Second Language Writing: State of the Field

The field of Second Language Writing is characterized by incredible divergence with respect to certain paradigms.  On the applied linguistics side, there seems to be quite a bit of debate (Kachru, 1985; Canagarajah, 2007; 2006; Lippi-Green, 1997) as to whose linguistic ideology we accept.  And while prescriptive grammar has fallen out of favor, at least in theory, it is still alive in the form of a "deficit model" for ESL students (Hinkel, 2003; Crossley & McNamara, 2011).  With regards to grammar instruction more generally, there is a hardline position against it (Truscott, 1996) that has developed over the last decade and a half.  Most scholars, however, seem to favor some sort of treatment of grammar (Bitchener, 2008; Ferris, 2004; Chandler, 2009).  Error correction is another related subfield that has garnered much attention in recent years.  At least since Lyster & Ranta's (1997) seminal study, researchers have examined in depth what sorts of error feedback are most facilitative toward learning (Bitchener, 2008; Ferris, 2006; Ashwell, 2000; Lee, 2005; 2003).  Here too, there is quite a bit of divergence among scholars, with respect to which mode(s) of feedback yield the best payoff for students.

From a composition studies standpoint, several of the popular theoretical models have been examined, e.g. process approach and, more recently, genre approach as a reaction to the process model (Hyland, 2003).  Researchers/educators have also tried to combine the two approaches, with mixed results (Tarnopolsky, 2000).  Another powerful theoretical tool employed in composition studies is critical theory.  Certain scholars (Atkinson, 2010; Canagarajah 2007; 2006; Leki, 2006) have mobilized this framework to help gain more of a macro-level perspective on the ideologies and power structures that underlie L2W pedagogy.  Lippi-Green (1997), specifically, characterizes the insidious monolingual ideology that pervades speech and writing and has for centuries.  This sentiment is echoed by others in more specific academic contexts (Shuck, 2006; Matsuda, 2006).

From an educational standpoint, much work has been done to try and determine not only what kind of feedback, but also what kinds of writing tasks are the most effective. Many scholars have recognized that the old paradigm of teacher-centered instruction has many setbacks.  To this end, they have advocated collaboration among students as a way empowering students.  A particular popular strategy has been peer review (Diab, 2011).  However, other scholars have shown the limitations of this technique, particularly among certain cultural groups such as the Chinese (Ramanathan & Atkinson, 1999).   Still others advocate making collaboration a more comprehensive part of the writing process, with peer review comprising only part of the collaboration piece (Storch, 2005).  Also, issues of assessing student writing have been eagerly taken up by researchers in the field (Weigle, 2007).

It follows, then, that with at least three different academic fields in play in which competing ideas abound, what scholars and educators are seeking is not so much a single, overarching process or approach to teaching writing to second language students.  Rather, teachers and researchers are exploring a multitude of strategies, theories, and models for teaching.  Essentially, whatever works, goes. Except that, as I intend to argue in my research paper for this class, ideology still has a strong sway over the field of second language writing pedagogy.  The problem is not a single, overarching ideology, but rather, as one might expect for a field characterized by so much diversity, different competing ideologies.  Costino & Hyon (2011) explore the ideology gap between applied linguists and L1 compositionists by compiling an inventory of “scare words” that conjure up negative images for teachers/researchers in these respective disciplines.  Although they are successful in their bid to use genre as a way of neutralizing these scare words, the fact remains that many teachers and scholars in the field of second language writing seem hesitant or unwilling to abandon their respective field’s dominant ideology in order to move the field forward.

Specifically, I argue that in both cases, the dominant ideology is predominantly Western.  Although both the above paper and Atkinson’s (2010) provocative discussion of “theory” and “practice” (not coincidentally, two of the “scare words” mentioned above) help us to operationalize this gap (basically, it characterizes L1 compositionists as more liberal and applied linguists as more conservative), it is clear to me that both parties’ dominant ideologies are rooted in Western paradigms.  Unfortunately, among applied linguists the “deficit model” seems to largely hold sway.  This model views second language writers as imperfect writing machines whose mechanisms need to be constantly tinkered with in order for them to produce “better” (read: error-free) written compositions.  For example, Hinkel (2003) and Crossley & McNamara (2011) bemoan the syntactic & lexical “simplicity” of L2 writers as a problem urgently needing to be addressed.

For L1 compositionists, while the dominant ideology may indeed be more “liberal” in terms of not advocating a deficit model, it is still rooted in Western notions of individualism and self-expression.  As Hyland (2003) points out, the widely accepted “process approach” emphasizes the writer’s individuality and voice, and may serve to downplay notions of audience, hugely influential for writers from collectivistic cultures where indirectness and preserving harmony in social relationships is highly valued.  Similarly, as noted above, teachers and researchers enthusiastic about the use of peer review as an effective technique to help students improve their writing may run into problems with students from collectivistic cultures (Ramanathan & Atkinson, 1999).   

The most successful efforts to date seem to have developed out of work like Hyland’s (2003) and Costino & Hyon’s (2011), and Tardy’s (2009), who advocate placing genre front and center when trying to holistically develop L2 writers’ sense of purpose and audience.  Although genre theory is more situated in L1 compositionist notions than in those of applied linguistics, it still, interestingly, has resonance with the concept of register, which has been utilized to great effect in recent research in corpus linguistics (Biber, Gray, & Poonpon, 2011; Biber & Gray, 2010).  Genre theory has great promise in bringing applied linguists and L1 compositionists out of their respective ideological “shells” so they can come together to effectively synthesize knowledge from both disciplines in order to better help students successfully meet writing tasks.

That being said, genre theory itself also comes out of a Western tradition, and we should be cautious about adopting it, or any metanarrative, completely wholesale.  The point is not that it is bad to use mainly Western theories to form our pedagogy.  On the contrary; many second language writers will be writing for contexts in which Western paradigms hold sway.  Rather, what is important is that both teachers and scholars in the L2W field learn not only to bridge the ideological gap between applied linguistics and composition studies, but also to develop an awareness of the cultures of writing and learning of the students being taught.  Since both fields are rooted in Western paradigms, it is essential that teachers make an effort to understand some of the culture-specific challenges that their students may face in the L2W classroom.  It is to this end that the fields of Contrastive Rhetoric and cross-cultural studies must play an integral part in informing the pedagogy of teachers of second language writing.  Also, it is critical that non-western scholarship be given due attention in these matters.  It is no coincidence that some of the most groundbreaking scholarship in our field has been done by non-Western scholars such as Kachru and Canagarajah.  More collaboration, not only between applied linguists and L1 compositionists, but also between Western and non-Western scholars, should also be encouraged.

Word Lists: Useful Pedagogical Tool, or Red Herring?

Partially in response to Nakamaru's (2010) article on lexical issues for second language writers, and partially based on my own experience as a writing center tutor working with students who sometimes struggle to find their own words, I was interested in devoting my final blog entry for this class to vocabulary building. Since I have focused heavily this semester on academic writing and the challenges second language writers may face in manipulating this highly contextualized written language to their advantage, I decided to review Hyland & Tse's (2007) examination of Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List (AWL).

Although Hyland & Tse (2007) regard the AWL as a noble undertaking, they question its underlying theoretical assumption, which is that second language students entering an academic discourse community will be well-served by having a general, "all-purpose" academic vocabulary. To this end, the authors undertook a corpus-based study of their own in order to more objectively evaluate the AWL's coverage of words that students were likely to encounter in their studies. Although they found that the AWL had a respectable level of coverage across the board, this coverage was not equal across disciplines, and furthermore, that many of the words in Coxhead's corpus were dependent on specific context for their meaning. The authors draw the conclusion that world lists targeting "generalized" academic vocabulary such as the AWL may not be particularly useful in teaching students the discipline-specific, context-dependent lexis they need to succeed in university.

In touting lists of so-called "transition words" to my students in the writing center, I am implicitly endorsing the view that certain lists of words are generalizable to a variety of academic contexts. Although reading this article has not changed my views on this particular word list, mainly because it is small and each of its members has a rhetorical purpose as well a linguistic one, I certainly appreciate Hyland & Tse's (2007) thoughtfully critical evaluation of the AWL's underlying concept. What their results suggest, and what they make explicit in their conclusion, is that academic vocabulary learning is a highly context-dependent endeavor and is best managed within individual communities of practice. 
 

These conclusions evoke a tension I have explored in my last several blog posts: the idea that writing, like talk, may be better "locally managed" (Canagarajah, 2007). Unlike the pro- position I took last week on the codification of ELF grammar as a way of empowering L2 writers seeking publication in academic journals, I am hesitant, like Hyland & Tse (2007), to prescribe the learning of lexical items from "on high," and this for a very practical reason: as advocates of our students' success, we want to make sure any time they spend hunched over a compendious tome is well spent. It is easy to imagine our students dutifully memorizing all 570 of Coxhead's word families, only to find that their efforts have not resulted in as great a payoff as they had hoped.

ELF and World Englishes: Different dishes, or different cuisines?

This week I am reviewing Seidlhofer's (2009) article articulating her concern with the tendency among some in the academic world to separate ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) from the World Englishes (WE) paradigm discussed by Braj Kachru (1985). Some scholars, it would seem, even find the two views incompatible (Seidlhofer, 2009). However, as Seidlhofer effectively argues, the two paradigms have more in common than one might think: they are both dedicated to subverting the current monolingual paradigm which currently holds sway over much of the world and elevates "native speaker varieties" of English such as North American, British, and Australian English(es). Although WE and ELF differ in terms of which of Kachru's "circles" each is primarily concerned with (WE tends to focus on the Outer Circle while ELF is primarily concerned with the Expanding Circle), this distinction should not separate the two fields of scholarship, according to Seidlhofer.

To be sure, tensions exist between WE and ELF. Through Bamgbose (1998), Seidlhofer makes an argument for the eventual descriptive codification of ELF. Already we see a conflict with the  theoretical bent of Canagarajah (2007), who de-emphasizes standards because each NNS-NNS interaction is something made up on the spot, the particulars of which are negotiated by the participants as the interaction unfolds. Kachru (1985) himself, on the other hand, does not eschew prescriptivism or codification, even endorsing it in some contexts.

With respect to writing in the academy, I tend to agree with Kachru: I don't believe it works well to extend Canagarajah's theory, based as it is on spoken interaction, to second language writing. If we theorize, for example, the submission of an article by a non-native writer to an English language journal as such an interaction (albeit a textual one), we instantly have problems because of the power differential between writer and audience. Unlike interactions among ELF speakers, where every participant is on equal footing linguistically, the two parties in the writer-journal interaction are grossly unequal. This inequality makes the interaction less a conversation between individuals and more a form of "institutional talk" (Cameron, 2001) in which the supplicant is constrained as to what sort of interactive moves he or she is allowed to make.

To ground this theory a bit, if the journal holds all the power in determining what sort of linguistic deviation it will tolerate in submissions accepted for publication, then there can be no negotiation - prescriptivism is handed down or not, according to the whim and ideology of each individual publication. However, if there were a codified standard for written English that conformed to an ELF/WE and not a monolingual paradigm, a submission could not be rejected for deviant use of articles or omission of the singular third person marker morpheme -s, because these minor deviations do not serve as barriers to communication. In other words, while codification constrains, it also grants rights to the speaker/writer which otherwise would not be available.

Lingua Franca English and Challenges to U.S. Second Language Writing Pedagogy

The article I read this week, by Canagarajah (2007), discusses Lingua Franca English and multilingual communities as confirming the validity of, and indeed expanding, Firth & Wagner’s (1997) challenges to the dichotomies characterizing Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theory. These dichotomies include native speaker (NS) versus non-native speaker (NNS), language learner versus language user, and interlanguage versus target language (p. 923). Canagarajah exposes these dichotomies as being based in a monolingual view of language acquisition, created in a Western framework where nation-states see language deviation as a “problem” to be “fixed” rather than the norm.

In revisiting Firth and Wagner’s (1997) theory, Canagarajah brings up two examples from the present day: Lingua Franca English (LFE), spoken in parts of the world where (non-native) English serves as a common language, and multilingual communities in the Global South, where multilingualism and language deviation are the norm, to the extent that speakers may be hard-pressed to identify their mother tongue. From these examples, Canagarajah derives an argument for a practice based model of second language acquisition, in which acquisition is seen as primarliy occurring outside of classroom contexts and conditioned by social interaction, and where meaning is created as a result of practice rather than communicated vis-à-vis the conduit model. Here, what is important is not shared values or experiences, but shared interests.

I found this article very interesting, although highly abstract. Although not directly related to writing in a second language, it provides some of the theoretical underpinnings for challenging the dominant paradigm for second language pedagogy. As Canagarajah points out, “Even Western communities are beginning to acknowledge the diversity, hybridity, and fluidity at the heart of language and identity” (p. 935). It is extending this awareness to the academic community in the United States that interests me in particular. Putting this article in context, I make the following conclusions for how we can change second language and writing pedagogy to meet the linguistic realities of the twenty-first century.

1) We need to acknowledge that much of language learning among multilingual communities of speakers occurs apart from (formalized) classroom contexts. The goal is not to get rid of classroom instruction, but rather to adapt it to the contexts in which language is actually acquired and practiced.

2) We need to throw out the NS/NNS model. While this will be difficult to accomplish, it will be well worth it. Arguably, multilinguals from other communities have an advantage in the global marketplace that monolinguals do not (p. 930). Therefore, it no longer makes sense to keep viewing the NS as superior.

3) We need to rethink our writing-centered pedagogy. If Canagarajah is correct, then the writing-centered culture of the U.S. academy does not facilitate second language acquisition. Further, it damages second language students’ sense of confidence and self-esteem when they are viewed by the academy as flawed writers, rather than the able communicators they are.

Neutralizing the impact of "scare words" in L1 and L2 composition studies

For my second blog post, I reviewed the article "Sidestepping Our 'Scare Words': Genre as a Possible Bridge Between L1 and L2 Compositionists" by Kimberly A. Costino and Sunny Hyon. This article provides a thought-provoking discussion of the (negative) power of certain loaded words in influencing composition pedagogy. For L2 compositionists, these "scare words" include ideology, power and critical, terms often invoked by L1 compositionists. L1 compositionists, on the other hand, are often intimidated by the words skills and practice, common terms in the TESOL lexicon. According to the authors, the negative associations these words bring to the minds of composition instructors often prevent the merging of the two sub-fields in a way that would be beneficial to students. In order to address this problem, the authors, an L1 compositionist and an L2 compositionist, respectively, design lessons for their respective classes using genre as a pedagogical tool to help each borrow teaching strategies from the other while avoiding the use of "scare words."

Despite a lack of clarity in the paper showing how the authors arrive at this idea, its application seems to come off swimmingly. Each instructor teaches a lesson in her respective composition class whose purpose is to familiarize the students with a particular genre; in this case, that of the book review. The L1 instructor borrows the L2 instructor's teaching of specific structural "moves" and calls attention to specific lexical choices endemic to the book review genre, while the L2 instructor is subtly able to co-opt the concepts of purpose and audience in order to get her students to think more about authorship, readership, and the agendas of the different parties involved in producing a book review. Both lessons are successful: in avoiding the other's "scare words," and having something central such as genre to focus on, each instructor is able to appropriate some of the other's methods, if not her terminology.

One of the interesting things about this article is the resonance it has with one of this week's course readings, "Between Theory with a Big T and Practice with a Little p" by Dwight Atkinson. Indeed, there is quite a bit of overlap between the two articles in terms of how each posits the prototypical L1 composition stance as liberal and theoretical, and the prototypical L2 composition stance as more conservative and practice-oriented. Roughly, the L2 compositionists' "scare words" evoke the dense and necessarily political theory (with a big T or a little t?) often employed by L1 compositionists in their classrooms. The L1 compositionists' "scare words," on the other hand, suggest a divorcing of theory from practice, or at the very least, letting theory lead practice, a view that many L1 compositionists are uncomfortable with.

What exactly constitutes academic-level syntax? What corpus-based data show

Ask international students coming into the university writing center what they want to focus on in their tutoring session, and many of them are likely to utter a sentence containing a word feared and loathed by writing tutors everywhere.  That word, of course, is grammar.  The many facets of grammar in ESL student writing are far beyond the scope of this blog.  Prescriptive grammar and minor grammatical errors do not concern me here.  Rather, the question I am concerned with in today’s entry is quite specific, and it’s a doozy:  from a grammatical standpoint, how do we know whether university students whose native language is not English are ready to enter an academic discourse community and participate in the conversation as full communicative partners?

According to Biber, Gray and Poonpon's (2011) article, studies of grammatical complexity in writing have long been used as a measure to assess writing development.  Grammarians and L2 writing scholars traditionally have relied heavily on a measurement instrument called a T-Unit, which measures the amount of subordination within independent clauses.  The argument goes, the more dependent clauses that occur per independent clause, the more complex the sentence, and therefore the more advanced the writer.  However, the researchers, using corpus data, show that the T-Unit may not be an appropriate measure of syntactic complexity in academic writing, since this kind of subordination is actually much more common in conversation than it is in academic writing.  Instead, the researchers argue, scholars and teachers wishing to do this type of assessment would be better served to use a different measure to determine syntactic complexity in academic writing: the proportion of dependent phrases that function as constituents of noun phrases.

(charts taken from: Biber, D., Gray, B., & Poonpon, K. (2011). Should we use characteristics of conversation to measure grammatical complexity in L2 writing development? TESOL Quarterly, 45(1), 5-35.)

The article appears to be well-researched; one of the arguments that makes using corpus data so appealing is that it is based on actual language usage, rather than native speaker perceptions about writing, which are often wrong.  One drawback is that the type of corpus-based research engaged in by Biber, et al. (2011) is quantitative in nature, which makes interpreting the data challenging at times; the sophisticated statistical instruments the authors use (and the charts generated therefrom) are unintelligible unless the reader has some background in interpreting statistics.  Nevertheless, most people understand bar graphs; the tables reproduced below clearly show that conversation and academic discourse tend to employ different types of complex structures.  The authors argue that acknowledging this fundamental difference between speech and academic writing constitutes a “weak” interpretation of their findings; a “strong” interpretation implies an acquisition order for complex grammatical structures in English, from the least complex complement clauses in conversation to the highest levels of phrasal embedding in academic writing.

The pedagogical applications of the current research are less clear than we might wish, since the authors stop short of offering recommendations on how teachers can use this research to benefit their students.  What we, as instructors of college students writing in a second language, can draw from Biber et al.’s (2011) study depends on which view of the findings we take:  if we take only the weak view, then we are merely confirming what linguists, according to Lippi-Green (1997), already know: that speech and writing are fundamentally different linguistically.  On the other hand, if we take the strong view of the current findings, we have a potential new tool in our box as writing instructors, even if it is, at the present time, unsharpened and somewhat unwieldy.

In my opinion, the utility of this tool is to help teachers gauge whether, from a syntactic standpoint, students with English as L2, whether they are in a bridge program, a basic writing class, or even a mainstream composition course, are ready to enter an academic discourse community using written English as the medium of communication.  This is not to say that it is practical, or even desirable, for teachers to employ sophisticated statistical instruments to measure the frequency of this type of construction in their students' writing.  Nor does it imply that the use of advanced grammatical structures in writing should be the only criterion for whether students with English as an L2 are ready to enter an academic discourse community at the undergraduate or graduate level. However, assuming a familiarity with the types of structures discussed here, teachers of L2 writing can at least “eyeball” their students’ compositions in order to roughly gauge whether they contain the same level of phrasal embedding as the compositions of many of their native English-speaking peers.  In other words, the applications of the research as it now stands are limited, but the implications for the future of both L1 and L2 grammar pedagogy as it pertains to college student writing are significant.