Writing Unit
While all
language skills are essential to success for ESL clients, to progress
academically, writing skills generally become the most important and require
the most effort on the part of the learner.
Writing skills are essential for test-taking, essays, applications for
entrance to work and further education and are critical for work-related
advancement. For an overview of Second
Language Writing acquisition, please see the Tapestry Series, The Tapestry of Language Learning: The Individual in the Communicative
Classroom by Robin Scarcella and
Rebecca Oxford, Heinle & Heinle Publishers.
It’s always very usual to try to find patterns in the errors you see in
the papers. Here are some common errors. The process of error analysis is covered from a Basic Writing
perspective in Myna Shaughnessy’s Errors
and Expectations.
Articles
Conditionals
Fragments
Gerunds and infinitives
Modals
Direct/indirect Objects
Prepositions
Perfect aspect
Prepositions
Run-ons, including use of semi-colon
Subject/verb agreement
Subordinate clauses
Prepositions
Word forms
Teachers
and native English speakers often ask why essays by ESL learners look the way
they do – full of word order, verb tense, missing or wrong parts of speech
(articles, noun instead of adjective).
Three concepts are useful in considering why the writing of ESL learners
looks the way it does:
Adapted from http://www.as.ysu.edu/~english/whattodo.html
1.
Interlanguage:
The old model of behaviourist transfer of habits from the first language to the second does not accurately describe the process of learning a language. Students instead go from their first language to their second/third, etc. through an interlanguage, a natural language that has its own rules. Whether the first language is Chinese or Spanish, all learners go through the same processes and stages, though first language may affect the length of stay in each stage. ESL makes a distinction between "errors" and "mistakes." Errors are glimpses into interlanguage. They are consistent and stage sensitive. Mistakes are slips, performance errors. So you first have to see if the student really knows the rule, but isn’t using it right now (a mistake) or if the student has a different conception of the rule (an error).
2.
Transfer:
While transfer
is not the whole story, some things are indeed transferred from the first
language to the second. Russian and Japanese speakers will have trouble with
articles because they do not have articles in their native languages, for
example.
3.
Contrastive Rhetoric:
Robert Kaplan began the field of Contrastive Rhetoric more than thirty years ago. He claimed that different language families had different rhetorical structures. While Kaplan wrote that written American English goes from point A to point B, Asian languages, he argued, are more likely to "go in circles." This claim has been accepted in outline, though most people feel students write the way they do because of their schooling, not because of some mysterious Sapir-Whorfian[1] structure in their brain. The specifics have been argued extensively. Many would claim that the classic patterns are being abandoned and that most people are taught to write in a linear fashion in high school throughout the industrial world. Depending on your students’ educational background, this may or may not be the case.
Styles of Paragraph Development, based on Kaplan, 1966
English Semitic Oriental Romance Russian
According to
Kaplan, English speakers usually study facts first, then present a conclusion and support it with facts and
details. Semitic speakers like to present ideas symmetrically, preferring long sentences joined by
correlative conjunctions and repetition.
The Semitic writing style is closer to the oral end of the writing
spectrum as they prefer to express
opinions through personal appeals and emotions. Asian speakers usually
provide a great deal of supporting
details believing that with enough details the reader can conclude what the main idea is. Romance
language speakers incorporate and tolerate a greater degree of tangential information in their
writing. Russian speakers prefer to present a theory then argue and study facts within that theory.
While Kaplan has revised the findings of his study in recent years,
ideas about structuring information, language use and communication style have
formed as a result of his contrastive rhetoric ideas.
Do I have to
treat these students the same as all the rest?
Theoretically, yes. Students need to be able to participate fully in
university and you need to make the determination that when they leave your
class, they are fully competent to go on.
Having said that, be aware of the research by Jim Cummins who says there
are two kinds of language proficiency:
1.
BICS (Basic
Interpersonal Communication Skills) and
2.
CALP (Cognitive
Academic Language Proficiency).
BICS is the ability to speak and listen about daily topics. It’s why we
often say, "He sounds just like one of us! Why can’t he write?"
CALP is what we are trying to teach all our students: the ability to read and write academic prose
critically. Cummins estimates that
students can be proficient in BICS within a year in some cases. CALP may take up to seven years, which means
a student could be working on her doctorate, and still not write appropriately
in English. You need to make the
determination whether the "noise" that’s still in the system (lack of
articles, problems with prepositions) is serious enough to affect comprehensibility.
Another way to think about this is:
How stigmatised are these errors
by the academic community?
What should I correct?
Ask yourself these questions as you are correcting:
1. Is this important?
§ Does it affect communication?
§ Is it stigmatised?
§ Is it going to bother readers?
2. Is it consistent?
§ Is this something the student doesn’t know, doesn’t understand or is it a slip of the pen?
3. Can I do something about it?
§
Can I offer a rule, examples, or an explanation that will help? It’s better to focus on a few problems than go off in many different directions.
You have a shot at punctuation and subject/verb agreement. It may take a while
to remediate articles and prepositions.
Reading
Unit
Philip Prowse has a great outline of Practical Ideas to do Before
Reading and After Reading activities, available at the following websites:
http://uk.cambridge.org/elt/readers/activities/beforereading.htm
http://uk.cambridge.org/elt/readers/activities/afterreading.htm