Helping our students become multicompetent academic writers
Carol Rinnert
From a three-hour presentation delivered in half the time, we got an impression of what is involved in researching the development of English writing abilities among EFL students in Japan.
In the U.S. Rinnert was teaching composition at Boise State University and researching Japanese writers there, finding they tended to go from specific to general, in contrast to their American counterparts. She came to Japan and teamed up with Hiroe Kobayashi at Hiroshima University, encountering new trends in multilingualism, with a tendency to downplay the hitherto favored focus on monolingual mastery of the target language and the realization that intercultural speakers and writers are potentially superior role models. Attention is shifting to Vivien Cook's (1991) notion of multicompetence (the compound state of a mind with two grammars) as a standard of evaluation.
Results were reported of Rinnert and Kobayashi's long-term, multi-stage research project and their implications for improving multicompetent academic writing. Diagrams illustrated essay structures in three different languages as demonstrated by different writers; "think-aloud" techniques helped show changes over time and how repertoires of writing knowledge expand and are internalized. Discussion followed regarding adaptation of this model and implications for teaching, such as goals and methods of writing instruction.
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