Read Tutoring Second Language Writers Online
Authors: Shanti Bruce
Tutoring Second Language Writers (35 page)
Helping Second Language Writers Become Self-Editors
PIMYUPA W. PRAPHAN AND GUIBOKE SEONG
Writing in a second language is a highly complex skill that involves the knowledge of vocabulary, syntactic and discourse structures, and the sociolinguistic rules of a target language. The struggles of even highly successful L2 writers were documented in
Connor and Belcher (2001)
. Tony
Silva (1997)
also attested to the difficulty of L2 writing and admitted that he was always amazed and humbled by the vast efforts of L2 writers in his classes. As both learners and now teachers of English at our universities, we can also attest to the struggles and the success of our own and students’ attempts at writing in English on a daily basis. It is beyond question that second language writers bring to writing centers a written product that is a result of their educational and cultural backgrounds. The encounter between the tutor and the second language writer is as challenging as it is fascinating. This chapter deals with this encounter, focusing on the editing process, which is often the tip of the iceberg. It identifies issues the tutors face every day at work, provides tips to handle confusion, and aids tutors with some practical editing strategies based upon up-to-date empirical studies and theories.
It is hardly surprising that many students, L2 and L1 students alike, do not fully understand the philosophy of the writing center: the focus on improving the writer’s skills, not the particular piece of writing s/he brings on a given day. From our experience with L2 and EFL students, especially Thai and Korean students, it is very common for the students to expect tutors or teachers to edit their writing line by line for them. Some of our students have said they would like every single mistake to be corrected. Some even express their preference for correction or written feedback in red ink. This is often the case for undergraduate students. For graduate students, we notice they are more sensitive to different styles of feedback. Many feel intimidated with written feedback in red
ink, but they do expect the tutors or teachers to “correct” their writing. Their expectation of an “ideal” text resulting from this editing process makes it hard to instill the idea of self-editing. To complicate the matter, some tutors’ expectations of second language students’ linguistic abilities can interfere with their practice. The first author’s experience as an EFL teacher in Thailand and tutor at a writing center in the United States illustrated that at times L1 tutors can overestimate L2 writers’ skills while some L2 tutors can underestimate them. This mismatch between tutors’ expectations and students’ actual performance might sound counterintuitive, but some tutors’ and teachers’ practices in helping students edit their papers do reflect that mindset. Some L1 tutors might assume students have certain knowledge and understanding, thus skipping some needed explanations. Some L2 tutors might assume certain words or structures are too advanced, when in fact students can learn through various channels in this day and age. Nevertheless, this assertion about tutors’ expectations needs empirical studies to support.
One thing is clear from our over ten years of experience as L2/EFL teachers: it is always challenging to gauge the students’ ability to self-edit and thus to decide on the most effective ways to give feedback. Some L2 teachers in our contexts tend to provide feedback in a way that does not encourage students’ self-reliance. In other words, some teachers believe it is often easier and less time consuming for the teachers to “correct” the product rather than help improve the writer in the writing process. However, it is in the best interest of the two parties that tutors or teachers resist the urge to merely correct the errors. In doing so, the tutors or teachers will move beyond being proofreaders or editors.
Although some L2 writers are still attempting to move beyond their interlanguage (
Selinker 1972
)—a linguistic system developed by an L2 learner who has not become fully proficient—research has shown that college-level L2 students are capable of becoming efficient editors of their own texts after proper training (
Linville 2009
). There lies the importance of writing center work and the roles of the tutors and tutor training. Editing students’ papers is always a challenge for tutors on multiple levels. Let us first review what core issues have become the center of attention in the professional debates relevant to tutors’ encounters with L2 writers.
A significant part of editing L2 writers’ papers involves error correction or how to improve what applied linguists call
formal accuracy
in English
language in their written work. One of the well-known debates on the topic is whether to treat errors or not. It would be surprising to most university writing tutors to know that the efficacy of written error correction or written feedback itself has been questioned among writing scholars. Based upon several theoretical rationales and empirical studies, John
Truscott (1996)
argued that error correction, for the purpose of improving “correctness,” or accuracy, in students’ writing is in fact not effective and thus should not be encouraged in the L2 classroom. He claimed practitioners should focus more on productive aspects in helping to improve students’ writing than on editing students’ writing for error correction. Although he later (
Truscott 1999
) admitted the possibility of certain range of potential benefits of written corrective feedback in response to other scholars’ criticisms against his arguments (e.g.,
Ferris 1999
), he still maintains (
Truscott 2004
;
2007
) that the practice should not be recommended. Some other scholars have also raised doubts about the effectiveness of teachers’ written corrections due to the possibility of the teacher’s being misunderstood or being vague in addition to being too directive (
Sommers 1982
;
Zamel 1985
). However, a growing number of research studies have been providing empirical data to support the position that written corrections or editing students’ writing does in fact have greater pedagogical advantages than not in terms of developing formal accuracy in their writing (
Bitchener 2008
;
Bitchener and Knoch 2009
;
Ferris and Roberts 2001
;
Sheen 2007
).
As life-long learners of English, we have valued the written corrections we have received from tutors and teachers, especially when it comes to discrete grammatical points in our writing. For example, many count versus noncount nouns (such as
point
versus
information
) are difficult to learn because they have to be memorized. When we make a mistake regarding a noncount noun (e.g., a lot of informations are needed) and our teachers point it out, then we see what is wrong and are able to learn a new form. The feedback helps us to learn and remember that
information
is a noncount noun.
Based on the existing literature and our practical experience, it is reasonable to believe written corrections are helpful. Our next concern is what types of errors to treat or edit. Are all errors made by L2 students equally important and in need of correction? What kinds of errors require the tutor’s attention? Are there kinds that deserve more attention than others? This issue is related to error gravity. Error gravity refers to the degree of acceptability of errors and how it influences readers’ judgments about the writer’s performance in the tasks (
Vann, Lorenz, and Meyer 1991
).
In one of the earlier studies on error gravity in writing instruction,
Vann, Meyer, and Lorenz (1984)
investigated faculty’s opinions regarding L2 students’ written errors. In terms of sentence-level errors made by L2 writers, 164 university faculty members’ responses at a US university revealed that not all errors are perceived as being equally serious. There is a hierarchy of perceived errors, and faculty perceptions on error gravity differ depending on their age and disciplines. Age-wise, the least tolerant group was the forty-five- to fifty-four-year-old group and the most tolerant group was the fifty-five-and-older one. The second most tolerant group was thirty-four and under, but they became less tolerant as they grew older. Among three groups of academic disciplines, faculty in social sciences, education, and humanities were considerably more tolerant toward some local errors, such as articles and certain spelling errors, than faculty in hard sciences, engineering, and nature sciences. All faculty groups, however, showed unified opinions about the relative gravity of the errors in the following order of increasing seriousness: spelling-1 (British or colloquial), articles, comma splices, spelling-2 (deletion or substitution), prepositions, pronoun agreement, subject-verb agreement, word choice, relative clauses, tense,
it
deletion, and word order.
Research shows that not only L1 respondents but also language learners can have different perceptions on error gravity in writing. According to
Bardovi-Harlig and Dornyei (1998)
, learners in EFL situations perceived grammatical errors to be much more important than other kinds of errors, while those in the L2 contexts perceived pragmatic errors as more important. A pragmatic error in applied linguistics refers to the way a text “works” or what effect it has on readers. In the example below, the pragmatic error relates to the impression of herself the author conveys to readers. The author was an EFL student writing an application essay for a graduate school in the United States.
I held a Bachelor’s of Engineering with first class honors and also gained the gold medal with my outstanding academic performance. Considering my profile in terms of solid academic background and professional experiences, I am confident that my qualification would be suitable for a Ph.D. program at First Choice University, and I believe that I would be an asset to your program.
In the above excerpt, grammar is not an issue, and the writer, before meeting with the tutor, was not aware of the possible pragmatic problem in her essay. The tutor pointed out that certain words in the essay (
outstanding
,
solid
, and
asset
) caused her to come across as being arrogant and pompous, which actually contrasted with her demeanor. As Jenny
Thomas (1983)
points out, grammatical mistakes may impede communication, but L1 speakers of the target language seem to have little difficulty accepting them. However, pragmatic failure reflects badly on the writer as a person. Based on our experience, most EFL writers are not aware of pragmatic errors and seem to be more worried about making grammatical errors.
With regard to the kinds of errors considered most serious, the goals of science, language studies, and education of the era should be considered. In the last century, when structuralism and behavioral psychology prevailed, grammatical structures and formal aspects of language held higher priority. As evidenced in audiolingualism, helping students achieve grammatical accuracy and error-free performance in language was language teachers’ primary concern. However, as the notion of communicative competence and awareness of pragmatic competence emerged, and the communicative need in language teaching arose, higher-order concerns in writing (
Reigstad and MacAndrew 1984
), such as organization, content, focus, complexity, and coherence, came to receive more attention.
James
Hendrickson (1980)
argued that global errors that interfere with the overall content and organization should receive greater attention and be corrected, while local errors may not be perceived as serious. Nevertheless, scholars today are aware that the distinction between local and global errors does not always hold. A local error involving a key word or phrase may have consequences for an essay’s focus or meaning at the global level. By the same token, an essay that contains no local errors can nonetheless be difficult to understand at the global level. Time and again, we get essays that do not have good organization, most often because they lack a thesis statement in the introduction. The following example is an introductory paragraph from a Thai student’s argumentative essay. The writer was trying to make an argument, later in the essay, that bad sleeping habits are the most important factor in students’ academic failure at his university.
Nowadays, most students spend time to study, work, eat and do other activities. Some do not have enough sleep and often ignore the essential of sleep. Inadequate sleep can affect to brain, physical health, emotion, meditation and skin aging. There are many activities that university students often do before go to bed such as playing Facebook, watching TV, talking on the phone, playing sports, etc. All of these activities will make university students do not want to sleep anymore and create bad sleep habits. The amount of sleep each person needs depends on age. Infants need about 16 hours a day, teenagers need about 9 hours and adults need 7 to 8 hours a night for the best amount of sleep.
Although the student’s essay above has some local errors, it is still intelligible. The most serious problem is that there is no argument presented at all; only some background information on the topic is provided. The writer states his argument in the last paragraph, which is rather common in Thai students’ essay organization. This global error is considered far more serious than the local errors students make.
Another debated issue in editing students’ writing is about specific error correction methods and the differential effects of the types of correction. Feedback options in writing are often discussed in two larger dimensions: direct or explicit and indirect or implicit approaches. The direct approach involves the teacher’s explicit provision of the correct form, while the indirect options use a range of devices to help learners notice, diagnose, and correct the errors on their own (
Bitchener, Young, and Cameron 2005
). Studies have reported that some L2 writers prefer their teachers’ direct and explicit error corrections more than implicit kinds (e.g.,
Ferris and Roberts 2001
). In Asian cultures, it is a readily accepted myth that those teachers who “burn the night oil” giving extensive direct corrections on students’ paper are the dedicated ones. While these teachers may be hard working, correcting as many errors as possible is not necessarily effective. It may even hinder more effective efforts. Recommendations for specific editing or correction methods will be described in a later section of this chapter, but it is important to note that a greater number of scholars have reported the relative advantages of implicit kinds rather than explicit and direct kinds (e.g.,
Hedgcock 2005
). Implicit kinds of feedback include indicating the approximate, not the exact, location or the identity of the error and making general comments about the learner’s core errors on a separate sheet of paper attached to the draft.
Some arguments for this approach lie in the fact that implicit kinds give learners opportunities to discover their own errors and to reformulate correct forms, which leads to longer retention and develops learners’ responsibility and autonomy. The indirect approach shares a core element with the process approach in writing in that it involves multiple steps in giving corrections. It also involves a characteristic of meaningful learning in that while trying to self-correct their own errors, students activate their schemata in a meaningful and contextualized task. In addition, the process of self-correction is more challenging and fun. Thus, students are intrinsically motivated. Caveats are in order for the writing teachers who deal with learners from different cultures. In implementing indirect methods, they might experience unwillingness or resistance from students from cultures of greater power distance (
Hofstede 1986
)
in which students are accustomed to passive roles in learning due to the mismatches in their expectations. For example, Korean and Thai are considered to be two cultures with higher scores in the power distance measure. This means that less powerful people in organizations in the society accept inequality in power distribution and consider it normal. In the classroom situation, students in such cultures expect the teacher to be the most powerful member of the group, so they believe the teacher should provide all the information directly, with authority. When the teacher, using implicit methods, asks students to identify the location and the nature of the error in their writing, some students do not feel comfortable and some may even think the teacher is not competent. Clear justifications for the technique, preparation, and well-thought-out execution of the method are needed to gradually lead students to believe in the benefits of the technique.
