Cultural Differences in the Classroom

     After reading Silva's article, he highlights the differences in NES and ESL writing in classrooms.  After reading the differences, the results seemed blatantly obvious.  Of course ESL students were going to fall short in nearly every category of writing.  It only makes sense that a person still in the process of learning the English language would struggle more lexically, morphologically, and semantically.  After looking at this study, I realized the most important part was to highlight these differences in the classroom.  While it may be obvious that an ESL student may not perform as well in writing as a NES, a future educator must realize this in his/her classroom.    It is paramount to understand that ESL students need special attention in areas they may be lacking.
      After seeing the dichotomy between ESL and NES students, I followed up with Kubota's story of Barbara. While there may be a large learning gap between NES and ESL students, it is important to look past the essentialist view of cultures and work towards developing an integrated environment where both native and non-native students can work.  Students should not completely abandon the cultural elements they bring to their education, but rather incorporate that element into their own curriculum.  To delve back into the idea of cultural identity, there is no broad identity that can be attributed to students.  Every student brings a unique perspective to the classroom.  To look at their perspective as indicative of a whole culture promotes a very essentialist mindset.