Writing From Different Angles: Julian’s Linguistic Journey From a Kenyan Village Primary School To an American University
Christopher Garth, Japan
Christopher Garth is an EFL instructor at Toyo University in Tokyo. He has taught English in Taiwan, the United States, and Japan, and has been an instructor for students from 3 to 83 at all possible skill levels. He is interested in role-playing games for use in and out of the classroom.
E-mail: christopher091@toyo.jp
Menu
Introduction
Primary school
Secondary school
An American English language institute
Freshman composition
Reflections
Julian (pseudonym) was a 20 year-old Maasai man from Kenya who has been studying at a large, Midwestern American university for just over one year at the time of this interview. He was required to take one writing class through the university’s English Language Institute the year before this interview, and was enrolled in a freshman composition course (focused on writing and American culture) when this interview took place. He began learning English in Kenya in a village primary school and continued to take required English classes throughout his academic career until he arrived at university in the United States. These years of English study were concurrent with study in his native dialect, Maasai, and the other official language of his country, Swahili. According to Jullian, his experiences in formal language education were not necessarily representative of the whole of the Kenyan population, but he believed that they did embody the national government’s intended course of study for children and its focus on development of a large English speaking population to foster international business opportunities.
Children in Julian’s village start learning to write in Maasai when they are between four and five years old. They start with basic letters and move on to forming simple words. Activities might include writing of the student’s own name, family members’ names, names of animals, and names of agricultural tools and products. Julian noted that there was a definite emphasis on learning to write the names of animals and implements used in caring for livestock in the Maasai dialect because they are part of a pastoral society and therefore integral to everyday life and the traditions of his people. In addition, the students were often read or told traditional stories and asked to write about them in Maasai, though Julian said that he couldn’t recall ever being instructed in any formal manner as to how he should approach these writing assignments. The importance of these stories and traditions was evident in that they were then used as a tool in the learning of the second language taught in his village school, Swahili.
As citizens of a country with two official languages, Swahili and English, Kenyan students begin to learn how to write in the first of these two, Swahili, in their second or third year of village primary school. Julian recalled that his teachers asked them to take traditional stories or articles written in Maasai and, in his words, “translate them into Swahili”. He said that his teachers would ask him and his fellow students to take a particular story and retell it by writing it into Swahili. The idea would be to tell the same story not word for word, but to make sure that all of the main plot details and characters would still exist and the story would still have the same emotional impact. Julian theorized that the teachers wanted them to have topics that they were very familiar with to make the writing easier, or that perhaps they wanted the students to be able to share their heritage with people outside of the Maasai community. In the course of these writing exercises, the teachers would comment almost solely on content as opposed to grammar.
The teachers’ view on instruction of Swahili writing was quite at odds with how they approached English writing. Julian’s English education started in his later years at his village primary school, but writing was limited to grammar exercises. He said that the teachers taught grammar and then asked the students to do fill-in-the-blank sentence activities that were completely devoid of context. Furthermore, they were asked to do a grammar translation variation of the method mentioned above for learning Swahili. Instead of the teachers being paying attention content, in the teaching of English they only wanted the students to directly translate the sentences from Maasai stories into English. Julian commented that he thought it was odd that English was treated in such a different way from Swahili and that he thought this robotic word-for-word translation is what caused many of his classmates to resent learning English.
In middle school, students in Julian’s area of Kenya continued learning how to write in English and Swahili, though the focus for English composition and the feedback that they received changed. Whereas in his village primary school teachers concentrated on grammar exercises and grammar translation, in middle school they asked students to write stories about their personal lives (e.g. time spent with a best friend, interesting things they did in school, family functions). He commented that most of the feedback that students received at this level on these assignments was related to grammar, his example being correct use of tenses. However, there was also an intense a crackdown on the use of “Sheng”. Although in its strictest sense Sheng is a patois of Swahili and English, he said that his teachers were mainly interested in keeping Swahili writing free of words and grammar structures from the pupil’s seven local dialects (though not necessarily free of English words and idioms) and English free from any Swahili or dialectal influence. Again, he noted that this caused resentment among students who would then feel more inclined to use Sheng, in written or spoken form, whenever possible.
At the high school level, Julian said that writing focused exclusively on English and Swahili and that there was a convergence of the techniques used to teach the two. The explicit goal of both subjects was to prepare students for the national exam (the KCSE, or Kenya Certificate for Secondary Education, which determines placement and scholarships for Kenyan universities), which included writing sections in both official languages. There was no formal focus on the mechanics of how to write, and it was assumed that some students possessed the natural talent to be good writers and would prove themselves on the exams while it was hoped that the others would learn through repetition and exposure to the works of notable authors.
Julian explained that students read compulsory short stories, novels, and plays and were often asked to write reports or reactions to them in either Swahili or English. He noted that the vast majority of these works were fiction and the teachers most often requested that the students write about the symbolism and metaphors present in the readings. Three novels, whose names and authors he said were, “burned into my brain”, received great emphasis due to their inclusion on the national exam for high school students: The River Between, by Ngugi wa Thion’o, An Enemy of the People, by Henrik Ibsen, and Shreds of Tenderness, by John Runga. Many writing assignments revolved around the themes present in these works (all three are stories of division and strife amongst neighbors and family) and students were asked to rewrite the stories in a variety of genres, such as poetry, prose, and scripts for short dramatic performance in class. In these assignments, the teachers graded on creativity and personal interpretation more than adherence to any particular writing conventions so determination of structure and organization was left up to the students.
Like many international students coming to study in the United States, Julian took the TOEFL to pass a college English language requirement. He received a 78, which he said was one or two points lower than the writing requirement for his American university. Though his score wasn’t high enough to get him directly into mainstream university writing classes, he did qualify for an EAP writing course. He commented that he was actually quite surprised by the academic orientation of university writing and initially found it a challenge to take a more, in his words, “removed” approach to expressing himself. Even the choice of readings and topics were much different than what he had been asked to write about in Kenya. Julian felt that until that point in time, his writing instruction in both Swahili and English had centered on the writer’s direct expression of his or her emotions and opinions and that those two ideas were integral features of good writing. However, for the most part, he felt as though he was prepared for producing materials for writing class and for assessment, though they weren’t always exactly what the university or his professors wanted in the beginning as a result of his writings’ more personal, opinionated focus.
Despite, or perhaps due to, the apparent discontinuity between Kenyan secondary school and American tertiary school in writing pedagogies, Julian said that an emphasis on structure and organization in his ESL composition course at his American university was something that he really appreciated as part of both a way to develop his writing abilities and as an induction into academic society in the United States. He noted that he felt he lacked the ability to employ and refine specific, repeatable strategies as he approached a writing task and that this often caused him some frustration. It was as though every time he sat down to write he had to reinvent his writing process. He found it helpful to imagine an introduction as a triangle that started broad and then became more specific as it got closer to a thesis statement. Julian also thought it useful to have the concept of topic sentences at the beginning of each paragraph to direct the reader’s attention to main ideas that would be supported within, and finally a conclusion that functioned similarly to an introduction, but in reverse. Though many instructors demonize the classic five-paragraph essay, he explained that he found it as a model that could give structure to his ideas and arguments, making the entire writing procedure less stressful. It also, according to him, aided in his adjustment to what was required of an American student in a writing class or one who was taking an essay exam by giving him an indispensable tool: A quickly applicable formula for easy understanding on the part of the reader.
On the other hand, Julian didn’t believe that peer review was beneficial for him in his ESL writing course. When asked why, he said that his classmates weren’t able to give him very good feedback or provide him with interesting ideas to improve his papers. He liked the idea of students helping each other with their writing and getting different perspectives, but perhaps that particular group of students wasn’t the one best suited for him. Julian was confident in his ability as a creative person and said that he wanted someone to challenge him and propose new interesting topics to include in his work. He remarked that the freshman composition course he was enrolled in would hopefully provide such and opportunity.
Julian reported that he was excited about the mainstream university writing class he was taking this semester and that he views it as a combination of his previous Kenyan writing experiences and what he learned in his ESL writing class at the university. He said that it allows him to use the strategies and structures that he learned in ESL writing while at the same time exploring his creative side that was nurtured in Kenya. He views the “Remix” assignment (converting a piece of writing into another medium) as something that he would have been asked to do by his Kenyan instructors, but from an American perspective. He talked at length about his idea to use a Masaai shield as a cultural artifact as an African man in the United States as a topic for writing, and how he could reinterpret it into another form of expression as part of the remix assignment. He now seems not only to be very comfortable at the prospect of essay writing for a mainstream university class, but also excited.
At the outset of this interview, I was woefully ignorant as to the educational system of Kenya and the writing pedagogy thereof. Coming from a background in teaching students who were almost exclusively Chinese or Taiwanese, it was very enlightening to begin to understand a different approach to EFL teaching. The focus on creativity as well as reflection through writing on metaphor and symbolism in fictional stories is one at odds with my own EFL experiences, in which teaching inference was not something that took center stage. Observing Julian’s experiences and academic success at an U.S. institution from the viewpoints of both his previous instructor and interviewer, it reinforces for me the idea that reading and writing in the classroom are inextricably linked and that reading fiction can provide rich ideas for compositions, which could potentially lead to students finding their voice in writing. However, as Julian himself noted, there is still use for the tried and true model of the five-paragraph essay, regardless of how many times it has been used and how tired we as teachers may be of it. Perhaps a combination of form and meaning in the classroom are what truly makes for the most complete writing pedagogy.
Please check the Methodology and Language for Primary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology and Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Teaching Advanced Students course at Pilgrims website.
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