before we start teaching those
skills to our learners, and even more before we start grading papers.
In other words, we may encounter an essay which possesses amazing
organizational skills and wonderful thesis statements and transitions
and yet it may also possess a great amount of English interference and
orthographical mistakes that would make it almost impossible for a
monolingual Spanish speaker to understand many of its sentences.  On the
other hand, and thanks to the assistance of great Spanish word processor
programs, other students may hand in papers with excellent grammatical
skills and minimal English interference and yet the paper may show very
poor data collection and organizational skills.  The goal is to aim at
teaching how to write essays that reflect effective writing techniques
and eliminate English interference and other grammatical errors.  Due to
the complexity of the subject, I am not surprised that there is a book
available that teaches us how to aim at all these targets successfully.


Alicia Sovich

----- Original Message -----
From: Scott McGinnis <smcginnis at nflc.org>
To: <heritage-list at Glue.umd.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, March 12, 2002 1:15 PM
Subject: Inquiry: Teaching composition to heritage learners


> Does anyone know of any books or articles that deal with the topic of
> teaching composition to heritage learners?  Not a student book, but
> one addressed to teachers?
>
> Thanks,
>
>
> Kim Potowski, Ph.D. <kpotow1 at uic.edu>
> Director, Heritage Language Teacher Corps
> Coordinator, Spanish for Students of Hispanic Background University of

> Illinois at Chicago, Dept. of  Spanish, French, Italian & Portuguese
> 601 S. Morgan St., 1727 UH, MC-315 Chicago, IL 60618
> (312) 996-8524, Fax (312) 413-1044
>
>

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