Foreword, Letter to Our Readers & Twenty Minutes of Fluency

07/09/07

Foreword
It was interesting to understand how the The Quarterly has changed along with the foundations of the NWP. As Professor Sarah Warshauer Freedman talks about the humble beginnings of the publication and then brings it full circle to the new digital format you can only but wonder, what other wonderful things future technology holds?

Letter to Our Readers: Endings and Beginnings
“The end is where we start from,” this quote by T. S. Eliot is a suggestive affirmation of the NWP’s future. As long as there is an end the NWP will duly rise up to the occasion and make a new beginning out of it. The end of the paper publication only marked the beginning of the new digital one.

Twenty Minutes of Fluency—A Test
More than a test this proved to be truly a challenge; I can truthfully put myself in the shoes of those students. As today I was asked to write responses in the allotted time of 10-15 minutes, given I already had a point of reference even a literary style to copy. The students in the article were only given a prompt and then create a response that, could possible yield a ‘4’? I couldn’t do it. As James Gray stated in the article, only but a few of the students were able to accomplish this task. Instead of me wanting to run and do this test on my ELL students, it makes me think of the many times I have asked the same from them. Really, an eye opener for me.