Some Features of the Development of Writing in an Intensive English Program

Introduction

One of the main goals of students in an intensive English program is to develop the ability to write clearly and accurately. The genres in English that many students need eventually to master are the research paper, laboratory report, or examination in their academic discipline. Students who are not preparing for academic study may want to be able to communicate clearly in business or their personal lives. Academic writing tasks are very high-stakes activities because students’ grades in future academic coursework will depend on the ability to communicate effectively in writing. The body of research on English for academic purposes is very large indeed, and readers are encouraged to consult key works in this area (e.g., books by well-known experts such as Hyland [2016a] and Swales and Feak [1994] as well as recent articles in the relevant journals such as the more general Journal of Second Language Writing [www.journals.else-vier.com/journal-of-second-language-writing] and the two more specialized Journal of English for Academic Purposes [www.journals.elsevier. com/journal-of-english-for-academic-purposes], and English for Specific Purposes [www.journals.elsevier.com/english-for-specific-purposes]).

IEP students can be a heterogeneous group, especially in lEPs that are in large cities. Even in lEPs that have a more direct connection to a college or university, such as in a pathway program (blended ESL and basic academic courses), each class may have students who plan to take a degree course in a wide variety of different subjects and at different levels (undergraduate and graduate). Because of this range of intended majors, most IEP classes cannot be too discipline specific but must focus overwhelmingly on general academic English. Given its urban setting and broad range of students, the Pitt IEP therefore attempts to guide students through basic concepts in development of paragraph structure, organization of ideas, and provision of support for statements that they make. At the same time, students receive guidance to develop their control of the grammatical structures, organizational vocabulary, and appropriate register of written English.

The chapter is structured as follows. First, we will consider briefly some key issues in second language writing as a review for the background of the instruction in the IEP. Second, the bulk of the chapter will be based on data from the writing classes in Levels 3, 4, and 5 in the IEP. We will trace the development of several individuals’ writing, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Finally, based on the analysis of these selected writing assignments, we will consider how the curriculum enhanced development in different aspects of the students’ written work. As with previous chapters, the final section offers areas for administrators and teachers to reflect on. The research described in Section 4.4 regarding lexical development and in Section 5.5 on grammatical development is also relevant to the students’ progress in writing in the program.

Research on L2 Writing Development – Selected Key Highlights

Hinkel (2005) provides an extremely useful summary of many of the concerns in this section, and readers are encouraged to consult Hinkel’s review and other recent overviews of L2 writing, for example, Leki, Cumming, and Silva (2008) and Matsuda and Silva (2014), which give broad overviews of the field as well as more recent scholarship.

Writing: Taking Account of the Potential Reader

Writing is an activity that can take a very wide range of forms, from literary products (poems, short stories, novels, and plays) to laboratory reports, research papers, and email. One of the key challenges for writers, including expert speaker writers, is that the writer has to make certain assumptions about what the reader already knows about a topic. Writers must have in their mind what their potential readers already know and provide enough discourse context for them to follow an argument or narrative but not overwhelm or frustrate them, either with known information or with technical details that they have no background in. We need not belabor such issues here, as IEP administrators and instructors will be well aware of the concerns of academic writing and reading that date back well over 40 years. Many of those early researchers in academic reading and writing were also successful textbook writers. For example, Widdowson (1978), especially in his Chapter 5, pp. 134-140, discussed the development of discourse units, and his ‘Reading and Thinking’ textbook series (Widdowson, 1979) addressed the interactive nature of reading and writing. Johnson’s (1981) work was an early ESL textbook that adopted information transfer from charts and graphs as prompts for writing. Other researcher-textbook writers whose academic writing textbooks and research on writing influenced much subsequent thinking include Reid

(1985, 1994), and Hamp-Lyons (Hamp-Lyons & Berry Courter, 1984; Hamp-Lyons, 1986, 2007).

In the mid-1990s, Ramirez (1995) summarized some of the teaching implications that had developed in writing instruction: the need to encourage a process of planning/organizing, to compose and then revise, and the need to encourage distancing from text in order to take into account the reader’s point of view. He also pointed out that often poor writers were unable to focus on global aspects of the message that they wanted to convey. This is the issue of considering the potential reader because the writer knows what the goal of the writing is but often does not make it explicit enough. Finally, he re-emphasized that reading good, finished products to obtain models is an important aspect of writing instruction. Ramirez (1995, p. 280) also noted that research in L2 writing development had shown several parallels to development of LI writing competence: learners may respond better to comments on content than form if they are unsure of their errors. Written accuracy tends to precede spoken accuracy (although with some speakers, spelling accuracy may lag behind spoken accuracy, as we have seen). In addition, successful writers engage more in higher level planning/re-writing. It is worth re-emphasizing that good texts are shaped as much by the writer’s sense of their readers as they are by the writer’s own characteristics.