Reactions to "Discovery of Competence"

I enjoyed reading this book in that it outlines at the very beginning the thrust of it's perspective: "(to) draw students into the academic community and help them discover their competence as writers and the relationship between what they know and what and how they will come to know". It's a very meta-cognitive, personal approach to teaching and learning, in my view. It's more empowering and inclusive, hopeful, than other views we've reviewed in the course. Students already possess skills to learn and comprehend, but the instructor acts as a guide to help them further develop their skills and to hone them.

Competence is not about learning grammatical structures, but about ideas and meaning making. It involves active engagement in a community. How we acquire language is that it is based in our environment, and perceived needs - the grammatical structures are formed eventually as we make mistakes and adjust. Learning a second language (English) should be no different.

I feel the course they are laying out is expressive and socio-cultural (McCormick) in that it draws on how students learned their first language (if English is their second) in determining how to teach English to them. In this way, it is more natural and organic, about ideas and meaning, as opposed to a rigid, structured way of learning English that some students are subjected to. So, the idea is that students are already competent in their language use, or fluent. The challenge just becomes finding ways to engage them into writing critically in a more academic way.

What I find to be potentially problematic is that it may be overly "expressive". How can we ensure the students are improving and are not merely expressing their opinions? How can we measure their progress as writers? Also, I would have liked more in the way of specifics of their course. What assignments would they give? What texts would they use?

I would adopt from their course to my own the use of narrative texts so they can express themselves and engage with readings that they can relate to, whether the readings are based on anthropology or social sciences, literature or the arts.