(Note: the following is the first of a series of articles which stem from a research project I did in the spring of 2011.)
ESL students have unique needs beyond those of mainstream composition students. However, I thoroughly believe that the techniques and methods used for ESL education are useful enough to be applicable for any teacher. With that in mind, I set out to apply my acquired knowledge of ESL instruction on mainstream students. But first, it seemed appropriate to read up on what was already out there.
The bulk of ESL studies and discussions deal in two areas which were of little use to me in my situation. The first area involves ESL education for young students – the majority of studies found deal with early ESL learners. The field of secondary and post-secondary ESL teaching, while it certainly exists, seems underrepresented by the research. Furthermore, while writing skills are occasionally emphasized in ESL studies, it tends to focus mostly on grammar and vocabulary skills, and not on organizational skills.
Some background: when I began teaching a college composition class at a New Jersey college, I found myself in the position of teaching post-secondary students and adults, some fresh out of ESL programs, and others still taking ESL courses, a course designed to strengthen just those organizational skills previously mentioned. I was informed early on by a more experienced instructor that this was not intended to be a grammar course; the mechanics of writing were to take a secondary role to the use of writing patterns to organize one's thoughts on paper.
What was sought, therefore, were research studies which focused on advancing writing skills (particularly organizational skills) to secondary and post-secondary students. The results were promising.
Lee and Krashen set out to identify the most likely predictors of writing proficiency among ESL students. The results they found were that “children who participate in free reading programs write better than comparison students” (2002), a finding which had mirrored one of my own maxims which I often shared with students: “The best writers are always the best readers.” Lee and Krashen also observed that “poor writers tend to focus on aspects of form during revision, better writers focus on content and organization” (2002). This was of particular interest as the course in question was designed to focus on organization. If students who revised based on organization became better writers according to Lee and Krashen, what would happen to students who were actively aware of organization from the beginning of the writing process?
A final observation that Lee and Krashen made was that “better writers do more voluntary writing, but increasing writing in classes does not increase writing quality.” (2002) While practice makes perfect, it did not necessarily follow that more writing assignments led to better writers. Voluntary writing was the key. Given that, in a classroom setting, any writing assignment is by definition involuntary, the answer seemed to be that students could be encouraged to write if the topic were to their liking. How, then, to deal with the double problem of encouraging students to write on topics which would interest and motive them, while at the same time, encourage them to make organization a part of their writing process as early as possible? Lee and Krashen, studying only predictive factors, did not offer specific courses of action.
C. Lynn Jacobs tackled these problems with a group of high school students she categorized as “long term English learners,” whom she classified as “typically have been enrolled in US schools for at least seven years, yet still have not reached the criteria for reclassification as fluent in English” (Jacobs, 2008). Through a series of exercises, including one known as “cubing,” Jacobs achieved such a measure of success with her own students that they were eventually able to have their essays, short stories, and poetry published in an anthology entitled Love Ties my Shoes. The cubing process was of interest, and became the basis for the current study: Could the same process which showed success with long term English students have similar results on more recent immigrants? It was Jacobs' study which served as a framework and guide for this project.
Finding Jacobs' research proved to be invaluable, as it clearly acknowledged the need for more research to be done on older English learners. Elizabeth Bifuh-Ambe was forced to recognize that “not much information exists about the literacy needs of foreign-born ELLs at postsecondary levels. A literature search showed few manuals with strategies that can help this cohort of learners acquire subject matter in a mainstream university setting” (2009). Bifuh-Ambe countered with her own qualitative case study of a single Korean-born ELL student, “Kim,” at a large Northeastern university. As Jacobs has also discovered, even being a long term Engish learner (Kim had been studying English for almost 14 years at the time of Bifuh-Ambe's study) was no guarantee of fluency, either in oral or written form.
Kim's problems stemmed, in part, from her original English instruction in Korea, which she described as focused mostly on the grammar, vocabulary, and isolated mechanics of the language, and little on actual communication (2009). Bifuh-Ambe's study examined the processes Kim went about learning English for communication and academic purposes, the challenges she faced, and specific strategies which proved effective for her. While the bulk of Kim's struggles were in comprehension, both written and oral, there was some mention of her developing writing skills, mostly due to cooperation with peer coaches (classmates willing to help and edit her work) and academic tutoring.
What is of special interest is Kim's reluctance to participate in class discussions, which was not due to her limited language skills, but because she did not have enough background information to make what she would consider a meaningful contribution. As Bifuh-Ambe explained, “one of the reasons Kim gave for her inability to participate in class discussions was her lack of prior knowledge of topics under discussion” (2009). This is often an issue in many ESL courses, as the rift between content instruction and language instruction must be regularly deal with.
On the other hand, in the College Composition class, as in most language arts classes, the language is the content, and while students may traditionally find themselves discussing topics unfamiliar to them (the textbook contained articles on subjects such as global warming and famous athletes), a writing professor must take extra care to avoid such problems my making sure that students are familiar with the topics they write about, so that language, not content, is the focus. Even when students are writing essays reacting or giving an opinion on a given topic, lack of understanding of the topic can and has led to poor results, as students find themselves forced to “react” to a situation they do not understand, although they know that “I don't know” is not an acceptable answer for an academic paper. Jacobs' cubing exercise begins by having students write about events from their own lives, thus taking the content/language dilemma completely out of the equation. This was another reason that recreating Jacobs' cubing study was an ideal choice for a composition class.
John Biggs, Patrick Lai, Catherine Tang, and Ellen Lavelle had previously collaborated on a similar issue of teaching writing strategies to adult students, and while their strategies were successful, they were overly specialized. They operated a series of 2 1/2 day workshops with Hong Kong graduate students, all in science related disciplines, who were struggling to write their dissertations in English.
Biggs et al summarized the writing process and the difficulties English language learners face with it quite succinctly:
Knowledge is of two kinds: content or topic knowledge (what to say) and rhetorical knowledge (how to say it). Rhetorical knowledge breaks down into several specific forms, such as genre rules, audience, grammar, and so on; this form of knowledge is particularly likely to be lacking in nonnative writers. (1999)
While Biggs et al clearly identified the general problem: “in order to handle this order of complexity, writers need to develop a writing strategy so that they can partition and sequence the components of the writing process to make it more manageable” (1999), and did manage to categorize various writing (and by extension, teaching) strategies based on effectiveness, the solutions offered in their workshops were tailor-made for Chinese students writing scientific dissertations. I found this to be a trend in much of the literature: specific solutions to specific situations, while convenient, did not offer the kind of general all-purpose instruction needed for an introductory course such as the one I was teaching.
Having previously studied, in detail, the strengths and applications of sheltered instruction (the SIOP method), it was of interest to read studies which challenged its effectiveness. When it was claimed that “very little research has examined empirically what constitutes an effective sheltered lesson . . .researchers have increasingly questioned some of the practices of SI,” and “there needs to be a greater focus on the linguistic structures that characterize academic language” (Aguirre-Munoz et al., 2008), it seemed, at first glance, to be a throwback to explicit grammar instruction, which has long since fallen out of favor in the current ESL literature.
However, Aguirre-Munoz et al. had instead classified various features which they referred to as field, tenor, and mode to identify students who had (or needed) sufficient control over academic language in order to support a thesis, and the means to train teachers to recognize these features in order to better educate their students. The specifics of the features Aguirre-Munoz et al are not mentioned as part of this review because they operated mostly on a sentence or paragraph level of writing, whereas both the course and the current study required students to be implementing writing strategies on larger scales, throughout entire essays. Nevertheless, it was an example of the current research to promote more elaborate and organized written work from ESL students.
References
Aguirre-Munoz, Z., Park, J., Amabisca, A., & Boscardin, C. K. (2008). Developing teacher capacity for serving ELLs' writing instructional needs: A case for systemic functional linguistics. Bilingual Research Journal 31, 295-322.
Bifuh-Ambe, E. (2009). Literacy skills acquisition and use: a study of an English language learner in a U.S. university context. Adult Basic Education and Literacy Journal 3(1), 24-33
Biggs, J., Lai, P., Tang, C., & Lavelle, E. (1999). Teaching writing to ESL graduate students: a model and an illustration. British Journal of Educational Psychology 69, 293-306.
Jacobs, C. L., (2008). Long-term English learners writing their stories. English Journal 97(6), 87-91
Kirszner, L.G., & Mandell, S.R. (2010) Patterns for College Writing (11th ed.) Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's
Lee, S., & Krashen, S. (2002). Predictors of success in writing in English as a foreign language: reading, revision behavior, apprehension, and writing. College Student Journal 36(4), 532-543
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