Documentary Blog Post

I think the main idea of the documentary was to see how culture plays a role in writing. How are our expectations shaped as a society by cultural preference? How do we assess international student writing when we have to grade it alongside the writing of native speakers and how can we think about surface error in a fair and constructive manner? As said in the documentary, Americans will introduce the main point, say what they want to say in the beginning and then develop. In places like Ecuador they don’t put the point at the beginning. They go around it then talk about the main idea in the middle. This is called circularity. For example, in the film it mentioned that if a fight broke out at a party, a person from America would say exactly this and then give supporting details. However, a non-native speaker might say something about how the one boy who was involved in the fight dated this person and give more background information about the people, rather than state upfront what happened. I don’t know if this will ever change because families teach their families that this is culturally acceptable to either talk excessively about something or go straight to the point. I do think that a listener would be more engaged in a conversation if the speaker went straight to the point like native speakers of English do because I personally would get lost in the Ecuadorian way of giving way too much information up front.

In Vietnam, students are penalized for going outside of the classroom and trying to get extra academic information other than what they are taught by their professors. Extra information and student’s own opinions don’t seem to be valuable. For example, a student got marked down for talking about how peaceful outside was because she was doing “creative writing”. This honestly shocks me because in order to understand the English language, I believe that students should learn all types of different writing. After taking an Advanced Composition class, it pulled me out of my comfort zone and made me write in a way that I never would have. It also helped me realize that I might want to be an author someday. But how can these students in Vietnam expand their horizons in the writing field if they are only taught one way of writing? It’s like the five paragraph essay. It is instilled in the brains of English native speakers in America for over 5 years until a student attends a university and learns that the five paragraph essay is not acceptable and it’s not the only way to write successfully. The American system of writing can be stricter than the Turkish system, if that is hard to believe. I have had the “12 point font, double spaced, one inch margins” banged over my head for years, and the “period trick” won’t work because my professors said they have all done it before.

Most professors know that international students know they are having a hard time while writing in the classroom. They are kind, however the problem is is that they are not acting as they are thinking. They know these students are having problems but are not doing anything about it. We are hoping that their behavior will be same as their thoughts and expectations. We as teachers require empathy for students coming from different countries and realizing how much intelligence they may have on different topics. Just because they might not be able to write in grammatically correct English doesn’t mean they aren’t smart individuals.