blog 1 Learning to write

Typically writing was a strength of mine throughout college and I preferred essay questions over multiple choice questions. I have always tried to show students strategies I used. After reading this chapter it has me second guessing how I have been teaching writing in Spanish class because I taught those same strategies on how to write in English for Spanish as well. I hope that the style of writing is similar in both English and Spanish after reading about Kaplan's work on contrastive analysis. I would assume the sociolingustic competence or styles of writing is similar in both Spanish and English (besides the passive versus active voice) compared to maybe Korean and English, but it is something I want to be more aware of now. When teaching writing to English L2 learners, I still want to teach what English readers expect even though it might be different than a language like Korean. I think L2 writers will be more successful writers of English if they go along with the sociolingustic competencies of writing in English versus their own language.  

I think writing occurred from a need to communicate with each other. More sophisticated writing was not as essential for nomadic people, but when civilizations, farming, and cities emerged writing was more essential. These civilizations needed a way to keep track of important matters such as who owed taxes, government business, or laws to govern society. Societies have become more complex so the writing systems have as well.

Again I would like to learn more about the different writing styles or formats that are used in other languages. Also I would like to learn more about the sociolinguistic competencies of other cultures because it is most likely reflected in their writing. The reason for this is that I believe sociolinguistic competence is so important. It is not enough to make good grammatically correct sentences but rather to connect with readers. One way of doing that is by grammatically correct sentences but another way is to not be offensive or to write in a way that connects with the reader. Knowing someones culture can help accomplish this goal.

The diversity of the writing systems could possibly be from the diversity of spoken languages. Depending on how the language was spoken could have a big impact on the best way to go about making up a writing system for that language. I believe people best learn how to use a writing system by learning the grammar rules associated with the language, and by reading in the target language as much as possible in order to reinforce those rules and build vocabulary. Also they are able to see the style or formats that are used by the native speakers when they read. It is wonderful that schools constantly promote that students read. Normally I emphasize how much that is promoted and tell students that if they want to be fluent in Spanish and write well in Spanish it is also important to read lots of books in Spanish.

Being literate in one language is a huge benefit when learning a second language. Of course it is great to start learning another language as a very young child (like 3 or 4 years old) in many aspects including just getting a head start over others, but there are advantages to being older as well. I think that advantage is being literate in your native language. For example, I normally emphasize the large number of cognate categories between English and Spanish. If a student knows the words and meanings of capitalist, feminist, or communist I can teach them that you just add the letter a to the word and that is the Spanish word. A five year old probably does not know the meaning of these words so this strategy would not be effective. They do not have enough literacy in their native language. This is also a good example of how writing in one's native language and second language can be both similar and different. They are similar in that the words are easily recognizable and have the same meaning but they are different in how they are pronounced and spelled.