"Popular Wrong Ways to Teach Writing"

This is an article I found while unpacking a box of my stuff tonight, which had been left in the basement of the apartment building since May.

Popular Wrong Ways to Teach Writing

by Curtis Kelly

Cambridge Connection May 2001

It always amazes me how many writing teachers--and writing books too, for that  matter—focus on grammar, vocabulary and language accuracy as the main objective of the writing class. I suppose we do this because, first and foremost, we are language teachers, but there are far more important things we should be teaching instead. In particular, I believe we should focus on teaching writing fluency and organization.

For very basic writers, let us give them fluency. Let us help them learn how to write directly into English without translating from their native language. Only two things are required to succeed in this objective: have them write a lot, and do so without fear. Interestingly, a correction-revision oriented approach (ie, focus on grammar, vocabulary and language accuracy), actually inhibits this kind of growth. If the students are worried on being graded for accuracy, they are more likely to be overly careful about what they produce. The result? They don’t write much and they write it in their native language first. In fact, error correction actually inhibits what it is trying to foster! Students worried about making mistakes avoid using higher forms of grammar and vocabulary, sticking to the simplest and easiest, thus curtailing their growth in this area. Therefore, don’t worry about mistakes in grammar and vocabulary, and don’t correct. After all, language acquisition comes more from input—listening and reading—than output. Instead, just focus on just getting your students to write, and to write a lot. Use interesting topics and have them write to each other. That is enough.

My comments: When I studied at UOI, a graduate school classmate, a native-speaker of English shared  with us how she taught an ESL writing class. She had the students keep a journal and hand in every week. She never corrected their mistakes; instead, she only gave feedback. In this way, the students were not afraid of writing and they got a lot of input.

Then, as soon as possible (even with high beginners), start teaching them how to organize. In years and years of dealing with Asian students trying to study abroad or communicate with native speakers, I have come up with the same problem in their writing. They just do not know how to organize writing in a way acceptable to native speakers. In fact, research shows that in expository writing (the kind of writing done in school and business), organization is far more important for communicating to native speakers than language accuracy.

Research in contrastive analysis shows that Japanese, Koreans, Chinese and Thai speakers all have a similar way of organizing writing that is almost the complete opposite of English. Whereas English writers usually state the main idea in the beginning and organize their writing into topics, Asian writers hold off stating the main idea until the end and organize their writing around one innocuous theme. Therefore, teach them the fundamental rules of paragraph writing, insist on a clear statement of the topic, and focus on prewriting activities, which is where organization happens.

Well, don’t feel bad if you have been an accuracy-oriented writing teacher all these years. It is not too late to change. After all, it took me ten years of correcting Japanese students’ errors before I realized how fruitless my efforts were. I now only correct the grossest of errors (except for those in organization) and have my students write as much as possible and as often as possible. And you know what? I really like teaching writing now.

For more information, see my web site at http://www.mediawars.ne.jp/~ctskelly/index.html

My comments: I just typed up the whole article. The above link is not accessible now.