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Audre Lorde: contextualizing strategies.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Providing contextual background is vital when teaching reading (and writing) to normative speakers of English. Moreover, contextualizing activities themselves are a rich source of creative reading and writing assignments, and they are especially useful for linking offline and online learning. Therefore, this paper presents and discusses contextualizing activities based on Audre Lorde's "That Summer I Left Childhood Was White." It demonstrates how a focus on the Emmett Till case, Jim Crow laws, and the question of silence can be pedagogically effective in the ESL classroom.

Introduction

The pedagogical issues and activities I will discuss clearly originate in a variety of research and studies pertaining to overall ESL reading comprehension. For example, Tang and Moore (1992) emphasize the importance and effectiveness of using pre-reading activities with ESL students, while Richgels (2002) discusses the necessity of providing background knowledge to the students before beginning actual reading instruction. Both Kitao (1990) and Drucker (2003) focus on the applications of schema theory to the ESL classroom, arguing that reading comprehension involves more than just linguistic understanding and that it should rightfully be seen as an interaction between text and prior knowledge of the topics referenced in the text. In my view, the theoretical case for the importance of contextualizing activities is quite persuasive, so my intention in this paper is to concentrate on applications. Thus I have intentionally adopted an anecdotal, narrative approach.

The American University of Sharjah has a four semester composition sequence required of all students. The first two courses in the sequence are Communication (COM) 101--Academic Writing--and Communication (COM) 102--Reading and Writing Across the Curriculum. The Com 101 and 102 sequence closely parallels a standard first-year writing program in the United States. Both courses are based on process writing, with the focus on argumentative/persuasive essays. The primary difference between Com 101 and Com 102 is that in Com 102 the students move from personal opinion to more research-based documented writing, reading and critiquing a variety of texts and constructing their own arguments accordingly.

The students in a Com 102 class typically write three 1000-word essays in the course of the semester. Teachers can choose the genres they wish to assign and concentrate on, but the first essay is usually some kind of narrative while the latter two essays are nonnarrative (for example, an evaluation and a position paper). In any case, the student essays always follow close readings of various writers anthologized in the Com102 textbook--the sixth edition of Rise...