Best Practices for Teaching Writing to ESL Students
David Daniels, Kamila Kinyon, and Casey Rountree

Since DU has a significant population of international students, it is important to identify how teachers in courses across the disciplines can best help English as a Second Language (ESL) students with writing. While grammatical errors can cause significant difficulties, this is by no means the only important issue to address in responding to ESL writing. International students enter DU classes with a different set of cultural expectations than native speakers of English. Both rhetorical conventions and assumptions about originality differ across cultures. Following are some best practice guidelines for responding to ESL students at DU. Much of the information synthesized below is taken from articles included in the collection ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors, edited by Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth. For those seeking further information about how to best address ESL students writing, the following articles offer a good starting point: Earth Aches by Midnight: Helping ESL Writers Clarify Their Intended Meaning by Amy Jo Minett; Editing Line by Line by Cynthia Linville; and Raising Questions About Plagiarism by Kurt Bouman.

I. Cultural Differences in Rhetorical Conventions
Be aware of varying methods in essay development across cultures:

A. Each language and culture has rhetorical conventions unique to it. According to Robert Kaplan and based on an analysis of 600 texts written by ESL students, we can see several cultural generalizations:

1. Asian students who have been taught according to the rhetoric of their cultures approach a topic from a variety of    viewpoints in order to examine it indirectly. This may be seen by American professors as lack of focus or indecisiveness, since academic papers in the US favor deductive reasoning. Papers are expected to have a thesis statement, linear development, and a summing up conclusion.

2. Kaplan describes speakers of French and Spanish as having much greater freedom to digress or to introduce extraneous material. To a US professor, this might seem like going off the topic.

3. Arabic writing tends to be less direct than writing in English. Rather than getting to a point, Arabic speakers might open up a topic and talk around a point.

B. Cultural differences may be manifested in some of the following ways:

1. In a papers organization (such as inductive or deductive reasoning patterns)

2. In a preference for a particular sentence style

3. In the forms of address or register (issues of formality)

4. In apparent lack of cohesive ties

5. In the amount and type of information that is included (such as the balance between general points and supporting information)

II. Guidelines for Reading ESL Papers

A. Begin with higher order concerns: focus, development, organization. Leave lower
order concerns (grammar and word choice) for later.

B. Read the paper in full, to see how it is organized on its own terms.

C. Reader may be disoriented by lack of meta-discourse or signposts. Try to identify and piece together the logic.

D. Make note of unexpected features and unique perspectives in order to encourage the student.

III. Editing (Sentence Structure, Grammar, and Spelling)

A. Six common error types:

1. Subject-verb agreement

2. Verb tense

3. Verb form

4. Singular/plural noun endings

5. Word form

6. Sentence structure

B. Ask ESL students to fix their own mistakes. Do not correct all the errors in a paper. Rather, identify the common grammatical problems or patterns of grammatical problems that the student has, and give one or two examples from the paper. Then ask the student to locate and correct other examples of the same problem.

C. If the paper has multiple errors, prioritize feedback to the student. Make sure to focus on those errors that most interfere with meaning. For example, sentence structure is central for making the meaning clear to a reader. The student should learn how to make these corrections first, before moving on to such issues as article usage.

D. Look for problems with particular words. According to Hinkel, the following are important to address with ESL students:

1. Qualifying hedges such as apparently, ostensibly, most likely

2. Modal verbs like may, might, should, could

IV. Plagiarism and Culture:

A. In the United States, ideas about plagiarism are driven by a particular understanding of what it means to write including a value on individuality, independence, and notions of authentic voice. Originality is another important concept in Western education systems.

B. Other traditions, as in China, emphasize close allegiance to a few acknowledged authorities, leading to convergence of perspective and social harmony.

C. According to David Bartholomae, paraphrasing is one of the most difficult skills to develop. Mary Dossin states that this requires that a writer master his sources and break his connection to their language and structure.

D. How to consult students about using sources:

1. It is useful to look at a students sources side by side with her papers.

2. See if the writer has done the following:
   a. Does the writer do a good job of weaving source information into the paper?
   b. Does she vary the way that she uses sources, drawing on summary, paraphrase, and direct quotation?
   c. Does he choose appropriate times to use direct quotes in his paper, or does he overuse them, failing to make an original argument in the paper?

V. In-Class Writing and In-Class Essay Exams

ESL students naturally need more time than native speakers for completing in-class writing and in-class exams. Essay exams may pose a particular problem. Do what you can to accommodate ESL students needs. For example, you may choose to give extra time to ESL students on in-class exams.

VI. ESL Students as Speakers (Differences in Speech Styles)

It is important to realize that ESL students may have different speech styles than native speakers and that their class participation may affect the classroom dynamic. For example, Nancy Sakamotos article Conversational Ballgames compares American speech styles to tennis and Japanese speech styles to bowling. A typical conversational interchange in Japan is based on longer explications of a subject, in a non-confrontational style, rather than the short argumentative exchanges typical in the United States. Whatever culture your ESL students come from, be aware that speech styles differ, and take this into account when engaging ESL students in classroom discussions.

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