Learning a New Language = Academic Writing

I've been intrigued this semester with Alice Horning's theory of Standard Written English as a Second Language. And although I feel that her theory has some major holes in it, I've found that it has really helped me in relating to my student's writing as we moved from the Memoir to the Critical Analysis and now on to the Research paper. A lot of GAs have mentioned that they have moved the Memoir later in the semester because they feel it takes a stronger grasp on writing to be able to sucessfully complete the Memoir with a significant amount of reflection built in, and I agree that that may be the case, but I still like to do the Memoir first, and get those frist drafts right off the bat, so that I can get a sense of the student's storytelling voice, first and foremost, before jumping into a further academic sort of writing. The first draft on this paper, for me, could truly be called a 'rough draft' in that I ask that they do not make any corrections or edits on thist first draft until after it has been workshopped by me and the other students. This would ideally let me see the most raw form of each student's writings and kind of get an idea of where they are. And it works up to an extent. There are always students that surprise you going both ways, either they take to the critical analysis very well or find it to be almost intrusive to their lives. This latter is where Horning's theory usually can come in to play. By allowing these students to do the Memoir first, I can show it to them when they are having difficultly on the Critical Analysis and tell them, 'yes, you do know how to write, it's just a different kind of writng now.' I try to get them to see the authority with which they wrote their Memoir and try to rediscover that when they are writing the Critical Analysis. It's hard, and most of them never believe that they should have the authority to say whether a text is achieving it's goal or not, but usually they will come around. Even if it means writing the Critical Analysis as an 'I' paper ('I' paper being "in my opinion" or "i think") first and then going back through and removing all of those I's. And perhaps, even in my teaching I haven't fully conveyed Horning's theory to my students, it helps me to remember a little bit about taking that first step into academic writing, gives me a little more sympathy.