The key to writing development: extensive and regular writing practice with interesting subject matter

(Sigh!) It doesn't look like anyone's paying attention to me... People are just joining and throwing their essays up, expecting instant feedback, and not taking advantage of the chance to write and discuss other topics in the forum.

Please, I do know what I'm talking about. You need to read and write widely in order to improve your general writing ability... There is plenty of potential TOEFL writing development in these other topics, and there is certainly more to English and writing ability than just a TOEFL independent essay score.

  Jason

Hi everyone,

Some good posts and comments here. It's interesting to read, and in some ways heartening.

I was thinking about (or was it "agonizing over"?) this issue again recently. I couldn't help but reflect that:

1. Many students only want writing in order to pass tests. There is no passion in that, and without genuine passion, genuine progress will always be very limited. 

2. Good writing requires some basic skills in terms of mechanics, organization and style (which can be quickly learned, actually), but from there it needs fluency - the ability to write without translating or analyzing one's language or meaning much. There is only one way to do that, and that is to constantly write and express oneself, and to focus on interesting subject matter to keep oneself motivated. If you're not writing in English (even a limited amount) 4-5 days a week, you're not going to progress much.

3. Students demand 1-1 feedback without doing much at all to build their communicative writing ability and writing fluency - in effect, they want somebody to think and do the hard work for them.

4. Some students worry that their mistakes will just keep repeating. In my experience, there are two reasons for that (from the student's perspective): they don't read a lot of other writing or respond to it (which helps to facilitate "noticing" of new language and expressions), and they don't read their own writing very closely once it is finished.

In any case, I am at the end of another semester where 40 or so university students have just progressed through my writing course. Quite honestly, they did a sensational job. They didn't demand my personal 1-1 attention to everything they wrote, they did extensive writing and gave extensive feedback to each other. I'm comparing first compositions at the start of term with final compositions under time pressure at the end of the term. The results speak for themselves - almost all of these students have helped themselves and each develop much better writing proficiency.

The proof is there, "in the pudding" so to speak. Hopefully at some stage more people will take notice!

Best regards to all of you,

~ Jason

Hi Eojin,

Thanks for your thoughtful comments.

Yes, number 3 is (and to some extent always has been) a hot issue for a number of reasons. Perhaps, in a non-negative way, you may be alluding to the fact that there wasn't a lot of 1-1 feedback and correction given in your own writing course, and you expand on it by explaining students' positive feelings about getting corrections given to them.

Let me expand on this point for you and any others. I'm not against correction - far from it - but there are four very important issues to consider:

1. Feasibility. When, as a writing teacher, you have a class of 6-12 students, giving a lot of corrections to your students is manageable, and doesn't kill your motivation or detract from your ability to plan your next writing lessons. Once you go above that number of students, it becomes much less feasible, will erode your passion for actually teaching writing (with so much of your time spent editing), and reduces the amount of time you have to read the students' writing as an actual audience and pick out common patterns and problems that you can point out to your entire (large) class. A lot of people ask why writing is not taught in public school systems, and the simple answer is that there is an expectation there will be a lot of correction needed, and therefore it is not worth pursuing on account of it not being possible to do properly.

2. Effectiveness. There is an assumption (as per Eojin's comments) that corrections will be very useful to the students. For many years before teaching at university level, I was a TOEFL instructor for secondary school students. With all the endless grammar corrections, I began to actually wonder how much it was helping the students, and even got into some debates with other teachers about it (especially the more traditional sorts who thought a teacher who doesn't correct everything is not a real writing teacher).

So I put it to the test. Myself and another TOEFL instructor gave the same pre- and post- TOEFL writing tests to our classes of students (who were of the same age and level), with a pre test, then 4 months of instruction, then a post test. I did very little correcting at all, and dedicated more time to generating examples and teaching tips and strategies, as well as encouraging peer feedback. The other teacher, being a very traditional sort, corrected each and every error his students made. The pre tests resulted in similar results, but in the post-tests (at the end of the course), my group ended up with not only higher overall holistic scores in their essays, but were actually making the same number of grammatical mistakes as the other group. That is, despite all those corrections in the other group, their overall essay scores ended up slightly lower and their grammar mistake rate was not lower than the group who didn't get explicit corrections from the teacher. Looking through the research literature, I found that other experiments with different kinds of teacher feedback had similar results; i.e., explicit corrections do very little (if anything) to actually improve learners' written grammar when writing under test conditions.

I did another experiment last (spring) semester at KNU in my writing course. I gave learners three specific corrections for every piece of writing they did over 4 weeks. At the end of the 4 weeks, I gave them each a piece of paper and asked them to write down the corrections they had been given (and presumably learned from). One student out of 22 in the class managed to write down three corrections she had memorized. Almost every other student in the whole class couldn't even recall one! So while a lot of people were complimenting me on all the corrections I was providing, in essence the learners weren't actually learning anything from them.

Most students see corrections and automatically think "good, I've been noticed, and my grammar is being improved." That's as far as they go with it. I'm not into time-wasting, not for me nor for the students. And remember, we can't just say this is because students are lazy. With many corrections, it is rather like hitting 20 different colored tennis balls over a net at the same time, with the balls landing in various parts of court, and asking a student to remember what every one looked like, and how to hit it back over the net correctly. It just isn't possible.

My main point here is - before you attempt to give your own classes of 40 secondary school students explicit writing corrections, ask yourself if it is possible, and ask yourself if it is actually helping them. If you are just doing it for moral purposes, or because "that's the way it has always been done", you could be in a pointless time warp, or teaching for pure appearances (or both). The key question then is, could there be a better way to spend your teaching time to get better results for a whole large class of writing students?

3. Independent learning. The more grammar corrections you give (as a teacher), the less students will be willing to do on their own or with other students. Dependence on the teacher for grammar correction becomes like a drug, and the addiction withers away students' capacity to discover patterns, experiment and learn from their own hypotheses. As a younger teacher, at first you will feel a lot of pressure to be a reliable source of knowledge to your students, and correcting feels like a natural part of that. As an experienced teacher, you will start to appreciate the larger responsibility you have to be a guide and facilitator to help students access and discover knowledge on their own. As Dr. Andrew Finch (a hugely respected professor in our own English Education department at KNU) signs off on all of his emails: "Teachers open the door. Students walk through."

4. Self-confidence. This overlaps with the other areas above in a lot of ways, but also consider this. When students see many corrections, they become focused on what they can't do and don't know. For many, this is a constant reminder or failure and inability. Of course, this could be a positive or negative force depending on each student's attitude. However, if we focus on the student's ability to express a view, contribute their opinions on a given topic, and share it in an interactive environment (like this forum), we are more likely to foster a feeling of capacity and inclusiveness ~ a sense of worth and belonging in the company of other writers. If we allow students to read other writing, compare it to their own, gradually discover their mistakes and/or find many positive models of better ways to say things, we are fostering more independent self-confidence.

Despite all of these points, I am not against correction of grammar. Yes, it can be effective in some ways. Yes, it can motivate certain students in some ways (even if it is just that they feel like they are getting attention). Yes, it can help them notice things (even if it is there and then and not studied or remembered afterwards). It just isn't high on my personal list of priorities when teaching writing and teaching students how to teach themselves (there are several other far more important criteria), and with large classes it can be either unfeasible or an unwelcome distraction from more important teaching objectives.

As a future teacher of English, when it comes to writing, you are going to have to really balance the following question for yourself. Explicit correction has very little impact on actual grammatical improvement. Explicit correction is far from feasible in very large classes. So, if it isn't possible to give lots of correction, should writing be excluded from your curriculum?

Something for all the student teachers here to think about...

Best wishes,

~ Jason 

Hi sir!

You always give me good tips for improving my english skills.

"to write extensively and on a regular basis"

Though this class has finished, I will keep writing essay or diary.

And it's important to write about various topic and with various forms of writing.

I will remember this Feasibility, Effectiveness, Independent learning, and Self-confidence.

I'm sure that this all will be helpful for enhancing my english skills.

Thank you Jason.