For the last two years, Johnson has been an English Language Fellow at the Institute for English Language Teacher Education (IELTE) at the Uzbek State University of World Languages, where he has taught numerous courses and helped his colleagues design and develop materials for a series of four writing courses.

Johnson emphasizes the role of process in the teaching of writing, and he says that students need to take their compositions through several drafts and receive feedback from their teachers and from other students as they work to complete their writing assignments. Thus, helping students develop a productive writing process is at the heart of the new writing curriculum.

Since February, Johnson has offered many seminars on this process-oriented approach. He has visited universities and institutes all over Uzbekistan and worked with hundreds of English teachers. These seminars have taken him to Jizzakh, Angren, Samarkand, Karshi, Namangan, Andijan, Bukhara, Urgench, and Nukus, and he hopes to finish his tour in Termez. At each stop, the teachers have received information about the new writing curriculum at IELTE and some of the materials that Johnson and his colleagues developed.

“With these 8-hour and 12-hour programs, I’m trying to introduce university teachers to the art of teaching composition. I’m giving them the basics concepts and materials they need to start teaching composition in a different way,” Johnson said. He hopes that after participating in his workshops, teachers have a better understanding of what composition is and how they might more effectively teach it. Most of all, he hopes that they will try to use the many concepts and materials he has shared with them.

Many students, Johnson said, have a very unproductive personal writing process: when they get a writing assignment, they wait until the last minute, and then crank something out as fast as possible. In their haste, they usually make many mistakes, and the quality of their work suffers.

The traditional product-oriented approach to teaching composition does nothing to change this type of behavior. But when teachers use a process-oriented approach, their students write several drafts of the assignment and improve their compositions step by step. Students have time to develop their ideas, and they learn to solve problems as they revise their work.

Johnson talks about the impact that the two different approaches can have on a student with weak writing skills. If her teacher is using a product-oriented approach, the student will probably receive a low grade on the assignment, learn little from it, and continue to think she’s a terrible writer. But if her teacher’s approach is process-oriented, she will have the chance to work on her assignment and to improve it with the help of her teacher and peers. In the end, she will come away with two things—a grade that reflects her true ability if she makes an effort, and the feeling that she is a successful learner and can become a skillful writer.

In the seminars, Johnson and the English teachers consider an essay’s many facets: its purpose and intended audience; its thesis and the development of supporting ideas. He and the teachers go far beyond the grammatical elements of composition and talk about ways of helping students find and develop the ideas that go into their essay. They also talk about how to change negative attitudes toward writing and create a classroom environment that is positive and encouraging.

During his travels for the seminars, Johnson has stayed with some host families and been to many places that few foreign visitors ever see. He spoke about the enthusiasm of the teachers in Angren and Namangan and Urgench, about how excited he was to get the chance to teach in Karshi, and of the heart-warming welcome he received when he visited a school in a village near Andijan.

“It has been incredible, an absolutely incredible experience for me,” he said. “It’s a genuine pleasure to share the knowledge I’ve gained over the years.”

The U.S. Embassy in Tashkent has sponsored several English Language Fellows in the years since Uzbekistan’s independence, but Johnson was the first since 2005. Two new English Language Fellows – one to be hosted by IELTE in Tashkent and the other by Urgench State University – are scheduled to arrive for the 2010-2011 academic year. Johnson said he was certain that these new EL Fellows will have an unforgettable experience.