Mark Sample, professor of Contemporary American Literature and New Media Studies in the English Department at George Mason University, is a smart fellow. I knew that even through the 140-character bursts from his Twitter account, but then he went and wrote this thought-provoking blog post: “Transparency, Teaching, and Taking My Evaluations Public”, the bottom line of which is this statement:

In addition to my research, I believe the other half of my job—teaching undergraduate and graduate students—should be as public as possible. Even if I weren’t an employee of the Commonwealth of Virginia, working in a publicly funded state university, I would still argue that virtually all aspects of my job—what I earn, what I teach, what my students think about my teaching—should be transparent.

Sample goes on to describe how he (and many others, myself included) makes his course material public (online syllabi, assignments, etc) but that students/other instructors/interested parties have no easy way to learn about the effectiveness of his pedagogy—the RateMyProfessors.com “system” is not terribly useful, as he reminds us “these ratings are based upon a professor’s charisma or workload, rather than any kind of systematic statistical data. (Is a chili pepper statistically significant?) These sites tell us what a few self-selected students think about a professor, not what they think about a professor’s teaching.”

Sample’s solution? Post all of his evaluations, “complete with every single enthusiastic or blistering or apathetic student comment.”

My initial thought was “Yes. That’s wonderful. I want to do the same!” Then I remembered I don’t have a job yet. Technically I’m still a PhD student and not even blessed with the magical title of “PhD candidate” yet. Then I said to myself, “self, so what?”

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In my post about multilingual students using L1 in the classroom, I briefly mentioned a translation project that students completed in one of my semester-long versions of English 403 (Professional and Technical Writing for ESL Students) at Washington State University. That reminded me that I bookmarked a blog post from Google last month about changes in Google Translate.

At the ASLE conference in early June, one of the audience questions was about on-the-fly translating services. It wasn’t really as tangential as a question as it might seem; the roundtable was about blogging space and place and I was bringing the technical knowledge, as it were. Essentially, the question was how do we talk about space and place and foster community when we’re only speaking English and on-the-fly free translation software isn’t all that good?

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On Twitter, @englishcomp (Jim Burke) posted a link to Ways of Motivating EFL/ ESL Students in the Classroom, which caught my attention because I was just thinking about my own students and their interactions in their group projects as we finish up this summer session, and thinking about how motivated they are to finish and to do a good job. Looking at the article itself, it’s geared toward a different type of classroom than mine; the issues of motivating students to learn English in the first place, and pedagogical methods for doing so, are not problems I face. I teach Professional & Technical Writing for multilingual writers, in a university setting. These students are already in the States to study at an American university, and they have to achieve certain TOEFL/IELTS scores to matriculate, so from that point forward it’s all about ensuring that they’re learning the material, not necessarily English per se. That’s not to say we don’t talk about academic writing in English, or grammar rules, or idioms and so forth—we do, but supplementary to the core material.

The part of the article that caught my attention was the brief section on using the L1 in the classroom, and how that is a question “which most divides EFL/ESL teachers, whether they are for it or against it.” In my particular situation, and the type of classes I teach, I am for it, because doing so is increasing these students’ skill level in other areas: listening, synthesizing, translating. I preach to them that their multilingual abilities are incredible skills to put front and center on their résumés. Some students in my class have four or five languages in which they are fluent: Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, English is a common configuration. When I tell them those skills are some of the most important that they could have, as a new college graduate, they are usually a little taken aback because I think they’ve had other instructors (including other English instructors) who tell them to be “more American” or tell them “you’re in America, speak in English,” and here I am telling them to embrace the many language skills they have.

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