About

charles

I'm Charles Nelson, an assistant professor of ESL writing at Kean University, Union, NJ, USA, and I've been here teaching first-year and second-year composition to non-native speakers of English--mostly immigrants who have attended U.S. public schools--since September, 2002. Before that, I taught basically the same course to international students at The University of Texas at Austin (1997-2002) and a mix of reading and writing to students in the Preparatory Program of Marmara University, Istanbul (1990-1994).

Teaching first-year composition to non-native speakers of English and researching how people learn in general, and more specifically learn to write, is a lot of fun. Much of this fun is trying to formulate a theory to guide my practice. Theories influencing me considerably are radical constructivism (Ernst von Glasersfeld), activity theory (Yrjö Engeström), and complexity theory (John Holland). None of these theorists research second language writing; however, their theories have great potential to help us understand, rather than merely describe, how students learn to write.

Thus, I'm very much interested in how technology can facilitate students learning: learning to read and write, learning other languages, and learning in general. One important point is to keep the learning in the forefront and the technology in the background. Technology should support our learning goals, not be the learning goal. And technology should not simply replicate what we're already doing in the classroom. It's too expensive for that. Rather, we need to take advantage of technology's affordances in promoting interaction and social learning.