Group items tagged

This is an article that looks at a Chinese immigrant teenager who uses online text based communication in English with a transnational group of peers. The study specifically focuses on the effects of the use of English online in regards to the individual's self-identity. The article discusses how the globalized online community shapes literacy and cultural belonging. The article explains the benefits of online literacy in a foreign language to strengthen ones ability and understanding on the L2 language. The online format also allows L2 learners a less intimidating forum to practice their L2 skills.

This is quite a small article, but it presents a certain interest as it connects writing with other social practices. I guess this assumption is crucial for teaching because it presupposes writing in the classroom with real-life purposes. The article also mentions interculturality and constant interaction of two languages, which is important when teaching writing to ESL students. The author is concerned about the specifics of effective transfer of literacy skills in bilinguals and heritage speakers. According to Martinez, as a result of traditional teaching, bilingual students tend to write with "conformity to rhetorical traditions in the dominant language" ("backwards literacy"), which creates certain problems with style, thoughts expression, choice of words and sentence patterns (i.e., mechanical transfer of the dominant language features into L2 writing). Therefore, it is necessary to develop "forward literacy", which accepts a non-standard way of writing ("writers carve out their own transcultural paths of expression"). In other words, writing of a bilingual or heritage learner implies constant shifts (transfers) between languages and cultures, and using the multiple resources of both languages in order to create an original pattern. The instructor's task is: (1) to identify multiple literacies (i.e. writing practices) that students possess and / or should possess in their heritage language and their dominant language; (2) to teach the students how to shift without mixing two languages. E.g. in early works of Spanish heritage learners, English norms penetrate Spanish writing: estoy the acuerdo instead of estoy de acuerdo. The shift should concern rhetorical strategies, which reflect cultural and aesthetical values of the two languages worlds, but not grammar or writing vocabulary; (3) teaching writing in the context of multiple social practices and contents While teaching writing, it is important to distinguish between positive transfer of skills already acqu

Wow, i like your article. It state purposely on how to help ESL student to write English better.

This article describes the results of the four OLE (Optimal Learning Environment) approaches to teaching writing used at four different bilingual special education California schools. These approaches include: (1) interactive journal writing: teacher leads dialogue with the students by providing written responses to their daily journal entries. The teacher's responses serve as a model for writing as well; (2) Writers' Workshop - "students go through planning, drafting, editing, revising, final drafting, and publishing each time they produce a written product", i.e. their own class book; (3) expository writing as a process; (4) combination of brainstorm writing, model webbing or mapping the story they have just read, non-interactive journals. The authors emphasize the importance of engaging the learners into the informal creative writing process to increase the intrinsic motivation. They state that often in classes with bilingual students there is a high amount of pressure to speed the students' transition from writing in L1 to writing in L2, which triggers the students' anxiety and reluctance to write. The results of the 10-week experiment in different educational settings showed that OLE program activities significantly decrease stress and increase writing productivity. According to the article, OLE is based on "sociocultural learning theory", and makes use of task-based interactive creative activities. Students are supposed to collaborate while working at their writing (= communities of practice). Writing is considered as a continuous ever-changeable life process. It always implies dialogue (with the teacher, classmates or oneself - in case of non-interactive journals). Response The idea of interactive creative writing is beneficial both for heritage learners, and ESL learners, who often do not feel at ease while writing in L2. Having experienced difficulties in writing in the past, they tend to produce limited quantities of clichéd patterns that lack spo

I like how in your article it state what kind of studies they did. They did Interactive journal writing; Writer's Workshop; OLE; and a combination of journal writing, brainstorming and planning, and spelling practiced for individual group. I think that just using one method from here might help a lot but if a teacher use two or three methods here, then the L2 would improve even more. But i don't know...it's a good article.

Noting that most existing studies on bi-literacy have focused on learners whose L1 and L2 share the same script (the roman alphabet), the authors of this study examine the acquisition of Hebrew literacy by children who are already literate in Russian. This longitudinal study compared the reading success of 1st grade students of three groups: bilingual (Russian and Hebrew) who were literate in Russian, bilingual (not literate in either language), and monolingual (illiterate). The study found that that the students from the first group, those who were literate in Russian when they started school in Israel, performed better on a number of reading tasks in Hebrew than the students who started school without literacy in any language (including those who were bilingual but illiterate). From this, the authors conclude that bilingualism does not significantly enhance literacy acquisition but that being already literate in another language, even one with serious structural differences and that uses a different writing system, does aid the acquisition of literacy in the second language.

Kimberly De Vries writes about the differences in writing between Chinese students and American students and the expectations of Western academic institutions. She compares Western writing to "mathematical plainness" and argues that there is a cultural bias that exists. De Vries writes, "My experience with American writing practice has led me to conclude that in America, clarity depends not so much on using a particular form, but rather using the form expected by the reader. Thus clarity is entirely dependent on cultural expectations..." (1). This article was interesting to me because I have several Asian students in my workshop. I'm trying to understand the motives behind some of the errors they make while writing. It's difficult because much of the research deals with wether they're using their L1 to help organize their thoughts and simply translating them into L2 (which usually results in a complete lack of clarity. In fact, at times I didn't know what whole sentences meant) or writing by using L2 only. De Vries also relies on research by Robert Kaplan who has documented the effects of culture on writing practices. De Vries writes, "Kaplan contended that writing teachers needed to understand that culture produces different styles of argument, rather than flawed thinking. If we are not looking for it, we may miss an unfamiliar pattern of argument just as we may miss an unfamiliar sound in a foreign language" (3). De Vries believes that American scholars value a certain "style" of academic writing -- a style that represents only a small part of all the writing that goes on in the world today. "As this work goes on, we now begin to see that many characteristics of 'good' writing that were once perceived as universally true, are actually very much influenced by culture" (6).

This 2010 article details the findings of a research project by Bitchener and Knoch wherein they studied the effects of corrective feedback for L2 writers. Specifically, they studied how advanced level ESL students in a university level writing class in the US improved or did not improve their accuracy with respect to the use of definite and indefinite articles as a result of different kinds of corrective feedback. The 10 week study seems to show that the accuracy of students who received explicit, meta-linguistic forms of corrective feedback improved considerably over the 10 week study. Those who did not receive corrective feedback, or who only received implicit correction in the form of circled errors with no accompanying explanation, did not demonstrate such an increase in accuracy.

This article describes a study similar to one that we read about with the 10 UCLA students, except these students in the study are ESL students; something I want to follow with this thread. This study basically shows that L1 and L2 writers had many strategies in common, the main difference being that L2 writers weren't as concerned as the L1 writers in correcting their work, their main focus being, just get it out! We have discussed in class about writing for a specific purpose and how you audience affects your writing; this study shows that ESL students' composing strategies were not inhibited by their purpose or audience.

This article continues the idea of my previous posts - about codeswitching and language transfer in the writing of bilinguals and heritage learners. It is based upon the experiment investigating formal and informal writing samples of students who possess three languages - Basque, Spanish and English. The authors'purpose has been to explain that although traditional teaching is turned towards monolinguals and native speakers' writing as a model, the perspective of bi- and multilingual writers is different. The authors - Cenoz and Gorter -explore the nature of transfer from one language into another, codemixing and codeswitching, and come to the conclusion that these three factors characterizing bilingual students are not to be treated as separate obstacles but rather as three parts of the one whole that benefits writing while enabling students to widely use resources of different languages. The authors use the term "translanguaging" denoting by it "combination of two or more languages in a systematic way within the same learning activity", and argue that translanguaging contributes to developing and strengthening writing in both languages. The authors propose a new approach to teaching writing to the bi- and multilinguals - "focus on multilingualism" that allows "looking at the different languages of the multilingual at the same time instead of separately". Cenoz and Gorter identify the relationships between languages as complex, yet beneficial for developing writing skills. According to their point of view, multilinguals use the same strategies when writing essay or informal social network posts, yet they incorporate in their writing the elements of three languages not because of limited lexical resources, but for conveying their communicative intent, which they think is better done in a particular language out of three that they possess. That means that multilinguals and bilinguals choose language resources in dependence on communicative purposes in their writing (

This article is looking at the differences in Non-Native speaker (NNS) and Native speaker (NS) in their writing discourse. The main focus is on the usage of tense, aspect, and active/passive voice in their writing. The subjects include NS, and NNS Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Arabic. They were given a class periods to answer one out of three questions. The result is very interesting for it shows the difference between the different groups of NNS and the overall differences of NNS and NS. At the conclusion of the finding, it says that NNS are less likely to use passive voice in their writing. I reflected it back to professor Wyrick's question about passive tense in Hmong. I notice that the reason we never pay attention to passive voice because we rarely use it in everyday communication that when I translated to my parents they said it's possible but it's hard to make sense out of it. I also tried to translate some transition words and found it to be very disturbing to the flow of the sentence.

This study investigated semantic transfer in second language. The author studied Korean ESL speakers who were asked to perform a semantic judgment task in which they decided whether or not 2 English words were related in meaning. I'm not sure if it's because I did a similar project in semantics or what, but this article is just jumping off the page to me and I feel like I need to share it with others. Semantic transfer from L1 to L2 is so fascinating and I have a feeling I can link this to where my inquiry is going.

This article is stresses the importance of the cultural component as a part of language learning rather than subordinate to it. It separates "cultural awareness" from "intercultural capability" in which the later is understood as "engaging learners in developing the capability to exchange meaning in communication with people across languages and cultures". Then the article goes on to give an ambiguous solution to revising L2 learning assessment. The article is short but it offers good insight to that fact that schools assess language as merely a descriptive code.

Unfortunately, I got this article from the library's research portal, so you will have to log in to view it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Investigating the Role of Identity in Writing Using Electronic Bulletin Boards Valia Spiliotopoulos & Stephen Carey This paper details the findings of a study on the effectiveness of using online bulletin boards, in this case WebCT, in a university writing class for ESL students. The study finds that the asynchronous nature of posting online allows students to participate more fully and in ways which may not be possible in traditional class interaction. The authors also argue that the process of forming an online community of English language learners affords the students the opportunity to develop a greater sense of identity as an English speaker and as part of a community of English speakers.

This article addressed the all to common problem of second language students being placed in mainstream English classes well before they have developed second language proficiency. These students are then expected to compete with their fellow peers who have developed proficiency since childhood. This article confronts the issues students face transitioning from ESL classroom environment to the mainstream environment. According Harklau the importance peer interaction and socialization should be used as tools to increase second language proficiency. Peer interaction and peer editing can help students develop a level of comfort and proficiency in their second language that is often missing in mainstream classrooms.