Response to Hillocks

Response 3 Reflective Practice
Arthur T. Zheng
9/14/2009

Everything I read recently about theorizing the practice of writing and teaching writing has been inspirational because over the past years I had been mainly concerned with practice. I was engaged in trying out new methods and strategies to make my classes work in efficient and interesting ways. What I often overlooked and now realized as an exciting and meaningful part of teaching writing has been with theorizing.

An example from my class of English Writing to sophomore English majors involved students’ translating from Chinese to English in the process of writing. It was frustrating to me to read passages in which I could easily discern traces of Chinese diction, syntax, and ways of thinking. All the writing techniques I introduced in class seemed to them either irrelevant or beyond understanding.

Whether or not should translation be allowed into the process of productive writing in English? If yes, when and where should translation take place? What percentage of the writing process should involve translation from the native language?

My investigation into students’ assignments produced as a result of translation revealed that students were not actively involved in the writing process to form, organize, and express their ideas. They were also “sluggishly” comfortable when using their mother tongue. In view of the results, I formed a preliminary frame of the situation: students may need to be comfortable with expressing in English; and they should be actively participating in the process of English writing.
The problem probably lied in the amount and content of translation. When students expressed in Chinese their ideas about the assignment topic, they were not doing enough in getting English information about the topic and the larger context in which the topic was made meaningful. Even though students had done translation, confusion of ideas and corresponding languages were evident in their passages. However, through translation students did arrive at a passage in English. Even though there were insufficient understanding of the topic and improper use of the language, it sounded likely that translation could prove a transitional approach to proficiency in English writing.

To prove the hypothesis, I designed a section in the class in which students were divided into group pairs of 2 or 3, with one group being responsible for translating passages that were related to major aspects of the topic and the other group reading about the topic in English. Then, in a group meeting, students were asked to contribute their understandings of the topic from different angles and compare translation from one group with reading from another. Each one of them many still feel insufficient in their response, but with a comparative framework installed in the group student could assess whether their translation was correct or not. Each member ended up learning more about both the topic and the words and expressions associated with the topic. In their writing afterwards, they started to get out of the translation process and put in their own ideas and use the words and expressions they learned from the group meeting. As the activities went on, students finally began to think in English and produce considerable quality in their assignments.

While Hillocks confirmed my experiments in the writing class as meaningful as a reflective practice, I still have some questions about the concept and theory of reflective practice as illustrated in “Chapter 2”. The term “reflective practice” seems to place teaching writing in between “routine” and the work of a pure theorist. Also it sounds too easy a job to just consider new ideas in teaching writing “in the light of some organized body of assumptions and knowledge”. The author seems to stop at relating experiments in the classroom and ideas formed out of the process of discovering, hypothesizing, and solving problems in teaching writing to certain frameworks of philosophy. However, as teaching and learning are in the center of human cognitive activities, it is likely that we teachers of English composition could be seriously involved in philosophical theorizing in the first place. Why shouldn’t we be producing, instead of using passively, a whole body of philosophy? To describe teaching writing as a reflective practice is insufficient in summarizing the whole lot of theorizing involved in the active process of teaching.

Hillocks also downplays the role of what he describes as “routine” in the teaching of writing. Though fixed content and structure of a teaching process are insufficient to address new problems and situations, it is reasonable to organize a set of practices that have undergone testing in practice under such titles as a national curriculum. The collective knowledge in teaching writing does have a core, which, of course, is constantly renewed and adjusted to changing conditions.

In sum, I would call for more rigorous experiments in the process of teaching writing and more theorizing. Do not stop at a reflective practice.