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Article 3
ESL and the Internet: Content, Rhetoric, and Research
The following paper was presented at Rhetoric and Technology in the Next Millennium: An Asynchronous Online Conference, June 15-30, 1998, and is reprinted here for the use of the teachers participating in the Global Classroom.
ESL and the Internet:
Content, Rhetoric, and Research
Loretta F. Kasper
Kingsborough Community College/CUNY
Paper presented at Rhetoric and Technology in the Next Millennium: An Asynchronous Online Conference, June 15-30, 1998.
Also available on CD-ROM: Proceedings of Rhetoric and Technology in the Next Millennium. William E. Tanner and Suzanne S. Webb (Eds.). Mesquite, TX: Caxton's Modern Art Press, 1998.
This paper describes a content-based approach to ESL instruction designed to develop linguistic and academic skills. This course uses Internet technology as a resource for content and as a foundation for teaching rhetorical and research skills to high intermediate level college ESL students.
Content-Based Instruction
Content-based instruction (CBI) has gained increasing popularity over the past few years (Benesch; Brinton, Snow, and Wesche; Crandall; Kasper, "Improved Reading Performance," "Theory and Practice," "Using Discipline-Based Texts," "The Impact of," "Meeting ESL Students;" Snow and Brinton) as a quick and efficient way for college-level ESL students to develop English language literacy and practice academic skills. In a content-based ESL course, students use the English language to acquire content knowledge through a variety of academically based tasks. These tasks are designed to teach students discipline-based content, and at the same time, help them develop proficiency in basic language
skills.
Over the past few years, the Internet has emerged as a prominent new technology with great potential for educational use, especially in the area of content-based ESL instruction (Singhal). The electronic resources made available through Internet technology present students, at the click of a mouse, with a diverse collection of authentic English language texts dealing with a wide array of interdisciplinary topics.
For ESL students, the key instructional benefit results from the hypermedia and interactive format of the Internet. Because information is presented through text, sound, and graphics, comprehension is facilitated, concepts reinforced, and learning consolidated, thus better enabling students to articulate knowledge and understanding through various modes of writing. In this way, the Internet becomes an ideal instructional resource for teaching rhetorical skills.
Developing Rhetorical Skills
Developing strong rhetorical skills is critical to ESL students' success in college. Because it emphasizes interdisciplinary study, a content-based ESL course offers an excellent setting in which to develop and hone these skills. The materials used in content-based courses offer many opportunities for expository writing requiring in-depth analysis of key interdisciplinary concepts. As students work individually and with peers, producing analytical responses to the course materials and to each other's writing, they refine critical thinking skills. By engaging in close reading and in-depth discussion of salient issues in science, psychology, business, and other content areas, they acquire the linguistic and cognitive tools needed to compose written pieces
spanning such rhetorical modes as comparison/contrast, cause/effect, and argumentation. Developing experience with these rhetorical modes provides a necessary foundation for the written articulation of focused research.
Developing Research Skills
Conducting effective research requires that students develop critical literacy; that is, the ability to locate information and evaluate the credibility and validity of resources (Farah; Mather). The Internet may be compared to a library containing almost every book in the world, but it is one which often lacks organization (Harvey). Therefore, teaching students to use the Internet effectively teaches them the most fundamental aspects of critical literacy--knowing how to search for, locate, and evaluate information. To reap the benefits of the multitude of resources on the Internet, students must be taught how to use search engines, Web browsers, and meta-sites to locate and retrieve information. They must learn how to refine their search, if necessary,
by entering more precise and focused language. They need to learn how to identify and to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant information. To do this students must scan through various texts, evaluating their reliability and choosing those best suited to the topic of the research. Web browsers, such as Netscape or Microsoft Explorer, facilitate the retrieval of documents from the Internet, assigning a specific URL (Uniform Resource Locator) to each web page. Meta-sites help to bring order out of Internet chaos by providing well-organized links divided into clearly labeled categories (Harvey). Finally, students must learn how to cite research sources. They can do this on the Internet by consulting Online Writing Labs (OWLs) contained in many university web pages. Critical literacy skills thus acquired through Internet research enable students to manage the vast amount of information they encounter more effectively, not only in the academic setting, but also in their everyday
lives.
Sustained Content Study: Focus Discipline Research
ESL students can effectively expand their linguistic, rhetorical, and research skills through focus discipline study. A focus discipline is a subject area (e.g., psychology, biology) that individual students choose to research extensively over the course of the semester (Kasper "Interdisciplinary English and the Internet"). Focus discipline study provides the context for "sustained content" (Pally 293), which is especially valuable for college ESL students because it engages them in extended practice with both language and discipline-based concepts, enabling them to become "content experts" in a subject area of their own choosing.
As part of the content-based model described in this paper, individual students are asked to choose from among a list of possible subject areas one focus discipline, which they will study in-depth over the course of the semester. Students base their choice on personal interest and/or college major, and because students have chosen to do extensive research in that discipline, they are invested in a learning experience that is personally meaningful and important.
When several students choose the same focus discipline, those students form a focus discipline group. In these collaborative groups, learning becomes not only an individual endeavor, but also a social one as group members work both individually and collaboratively to collect information on the focus discipline. Collaborating in a focus discipline group enhances learning because it offers ESL students the opportunity to work together in constructing knowledge. The social discourse afforded by the group encourages students to elaborate and reflect both on their own ideas and on those of their peers, helping to build a strong personal and group knowledge base. In this way, peers become resources for furthering knowledge and understanding of content area
and linguistic information (Strommen and Lincoln). As students actively construct knowledge by exploring, creating, experimenting, and manipulating material that is meaningful and important to them, they hone the rhetorical and research skills necessary for college-level work.
A Sample Lesson
Teaching rhetorical and research skills through Internet technology requires a bit of planning and the use of appropriate content-based materials. ....
[ I have not included Ms. Kasper's sample lesson on Greenhouse gases for the purposes of brevity and focus. Our Global Classroom contains the elements of research, rhetoric, and writing that she describes in her sample lesson. If you are interested in the sample lesson it may be accessed at the web site at the beginning of the article.]
Conclusion
As they conduct Internet research and subsequently articulate knowledge through diverse rhetorical modes, ESL students are actively engaged in the process of meaning construction within and across a variety of texts. As students strive to understand and consolidate the information presented through the diverse textual media found on the Internet, they call upon cognitive and linguistic resources developed through their experiences with other related texts and events. By working though the "complex intermingling of meanings, embedded within (these) different texts" (Tierney 1177), ESL students learn how to define equivalencies between experiences and how to perceive differences involving similar phenomena (Dyson 302-5).
By offering new paths to information and new ways to think about that information, the resources available through Internet technology provide a solid foundation for teaching ESL students the rhetorical and research skills necessary for success in college courses.
Works Cited
Benesch, Sarah. (Ed.). Ending Remediation: Linking ESL and Content in Higher Education. Washington, DC: TESOL, 1988.
Brinton, Donna M., Marguerite Ann Snow, and Marjorie Bingham Wesche. Content-Based Second Language Instruction. New York: Newbury, 1989.
Crandall, Joann (Ed.). ESL through Content-Area Instruction. McHenry, IL: CAL/Delta, 1995.
Dyson, Anne Haas. "Viewpoints: The Word and the World--Reconceptualizing Written Language Development or, Do Rainbows Mean A Lot to Little Girls?" Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading. 4th Ed. Eds. Robert B. Ruddell, Martha Rapp Ruddell, and Harry Singer. Newark, DE: IRA, 1994. 297-322.
Farah, B.D. "Information Literacy: Retooling Evaluation Skills in the Electronic Information Environment." Journal of Educational Technology Systems 24.2(1995): 127-33.
Kasper, Loretta F. "Improved Reading Performance for ESL Students through Academic Course Pairing." Journal of Reading 37.5(1994): 376-84.
Kasper, Loretta F. Interdisciplinary English (2nd edition). New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998.
Kasper, Loretta F. "Meeting ESL Students' Academic Needs through Discipline-Based Instructional Programs." Adult ESL: Politics, Pedagogy, and Participation in School and Community Programs.Trudy Smoke (Ed.) Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1998. 147-57.
Kasper, Loretta F. "The Impact of Content-Based Instructional Programs on the Academic Progress of ESL Students." English for Specific Purposes 16.4(1997): 309-20.
Kasper, Loretta F. "Theory and Practice in Content-Based ESL Reading Instruction." English for Specific Purposes, 14.3(1995): 223-30.
Kasper, Loretta F. "Using Discipline-Based Texts to Boost College ESL Reading Instruction." Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 39.4(1995/1996): 298-306.
Lepeintre, Suzanne, and Laurie Stephan. "Telnet Treasure Hunts: Learning to Read (on) the Internet." Virtual Connections. Mark Warschauer (Ed.). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. 331-35.
Pally, Marcia. "Critical Thinking in ESL: An Argument for Sustained Content." Journal of Second Language Writing 6.3(1997): 293-311.
Snow, Marguerite Ann, and Donna M. Brinton. The Content-Based Classroom: Perspectives on Integrating Language and Content. New York: Longman, 1997.
Tierney, Robert J. "Dissension, Tension, and the Models of Literacy." Ruddell 1162-1183.
Washington Post."Consensus Emerges Earth Is Warming--Now What? (November 12, 1997): A01. Online. Internet: "ttp://www.washingtonpost.com/ 21 April 1998.
Biographical information:
Loretta F. Kasper, Ph.D.is Associate Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College/CUNY. She regularly teaches content-based courses with an Internet component.
Reports of her work have appeared in a number of national and international journals among them, TESL- EJ, ITESL-J, English for Specific Purposes, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College. She is the author of two content-based texts, Teaching English through the Disciplines: Psychology (2nd ed.)(Whittier, 1997) and Interdisciplinary English (2nd ed.)(McGraw-Hill, 1998). She is presently at work on an edited volume, Content-Based College ESL Instruction, for Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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