6. Myth of Monolithic Academic Discourse Community

To understand the challenges ESL students face in content-area courses, it is important for students and faculty to acknowledge that there is no university-wide definition of good writing. Leki describes a study in which students and faculty were asked to rank the same essays: Out of 29 ESL writing, non-ESL writing, and content-area faculty, the ranking of essays varied. More important, even faculty using the same criteria disagreed. She observes that "the faculty members were not very consistent among themselves, that criteria for rank ordering the essays varied fairly widely, and that even with the same stated criteria, faculty differed in their identification of those criteria in specific essays" (Leki "Good" 23).

As Leki points out, there are "many discourse communities subsumed under the term academic, each community with its own set of expectations for students, and certainly also professional, texts" (Leki "Good" 42). Anthropologist Geertz' work points to the variety of discourses in academic communities which he calls "intellectual villages" (161), and which Leki describes as "complete with local and sometimes parochial standards tenaciously adhered to" ("Good" 45).

If students assume the existence of a universal idea of good writing, and the existence of a monolithic academic discourse, and faculty, both in writing and content-area courses, do not help students to become aware of the variety of discourse in the academic community, then all students, especially ESL students, will remain confounded.

No one single writing course could possibly teach students about the multiple discourses in the academic community. It is important that content-area faculty teach their students not only what makes good writing in that discipline, but also why: "We have an obligation to our students to make our standards as explicit as possible, while realizing at the same time that even with explicit criteria for good writing, there is much that will remain implicit and, therefore, difficult for our students to comprehend and respond to" (Leki "Good" 40).

In other words, faculty must work to make the implicit explicit concerning the expectation of good writing in their disciplines, and the assumptions that inform those expectations.