A film written and directed by Wayne Robertson

Writing Across Borders is a 3-year documentary project funded by Oregon State University’s Center for Writing and Learning (now simply known as the Writing Center) and its Writing Intensive Curriculum Program. The documentary's purpose is to help faculty, writing assistants, and other professionals work more productively with international students in writing environments. The film’s goal is to address some of the most significant challenges international students face when writing for American colleges and universities. In addressing these challenges, it asks the following questions:

  • How does culture play out in writing, and how are our expectations shaped by cultural preferences?
  • 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?
  • What kinds of teaching and testing practices disadvantage international students and which help them improve as writers?

Watch the film in parts on You Tube, courtesy of Towson Writing Center, Towson University. Part 1, Part 2

For those of you who are interested in the DVD, there are clips to preview and a link to the OSU bookstore, where the DVD is on sale. For those of you using the DVD in faculty or staff development, you can find questions and discussion suggestions for the film on in the menu below.

Most people who use the film in writing/tutoring centers are using it as a training opportunity. The following questions are meant to help tutors think specifically about issues that matter most in their work with international students. 

Facilitation Questions:

  • In the film, international students provide a number of cultural differences they have noticed between writing in their home countries and the United States. How has culture played out in your sessions and with student writing? What experiences have you had?
  • What kinds of cultural preferences do you think you have as a writer? Where did those preferences come from? 
  • What do you do when you think you notice a cultural difference in how a student is writing or responding to an assignment? How do you broach the subject? What things do you need to be aware of? 
  • What research-based issues have you noticed in international students' writing? How do you handle those issues? 
  • The second part of the film is about the issue of surface error. While this part of the film is meant for teachers, it is certainly relevant to our work in the writing center. First, what points do Tony Silva and Deborah Healey make about surface error? Second, how does what they say inform how we work with students? 
  • How do you decide how much to work on surface error in the writing center? 
  • Is it ever ok to give students quick fixes? 
  • Some faculty are obviously stricter about surface error than others. The film points out that to be fair in their grading, faculty need to be aware that international students will write with an accent, that they will misuse articles, that they cannot be assessed entirely equally. Some faculty accept accent and grade accordingly while others do not. Do we worry at all about this issue? Is it our problem? How might you counsel students about this issue? 
  • What do we do when we know that a particular faculty member is going to grade according to unrealistic expectations? 
  • The film points out that many surface errors have nothing to do with grammar rules, but rather are lexical in nature and thus require years of advanced memorization through practicing, hearing, and speaking the language. Can you think of any examples of this? 
  • Let's imagine that an international student comes in with a statement of purpose they are using to apply to a graduate program. The student wants you to help her edit the statement so that it sounds exactly like a native speaker has written it. Is there an ethical problem with doing so? Are we fooling the graduate school they are applying to? 

For those of you presenting the film to faculty at your school, you may be presenting to ESL faculty, composition instructors, first-year writing graduate teaching assistants, Writing Across the Curriculum faculty, or any number of different audiences.

The questions below are meant to help you facilitate conversations after viewing the film. They draw on faculty's own classroom experiences and encourage faculty to think through the issues in terms of their own teaching.

Facilitation Questions

  • In the film, international students provide a number of cultural differences they have noticed between writing in their home countries and the United States. How has culture played out in your own classrooms and with student writing? What experiences have you had?
  • What kinds of cultural preferences do you think you have when it comes to writing? Where did those preferences come from?
  • Jean Kaunda, the student from Malawi, talked about her fears of writing about politics. What kinds of issues does that raise for you in your classrooms? How might you deal with that issue with your international students?   
  • What research-based issues have you noticed in international students' writing? How do you handle those issues? 
  • To what extent do you think we should accept cultural preferences even though the students are writing for American classrooms?  
  • How do you approach surface error in ESL student writing? Do you correct a lot, a little, none? What has worked or hasn’t worked so well for you in the past?  
  • One of the ideas mentioned in the film is that many of the errors that non-native speakers make have nothing to do with learning grammar rules, but are instead matters of advanced memorization. How do you handle this issue when working with non-native speakers? What is fair?  

Transcript of the film: WABTranscript.pdf