By Ruth Trimble

TIPS FOR TEACHING ESL STUDENT WRITING

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Students of English as a Second Language are learning your language. Even though many of them may have good accents and be able to converse freely, this may not always apply to their writing. You may need a little help understanding their problems and these few tips might help:

What you should expect in ENG 100 or transfer level college writing:

• 1. Correct layout, form and organization of a paragraph or essay
• 2. Clear and logical thinking
• 3. Logical and well developed organization
• 4. Adequate details or examples for supporting generalizations
• 5. Appropriate and adequate topic /thesis sentences
• 6. Varied sentence patterns involving complex patterns correctly used
• 7. Connections or transitions between ideas/paragraphs
• 8. Expression of ideas should be clear
• 9. Sentence skills show adequate awareness of
  • Fragments/
  • Run-ons/
  • Subject-Verb Agreement/
  • Pronoun Reference/ Redundancy/ and so forth.
• 10. Correct form, outline and organization of the essay

What you cannot always expect of Non-native speakers of English outside the ESL class are:

• 1. Perfect and full vocabulary - may be limited and inappropriate at times.
• 2. Perfect prepositions - errors may last the adult student's lifetime; an extra strong effort is required to change the problem. Even different dialects of English will use prepositions in varied ways. Be aware
• 3. Perfect use of articles. These are a mystery to many foreign language speakers particularly Japanese, Korean, or Russian. Those who acquire a grasp of 50-80% of articles are doing well. To understand articles is much more complex than most native speakers would guess. It requires an awareness of count and non-count nouns, plurals and singular, definite and indefinite articles, together with a host of exceptions and special rules that are often about how much the audience knows of the topic. Add up all these at once and the task of guessing the correct article must seem impossible. Most of these students may never understand the use of articles no matter how many years they study.
• 4. Non-count or Mass nouns--English divides nouns into those we can count and those we cannot (like air, water, furniture, love etc.) The student will use the indefinite article before count nouns i.e. a luggage, a homework. Then pluralize non-count nouns such as "informations." This problem is intertwined with the article problem and often improves after a few years.
• 4. Perfect plural nouns-- ESL students do not give the 's' on words the kind of value that native speakers do. To them the 's' at the end of a word is just the same as any other letter, and has little significance. They must make a continuous effort to remember "How many is it?" and then add the 's' for plural.
• 6. Correct use of Passive tense - few will come to grasp the hidden implications of this tense. They should avoid it until they have a good grasp of the structure of English. "The passive should be avoided by ESL Students!"
• 7. Participial adjectives -ing and -ed. Even graduate students will continue to misunderstand the "exciting event" and the "excited event." These bring a little amusement to the instructor, but students need patience and practice to overcome. Refer the student to any ESL grammar text book to work on this. (Azar's "Understanding and Using English Grammar" is recommended)
• 8. Infinitive/ or Gerund after certain verbs. This is very hard to learn for many Asian students. You might see such strange things as: " I wanted stopping the music." or "My auntie avoided to get wet." If you can see the problem, you can hopefully understand the basic idea of the student.
• 9. Word order all askew : The English sentence has a general pattern subject-verb-object. Unless you have learned a 2nd language, you may not appreciate that a Japanese, Korean, or Hindi student would be using subject-object-verb as a basic thinking pattern. When we say: "The book is on the table." These students have learned: "The book the table on is." Try taking just one English sentence and putting it into their sentence patterns, and you begin to understand some of their dilemmas.

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HELPING the ESL Student

• 1. CONFERENCING :
  • a. If you cannot understand the student's written work, schedule a conference and ask him/her to tell you what s/he means. Often in retelling it to you, the student can explain it better. Asking leading questions will help them formulate their ideas. After the student has said it in words, rephrase it by saying, "Is this what you mean?..." When the student affirms this tell him/her to write it down. This will help clarify the thinking problem and internalize the phrasing.
    
  • b. In a conference, you can have them read their work aloud to you. Often they can hear their mistakes but not see them. They can often self-correct as they do this.
  • c. The college has very effective tutors who are trained to help ESL students improve their essays and refine their grammar skills. Contact the tutoring center, or send the students to the Learning Center for assistance.
• 2. IN CLASS PEER GROUPS:
  • a. Evaluation of rough drafts by peers in groups of 3 or more can help. Have them read their papers aloud. Other native students will be able to give them feedback on organization and help clarify ideas. Peer groups help with structural problems but may not be able to help with the grammar problems.
    
  • b.Give more time to in-class proofreading before the paper is handed in. The students proofread for each other. Corrections are made by the student who wrote the paper, but others often find a good percent of the easier typing and grammar errors. Everyone learns from this activity.
• 3. PERSONAL POINTERS As the student discovers the kinds of typical errors he makes, have him keep a workbook of "Pointers" or grammar rules. These pointers can be of the type :"Certain verbs such as: enjoy, avoid, dislike etc...can be followed by a gerund." "Use 'some' or 'the' or 'Ø'with non-count nouns but not 'a/an'."
• 4. GRAMMAR CHECKLIST Don't correct all their grammar errors. Expect the ESL student to find out what kind of error was made and ask the student to correct it and provide the grammatical rule. Tutors or English teachers can help with this.
• 5. TENSES Students who consistently don't use tenses in their first language may need some helping techniques. Some languages use the same verbs with phrases such as "yesterday" or "last week" to give ideas of time. Try having them use time phrases such as "Last week.." or "Next summer.." in front of the sentence to assist them determining the correct time frame. It may help them remember the tense endings.
• 6. PREPOSITIONS: This problem can make the sentences seem nonsense, but if you can see how a different preposition might alter the meaning, it could well be why it does not make sense with their choice. Preposition usage varies from one English speaking place to another. Prepositions that attach to certain two-word verbs need to be learned by being in the culture over a period of time. Various ESL texts have abbreviated lists of these. It will be a lifelong issue.
• 7. ARTICLES : This problem can be solved only with great personal effort on the part of some Asian students. I have met even Ph.D. Japanese professors who never use articles, yet they manage to command top positions and be understood by everyone. Some simple rules can be found in most grammar textbooks for non-natives. If you are upset by these errors, then insist on a tutor to check for this particular problem before the student hands in an essay.