Imagine being asked to write an essay in a language you don't know well or at all, to have to express yourself--your knowledge and analysis--grammatically and clearly in, say, three to five pages. How is your Spanish, your Urdu, your Hmong?
This is what teachers ask their ELL and multilingual students to do every day in middle and high school, especially in English classes, leading to expectations both too great and too small. Teachers often resort to worksheets and grammar drills that don't produce good writing or allow these students to tap in to their first language assets and strengths. Writing well is a primary door-opener to success in secondary school, college, and the workplace; it's also the most difficult language skill to master. Add writing in a second language to the mix, and the task difficulty is magnified.
In Writing across Culture and Language, Christina Ortmeier-Hooper challenges deficit models of ELL and multilingual writers and offers techniques to help teachers identify their students' strengths and develop inclusive research-based writing practices that are helpful to all students. Her approach, aligned with specific writing instruction recommendations outlined in the NCTE Position Paper on the Role of English Teachers in Educating English Language Learners (ELLs), connects theory to classroom application, with a focus on writing instruction, response, and assessment for ELL and multilingual students. Through rich examples of these writers and their writing practices, along with "best practices" input from classroom teachers, this book provides accessible explanations of second language writing theory and pedagogy in teacher-friendly language, concrete suggestions for the classroom, guiding questions to support discussion, and an annotated list of resources.
Ortmeier-Hooper, Christina: -
Christina Ortmeier-Hooper (Ph.D., University of New Hampshire) is an associate professor of English and incoming Director of the NH Literacy Institutes. She has served as the Director of Composition for the first-year writing program, and she is a leader of the UNH School-University Dialogues on College-Readiness and Writing initiative. She began her teaching career as an English language arts and ESL teacher in the public schools, and her research areas continued to reflect her investment in school-university collaborations, writing teacher education, and immigrant adolescent literacy. At UNH, Ortmeier-Hooper teaches in the undergraduate writing program (first-year writing, introduction to creative non-fiction) and in the English graduate program. At the graduate level, she has taught courses in research methods in composition, second language (L2) writing, literacy and identity, sheltered instruction, the teaching of writing, and composition theory. She has served as chair of the CCCC Committee on Second Language Writing and is the founding chair of the TESOL Second Language Writing Interest Section.
Ortmeier-Hooper has edited four collections focused on research in second language writing, including Linguistically Diverse Immigrant and Resident Writers: Transitions from High School to College (Routledge, 2017 with Todd Ruecker), Reinventing Identities in Second Language Writing (NCTE Press, 2010 with Michelle Cox, Jay Jordan, and Gwen Gray Schwartz) and The Politics of Second Language Writing: The Search for a Promised Land (Parlor Press, 2006 with co-editors Paul Kei Matsuda and Xiaoye You). Her work has also been published in English Journal, TESOL Journal, the Journal of Second Language Writing, and College Composition and Communication. Her books include The ELL Writer: Moving Beyond Basics in the Secondary Classroom (Teachers College Press, 2013) and Writing Across Language and Culture (National Council of Teachers, 2017).
