Teaching College Reading and Writing Skills to Hindi-speaking Post Graduate Students
Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Chair India Project Statement
by Jilani Warsi
Opening Statement As a Fulbright Scholar, I plan to teach North American academic reading and writing skills to native Hindi speakers studying for a Master’s in English at a university in India. The proposed course would introduce Indian students to reading and writing as cognitive problem-solving processes by which readers and writers actively use phonological, syntactic, and semantic cues in order to comprehend written text and place it within a framework of their prior knowledge, expanding their knowledge further, and produce written work that adheres to the linguistic conventions of North American academic written discourse. I hope that the course would teach Indian students through the combination of holistic and skills-based approaches, to become independent, confident, and lifelong readers and writers. I intend to approach reading and writing skills with an applied linguistic perspective in which I was formally trained in the US. I believe such an approach is realistic, most enjoyable, and exciting for students. In addition to teaching the proposed course to the students, I also wish to offer a series of workshops to university faculty, focusing on assessment with the goal of improving teaching and learning through intentional dialogue about assessment among practitioners; of creating a collaborative, dynamic, and continuous assessment process that engages faculty and personnel across the institution in the cultivation of student success; of utilizing assessment to improve from within while maintaining a documentary record that demonstrates this improvement to the community; of balancing the assessment process between a meaningful and thoughtful practice, which is part of what educators do daily.
Project Overview This project is based on the assumption that designing curricular objectives is pivotal to student success, especially in acquiring reading and writing skills in the English language. If the curricular objectives are clearly stated at the outset of English courses and measurable learning outcomes are explained in advance, students can work toward acquiring them. The goal is for both faculty and students to understand how course outcomes, when assessed, can determine student learning as part of the overall program outcomes. Another goal of the project is to discuss with faculty how to develop and teach the curriculum and provide evidence of the curriculum’s effectiveness through assessment. Surveys and interviews will be administered to both faculty and students to determine their knowledge and understanding of the importance of measuring learning outcomes and how the information obtained from assessment can be used to improve student learning and ultimate success.
Why India? India is a linguistically diverse country where several languages and dialects are spoken, and English serves as a lingua franca, a common means of communication. However, English is taught in India under conditions that are far from being satisfactory. It is a fact that despite studying English in schools and colleges for about 6 – 8 years, students, especially coming from rural backgrounds, do not acquire communicative competence in the English language. I teach remedial reading and writing courses in the English Department at Queensborough Community College, City University of New York and have students from India who struggle with completing reading and writing assignments. For example, they have serious gaps in their reading comprehension and do not identify the author’s main idea, fail to recognize the supporting details, and have difficulty making inferences. Similarly, Indian students find it difficult to write the academic essay with an introduction containing a circumscribed thesis statement, develop the central idea in the body paragraphs using both major and minor details, and write a concluding paragraph, summarizing the main points of the essay and restating the thesis statement. They make assumptions that their knowledge is shared by the reader and structure information in their essays in a circular way, not realizing that in the English language, the writer is expected to assume predominant responsibility for effectively communicating his ideas to the reader. In the Hindi language, the national language of India, however, the reader is expected to be able to infer meanings which the writer has not communicated explicitly. Clearly, since the expectations of the Indian writer and the North American reader, regarding reader/writer responsibility are different, effective communication may be impaired. Furthermore, I was born, raised, and educated in India and received a Master’s in English from Patna University before immigrating to the US for higher education. I studied applied linguistics formally at Boston University and received my Ph.D. Since then, I have been a visiting professor in the International Education Programs at Framingham State University, teaching graduate courses in general linguistics, first and second language acquisition, teaching English as a second or foreign language, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and phonology and morphology in Europe, Central America, North America, and Asia. However, I have never had the opportunity to share my acquired knowledge and expertise in language teaching and learning with Indian faculty and students. I believe fervidly that I can make meaningful contributions to the teaching of English in India and give back to my native country. The Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Chair Award would enable me to impart my knowledge of the fundamentals of the English language to my fellow faculty members and students in India.
Teaching Style Description For more than two decades, I have taught a wide range of courses: English as a Second Language (ESL); Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language; Supervision, Staff Development, and Collaborative Leadership; Language Structure: Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics; Language Structure: Phonology and Morphology; Advanced Teaching Strategies; Behavior and Classroom Management; and Seminar in Applied Linguistics. At the Institute for English Language Programs at Harvard University, I won Honorable Mention for excellence in teaching three times and an award for excellence in teaching once because of my ability to understand the different ways in which my students from diverse social, linguistic, cultural, and political backgrounds learned the English language. I am confident and comfortable working with students who come from passive learning backgrounds and who are used to learning through rote memorization, and I have taught various class sizes. Depending on the students’ learning styles and attitude toward learning English, I vary instruction accordingly and make sure that the learning atmosphere is conducive for my students. In my classroom, student-centered learning involves all members of the class consulting as a group on what they need to learn and on how they expect to go about doing so. According to Longman, “students who come to class to learn (rather than to be taught) are more active, take more responsibility for their own learning, take notes, and make a conscious effort to remember.” In this sense, my primary responsibility is to assist my students in setting challenging linguistic goals; in learning how to monitor their progress in reaching these goals; in undertaking useful measures to reach these goals; and in appropriately modifying the goals and procedures as needed.
How Teaching Style Will Be Adapted As I have mentioned previously, I have taught English language courses to non-native speakers of English for more than two decades, so I am cognizant of the issues that impede and/or facilitate successful acquisition of the English language. Throughout my teaching career, I have learned to adapt my teaching style and my English language courses. Knowing that for most students in India, English is not their native language, I speak slowly and clearly when I instruct them in the classroom. Furthermore, I provide specific examples so that my students can learn the concept being taught and welcome feedback by students so that everyone learns to actively monitor the language behavior in the classroom and to comment appropriately upon it. I also encourage students to develop appropriate modes whereby they will request clarification from other students and the instructor so that everyone practices speaking up and using language clearly, and I explain a linguistic point clearly when students ask for clarification. In India, I plan to speak slowly and enunciate vowels and consonants clearly so that my students can understand the most important points of the lesson. I also plan to encourage my students to actively participate in class discussions, as they will learn through investigation and discovery and improve their pronunciation and speaking skills in the English language. I have attached syllabi that show two different types of courses. The first course focuses on academic reading and teaches critical college reading skills such as identifying the main idea and recognizing different patterns of organization. The second course offers the linguistic conventions of academic writing and teaches students how to write a circumscribed thesis statement and expound on it in the body paragraphs writing topic sentences with clear controlling ideas.
Research Methodology Description The two courses I plan to teach will be offered in four weeks. The academic reading course will be taught in two weeks. After that, the academic writing course will be taught in two weeks. The two courses will have the goal of achieving the following curricular objectives:
For Students
Academic Reading
1. Paraphrase and summarize reading passages, both in oral and written form.
2. Determine meaning from context
3. Identify the author’s main idea
4. Recognize the supporting details
5. Making Inferences
6. Recognize both an author’s purpose and tone
7. Distinguish between fact and opinion
8. Evaluate an argument
9. Identify the patterns of organization in a reading
10. Improve multiple-choice test taking ability through a heavy focus on test strategies and question type identification.
Academic Writing
1. Write a circumscribed thesis statement with a central idea that can be developed in the essay.
2. Write a topic sentence with a controlling idea that can be developed in the paragraph.
3. Demonstrate facility in writing analytic, expository, and/or persuasive essays of multiple paragraphs (500 words) that introduce, develop, and conclude the discussion of an essay's topic with a unified, logical, and coherent focus.
4. Demonstrate the logical development of an essay by using transitional words, phrases and sentences variety both within and between paragraphs and between them.
5. Organize body paragraphs so that each paragraph develops one idea and supports the central focus of the essay.
6. Analyze and summarize a variety of texts, identifying and engaging in important ideas from the text and relating these ideas to other readings or personal experiences.
7. Utilize a writing process that includes prewriting techniques, such as brainstorming and free writing.
8. Follow conventions of Standard Written English (SWE), specifically using coordination and subordination to achieve sentence variety as well as an appropriate and consistent level of diction in their essays.
9. Write essays, in and out of class, with minimal global errors, showing a command of sentence boundaries and will be able to write an essay that contains very few local errors related to fragments and/or run-ons, subject-verb agreement, verb tense, pronoun agreement and reference, and basic punctuation and capitalization.
10. Proofread effectively for surface errors such as misspellings, as well as missing or misused apostrophes, articles, possessive nouns, prepositions, and content words.
In both courses, students will be given a pretest and a posttest to measure the learning outcomes and assess student success. In addition, I intend to offer two workshops to the faculty members, primarily focusing on assessment methods and tools. For Faculty: Workshop 1 Workshop 2 Assessment Module #1: Assessment Goals Assessment Module #2: Assessment Methods and Tools
How Research Will Be Disseminated I will disseminate the findings of the projects in journals and national conferences dedicated to the teaching of English to non-native speakers in the US and aboard. I expect that the faculty’s increased sensitivity of the pivotal role of assessment in designing curricular objectives and in measuring learning outcomes will improve student success. I expect that my colleagues at City University of New York and other universities in the US that teach academic reading and writing to linguistically impoverished students will find the findings instructive and exciting. I will also disseminate the findings of my projects in the graduate courses I teach overseas in the International Education Programs.
Outcomes and Contributions I expect that my professional endeavors in India under the Fulbright award will benefit me as a global educator and my students and esteemed colleagues in India, City University of New York and the academic institutions in the US. The award will give me the opportunity to build on my knowledge of applied linguistics, to learn the different ways Indian faculty members teach English courses, especially reading and writing to Indian students, to publish findings of my research in peer-reviewed journals in the US, and to forge an intellectual alliance with my colleagues in India and other parts of Asia. Having taught in the US for more than twenty-five years and overseas for close to two decades, I believe I am ready to benefit from a sabbatical, which will allow me to reflect on my professional career and rejuvenate myself as an intellectual. My college, Queensborough Community College, and City University of New York will immensely benefit from increased faculty performance and professional gratification, and will be proud to be affiliated with the prestigious Fulbright award. Academic institutions will certainly benefit from the findings of the project and shed light on the important role assessment plays in determining student success.
by Jilani Warsi
Opening Statement As a Fulbright Scholar, I plan to teach North American academic reading and writing skills to native Hindi speakers studying for a Master’s in English at a university in India. The proposed course would introduce Indian students to reading and writing as cognitive problem-solving processes by which readers and writers actively use phonological, syntactic, and semantic cues in order to comprehend written text and place it within a framework of their prior knowledge, expanding their knowledge further, and produce written work that adheres to the linguistic conventions of North American academic written discourse. I hope that the course would teach Indian students through the combination of holistic and skills-based approaches, to become independent, confident, and lifelong readers and writers. I intend to approach reading and writing skills with an applied linguistic perspective in which I was formally trained in the US. I believe such an approach is realistic, most enjoyable, and exciting for students. In addition to teaching the proposed course to the students, I also wish to offer a series of workshops to university faculty, focusing on assessment with the goal of improving teaching and learning through intentional dialogue about assessment among practitioners; of creating a collaborative, dynamic, and continuous assessment process that engages faculty and personnel across the institution in the cultivation of student success; of utilizing assessment to improve from within while maintaining a documentary record that demonstrates this improvement to the community; of balancing the assessment process between a meaningful and thoughtful practice, which is part of what educators do daily.
Project Overview This project is based on the assumption that designing curricular objectives is pivotal to student success, especially in acquiring reading and writing skills in the English language. If the curricular objectives are clearly stated at the outset of English courses and measurable learning outcomes are explained in advance, students can work toward acquiring them. The goal is for both faculty and students to understand how course outcomes, when assessed, can determine student learning as part of the overall program outcomes. Another goal of the project is to discuss with faculty how to develop and teach the curriculum and provide evidence of the curriculum’s effectiveness through assessment. Surveys and interviews will be administered to both faculty and students to determine their knowledge and understanding of the importance of measuring learning outcomes and how the information obtained from assessment can be used to improve student learning and ultimate success.
Why India? India is a linguistically diverse country where several languages and dialects are spoken, and English serves as a lingua franca, a common means of communication. However, English is taught in India under conditions that are far from being satisfactory. It is a fact that despite studying English in schools and colleges for about 6 – 8 years, students, especially coming from rural backgrounds, do not acquire communicative competence in the English language. I teach remedial reading and writing courses in the English Department at Queensborough Community College, City University of New York and have students from India who struggle with completing reading and writing assignments. For example, they have serious gaps in their reading comprehension and do not identify the author’s main idea, fail to recognize the supporting details, and have difficulty making inferences. Similarly, Indian students find it difficult to write the academic essay with an introduction containing a circumscribed thesis statement, develop the central idea in the body paragraphs using both major and minor details, and write a concluding paragraph, summarizing the main points of the essay and restating the thesis statement. They make assumptions that their knowledge is shared by the reader and structure information in their essays in a circular way, not realizing that in the English language, the writer is expected to assume predominant responsibility for effectively communicating his ideas to the reader. In the Hindi language, the national language of India, however, the reader is expected to be able to infer meanings which the writer has not communicated explicitly. Clearly, since the expectations of the Indian writer and the North American reader, regarding reader/writer responsibility are different, effective communication may be impaired. Furthermore, I was born, raised, and educated in India and received a Master’s in English from Patna University before immigrating to the US for higher education. I studied applied linguistics formally at Boston University and received my Ph.D. Since then, I have been a visiting professor in the International Education Programs at Framingham State University, teaching graduate courses in general linguistics, first and second language acquisition, teaching English as a second or foreign language, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and phonology and morphology in Europe, Central America, North America, and Asia. However, I have never had the opportunity to share my acquired knowledge and expertise in language teaching and learning with Indian faculty and students. I believe fervidly that I can make meaningful contributions to the teaching of English in India and give back to my native country. The Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Chair Award would enable me to impart my knowledge of the fundamentals of the English language to my fellow faculty members and students in India.
Teaching Style Description For more than two decades, I have taught a wide range of courses: English as a Second Language (ESL); Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language; Supervision, Staff Development, and Collaborative Leadership; Language Structure: Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics; Language Structure: Phonology and Morphology; Advanced Teaching Strategies; Behavior and Classroom Management; and Seminar in Applied Linguistics. At the Institute for English Language Programs at Harvard University, I won Honorable Mention for excellence in teaching three times and an award for excellence in teaching once because of my ability to understand the different ways in which my students from diverse social, linguistic, cultural, and political backgrounds learned the English language. I am confident and comfortable working with students who come from passive learning backgrounds and who are used to learning through rote memorization, and I have taught various class sizes. Depending on the students’ learning styles and attitude toward learning English, I vary instruction accordingly and make sure that the learning atmosphere is conducive for my students. In my classroom, student-centered learning involves all members of the class consulting as a group on what they need to learn and on how they expect to go about doing so. According to Longman, “students who come to class to learn (rather than to be taught) are more active, take more responsibility for their own learning, take notes, and make a conscious effort to remember.” In this sense, my primary responsibility is to assist my students in setting challenging linguistic goals; in learning how to monitor their progress in reaching these goals; in undertaking useful measures to reach these goals; and in appropriately modifying the goals and procedures as needed.
How Teaching Style Will Be Adapted As I have mentioned previously, I have taught English language courses to non-native speakers of English for more than two decades, so I am cognizant of the issues that impede and/or facilitate successful acquisition of the English language. Throughout my teaching career, I have learned to adapt my teaching style and my English language courses. Knowing that for most students in India, English is not their native language, I speak slowly and clearly when I instruct them in the classroom. Furthermore, I provide specific examples so that my students can learn the concept being taught and welcome feedback by students so that everyone learns to actively monitor the language behavior in the classroom and to comment appropriately upon it. I also encourage students to develop appropriate modes whereby they will request clarification from other students and the instructor so that everyone practices speaking up and using language clearly, and I explain a linguistic point clearly when students ask for clarification. In India, I plan to speak slowly and enunciate vowels and consonants clearly so that my students can understand the most important points of the lesson. I also plan to encourage my students to actively participate in class discussions, as they will learn through investigation and discovery and improve their pronunciation and speaking skills in the English language. I have attached syllabi that show two different types of courses. The first course focuses on academic reading and teaches critical college reading skills such as identifying the main idea and recognizing different patterns of organization. The second course offers the linguistic conventions of academic writing and teaches students how to write a circumscribed thesis statement and expound on it in the body paragraphs writing topic sentences with clear controlling ideas.
Research Methodology Description The two courses I plan to teach will be offered in four weeks. The academic reading course will be taught in two weeks. After that, the academic writing course will be taught in two weeks. The two courses will have the goal of achieving the following curricular objectives:
For Students
Academic Reading
1. Paraphrase and summarize reading passages, both in oral and written form.
2. Determine meaning from context
3. Identify the author’s main idea
4. Recognize the supporting details
5. Making Inferences
6. Recognize both an author’s purpose and tone
7. Distinguish between fact and opinion
8. Evaluate an argument
9. Identify the patterns of organization in a reading
10. Improve multiple-choice test taking ability through a heavy focus on test strategies and question type identification.
Academic Writing
1. Write a circumscribed thesis statement with a central idea that can be developed in the essay.
2. Write a topic sentence with a controlling idea that can be developed in the paragraph.
3. Demonstrate facility in writing analytic, expository, and/or persuasive essays of multiple paragraphs (500 words) that introduce, develop, and conclude the discussion of an essay's topic with a unified, logical, and coherent focus.
4. Demonstrate the logical development of an essay by using transitional words, phrases and sentences variety both within and between paragraphs and between them.
5. Organize body paragraphs so that each paragraph develops one idea and supports the central focus of the essay.
6. Analyze and summarize a variety of texts, identifying and engaging in important ideas from the text and relating these ideas to other readings or personal experiences.
7. Utilize a writing process that includes prewriting techniques, such as brainstorming and free writing.
8. Follow conventions of Standard Written English (SWE), specifically using coordination and subordination to achieve sentence variety as well as an appropriate and consistent level of diction in their essays.
9. Write essays, in and out of class, with minimal global errors, showing a command of sentence boundaries and will be able to write an essay that contains very few local errors related to fragments and/or run-ons, subject-verb agreement, verb tense, pronoun agreement and reference, and basic punctuation and capitalization.
10. Proofread effectively for surface errors such as misspellings, as well as missing or misused apostrophes, articles, possessive nouns, prepositions, and content words.
In both courses, students will be given a pretest and a posttest to measure the learning outcomes and assess student success. In addition, I intend to offer two workshops to the faculty members, primarily focusing on assessment methods and tools. For Faculty: Workshop 1 Workshop 2 Assessment Module #1: Assessment Goals Assessment Module #2: Assessment Methods and Tools
How Research Will Be Disseminated I will disseminate the findings of the projects in journals and national conferences dedicated to the teaching of English to non-native speakers in the US and aboard. I expect that the faculty’s increased sensitivity of the pivotal role of assessment in designing curricular objectives and in measuring learning outcomes will improve student success. I expect that my colleagues at City University of New York and other universities in the US that teach academic reading and writing to linguistically impoverished students will find the findings instructive and exciting. I will also disseminate the findings of my projects in the graduate courses I teach overseas in the International Education Programs.
Outcomes and Contributions I expect that my professional endeavors in India under the Fulbright award will benefit me as a global educator and my students and esteemed colleagues in India, City University of New York and the academic institutions in the US. The award will give me the opportunity to build on my knowledge of applied linguistics, to learn the different ways Indian faculty members teach English courses, especially reading and writing to Indian students, to publish findings of my research in peer-reviewed journals in the US, and to forge an intellectual alliance with my colleagues in India and other parts of Asia. Having taught in the US for more than twenty-five years and overseas for close to two decades, I believe I am ready to benefit from a sabbatical, which will allow me to reflect on my professional career and rejuvenate myself as an intellectual. My college, Queensborough Community College, and City University of New York will immensely benefit from increased faculty performance and professional gratification, and will be proud to be affiliated with the prestigious Fulbright award. Academic institutions will certainly benefit from the findings of the project and shed light on the important role assessment plays in determining student success.
Comments
Post a Comment