Author Archive for Chihping

Can an Essay a Day Keep One’s Life from Decay?

Published
by
Chihping
on December 9, 2005
in Language and Low-Stakes Writing
. 0 Comments

Can writing have any therapeutic effects? As I am researching on ”literature and science,” a scientific research on the use of language fascinates me–it makes me consider writing from a seemingly unrelated context. A study which was allegedly “the first to test the effects on medical conditions of the writing exercise” appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association and was reported in “Can an Essay a Day Keep Asthma or Arthristis at Bay?” in The New York Times (April 14, 1999: A21). The results of the research show that “writing about traumatic experiences measurably improves the health of some patients suffering from chronic asthma or rheumatoid arthritis,” so reported Erica Goode in the Times.

What I find most interesting is a comment Goode makes in the opening of her article, that the study powerfully demonstrates “how intimately mind and body are linked” and writing serves a big purpose in their interactions. According to the study, the asthma patients in the experimental group were instructed to write about their “deepest thoughts and feelings’” about traumatic experience, while those in the control group wrote down their daily plans, for 20 minutes per day and three days in a row. Reseachers found that

. . . of the 70 patients who wrote about traumatic events, 47.1 percent showed significant improvement in their health at the end of four months, 48.6 percent showed no change and 4.3 percent got worse. In the control group, 24.3 percent showed improvement, 54.1 percent showed no change and 2.6 percent got worse.

It was further noted by the researchers that many patients whose conditions “might have been expected to worsen” unexpectedly improved after writing about stressful experiences.

Four-month length … is about one semester in school. Are we able to observe some sort of ”healing” or improvements in our students, even though we definitely are not treating them as ”patients”?

However we want to ”treat” our students and writing, the implications of the study seem to me to be many-fold. In terms of pedagogy, it makes me re-consider that teaching composition may need to be perceived and designed in a more realistic, human context. That writing is able to change one’s life and it’s just that I have yet to find a way to effect that change. And I imagine that the consideration may also help us guage the level of our attention to and concentration on mechanical and rhetorical aspects more effectively. That is, all kinds of reading assignment and writing exercises will serve a certain purpose that we set forth initially, be it a healing, organizing one’s life, elevating one’s soul, writing for writing’s sake, etc.

On the contrary, after reading this research and writing this blog, I also wonder when do (or will) I transfer the attempt to organize ideas in an essay to actual actions of organizing my life in general? Can I organize my life as the way I organize my writing, to have a thesis? Or better yet, will I have to, since a paper is a paper, life is life? In any event, will the moral of this study be: the more we write, the longer we will live? What would the poet John Keats have to say?

Some Thoughts about Cross-Cultural Communication

Published
by
Chihping
on November 16, 2005
in ESL
. 0 Comments

A recent workshop I sat in struck me in various ways that I almost had a moment of epiphany, a learner’s realization. In that workshop one activity suddenly summoned up my past educational experiences and made me realize that even an unintended moment of communication may surprisingly impact an ESL audience in ways that evoke different cultural habits and thinking patterns that have long submerged into one holistic culture of interactions. Yet that remembrance resurfaced through an exchange based on mutually yet unconsciously kind intensions to get meanings crossed.  And it could happen in an ordinary daily life.

It may begin like this.  Early one morning, as usual, I sat in on one of my tutoring sessions to collect data for my WAC research project. Due to some personal issues the former tutor yielded the floor to the current one, who had to make up all that had been left undone with tutoring and in the meantime get to know the students and new topics of subsequent workshops. Roughly speaking, I sat in mainly for the purpose of observing students’ learning process in order to figure out how the tutoring sessions may be intergrated most effectively into the 2100 class. As usual still, I tried to jot down whatever things that would contribute to that understanding. As the workshop meandered half way through after we (or they) discussed evaluating sources for their research paper, the tutor gave each student an article and asked each to proceed to something very specific and share back.

That was the moment when I felt struck, the moment when all the accumulative effects materialized. He asked them to circle two words they didn’t understand, write two questions, two comments, and two critical marginal notes, the kind of exercise that belongs to conducting a research. What struck me, if never before, was the specificity of the exercise, the instructions. It certainly was not the first time in my life to hear of the instructions or do an exercise so specific; a large part of my past schoolings was taught by English-speaking teachers. And I think when I taught at City Tech I also tried to be specific and gave specific assignment (now when I come to think of it I really need to seriously reconsider that…). Nor did it seem unusual for me to hear people even while they were deliverying speeches use terms and expressions quite straightforward or personal–gesturing toward their friends, etc. However it has not struck me until that moment in the workshop that the kind of specificity and straightfowardness run counter to my Taiwanese/Chinese culture as a whole, which promotes generialization, ambiguity, and understanding through continuous internal workings and realization. That is, crucial things may get hinted at and left unsaid in order for the students to lumber up their mental muscle.

In this way my cultural upbringing encourages kids to think the unthinkable, to do something that goes beyond their age. Oftentimes interpersonal communication also becomes ambiguous since people are accustomed to referring to things in a roundabout way. If you look at a Chinese painting, for instance, a huge empty space may catch your attention; that’s where the meditation should fall. So the ambiguity is the underlying focus of communication and the inherent asthetics of a meditative culture.  In any event the exercise put forward in such a way in that workshop may appear quite natural to many of you and to me most of the time as I become more immersed in this culture; however, at times such as this one I was reminded yet once more of the differences of cultural habit and behaviour just in that seemingly ordinary endeavour, and was wondering if our presence has brought anything into this melting pot, not to mention just the take-out food. But overall, my feelings would be that the workshops I’ve sat in are like cultural enhancers or fusers. They serve as an interface bridging me, an ESL learner, and the new culture, also a mixed kind, in an interesting way. I have yet to find a chance to talk to the tutor about this and am quite curious whether the similar situation has dawned on any ESL students in those workshops.