Connecting Speaking and Writing

The connection between speaking and writing is crucial to learning a second language. I think that literacy educators never really pay much attention to these two interconnected skills because of the fact that it has been coined as one-on-one conferencing. Also, we have not realized of how much we can write after we discuss our ideas and/or concepts with other people.

As Williams has discussed in her Chapter 1, writing center is a site that this research can certainly grow and will, I believe, play an important role in the future. Writing centers always try to find out how much tutors can help students in revising their writing and helping with their papers when they come to the centers.

However, I still think that writing and speaking skills are incomparable in term of language production. We cannot expect students, especially L2 learners, to experiment new forms in writing if we still use grammatical drills or textbooks with writing formats. In those contexts, students will always think writing as rigid rules because they will think that writing they produce need to be grammatically correct. Though the attempt has been made to encourage these L2 students to be less worried about this issue as grammatical issue can be dealt with in the last draft, they still insist (and sometimes resist) to the idea. This is the reason why I think that creative writing is a great start for L2 students to produce because the form is literally ignored (i.e. in poetry writing).

Another interesting connection between speaking and writing is the concept of intertextuality. Intertextuality is the use of other people's words, ideas, and concepts to build our own credibility to our claims in speaking and writing. This skill is crucial for doctoral students simply because they need to conduct their professionalism in the future through research and publications--conferences and journals. They need to think about how to enter into the conversation and this intertextuality is the key for doctoral students to do so.

It is interesting to see students' interactions through online comments and discussion in Seloni's chapter. These students are in the quest of negotiation to add their own voices in their writings. By adding their voices, they want to add their own ideas and thoughts into the writing, which in a sense it is legitimate to do so. There are two strategies in doing so, which I think they are useful for the future as well. First, these students need to read widely on the topic they are working on. By knowing the literature, students will be able to see gaps that they can add their voices in. Second, they also need to develop their own authority by start publishing. I believe these two strategies will certainly be the start to add multiple voices into the literature.