Sponsorship Lost in Translation

The ideas of Sponsorship shed light on racial prejudice, discrimination, and the struggles of international students at the university. To be clear, it is not always the university system that is to blame for the unequal distribution of literacy skills at the university, sometimes it is the instructors themselves who refuse to sponsor the literacy practices of students, in particular non-native speaking students. What are the implications for the unequal distribution of literacy skills for second language learners at the university? I’ve been trying to tackle this question for months now, ever since I started writing my thesis. For my thesis, I decided to put together a curriculum for first-year academic writing (or English 130) for second language learners. I started out with the idea that in order for instructors to prepare their students for academic writing, we must help them enter into the discourse of their major fields of study (discussions of genre are also important). Easier said than done. Ofcourse we can ask them to read articles written by scholars in their fields and respond to the same ideas in their own writing, but to enter into this community is a seemingly insurmountable challenge for both students and instructors. For international students, the challenge is even more difficult. From my own experiences teaching English 130 for international students and asking them to enter into academic communities, they have faced unthinkable struggles every step of the way. One of the first assignments I have the students do is interviewing a professor in their field to talk about the kinds of writing that goes on in their field, the different roles of writers, and, in essence, what it looks like to be a professor in say Mechanical Engineering (or even to be a Mechanical Engineer). In preparation for this assignment, we put together questions for the interview as a class. Each group (separated by disciplines) also has an opportunity to come up with more specific questions that they would like answered or that are more appropriated for the field their interviewee is a part of. We then workshop the questions, first focusing on the types of questions that the students are asking and then editing the questions for grammatical errors, etc. (as a last step). The students are understandably nervous about this assignment from the very first day it is introduced in class, but after the interview questions are discussed and workshopped in class the students feel a little more confident about the assignment itself. Their feelings about it once they begin planning out the interviews, are completely dependent on the responses they receive from their major advisers and interviewees. There have been countless occasions in which the people contacted about these interviews respond in such a negative way that the students are obviously discouraged and hesitant about meeting with their professors ever again. This is so unfortunate since this is one of the only opportunities, early on, that these students are able to gain insight into their majors. Also, since one of the ways students continue to be successful in school is forming and maintaining close relationships with their professors, students are at an extreme disadvantage when they are afraid to send an e-mail for fear of “irritating” their instructors with indirect messages and grammar errors. Instructors lose the opportunity to sponsor their students’ developing literacy skills and students continue to be at an extreme disadvantage to their peers throughout their academic careers.