The ones we don't know we don't know

Although teaching English to Chinese students no doubt presents a Gordian knot of linguistic and cultural obstacles through which many a Westerner hath tried in vain to cut, my first weeks of teaching have been partially consumed by a more familiar but perhaps more more inscrutable question: how does one "teach" writing? Half of my course load this semester involves instructing junior English majors in "advanced writing," a term which, it has been made clear to me, means basically whatever I want it to mean. My students' English writing, much like their speaking, lingers in that predictable limbo between stiltedness and proficiency, where the vast majority of second-language learning withers away for all eternity. My task is not only to improve their internal sense of what correct English sounds like out loud, but also to bestow upon them the elusive knack for English writing that even many Americans lack. Most of my students are painfully reticent in class but eager in their work, and I suspect that they have already realized the truth that a foreign culture whispers to its newcomers: teaching could not exist without learning, and not the other way around.