ESL Writing Course Round-Up

Every semester I that I teach an ESL Academic Writing course, I am convinced that *this* time I’ve developed *the* right way to teach writing. And, of course, by the end of the semester, I come up with yet another list of “things I will change next time.”

But at the beginning of this semester, I felt that things were different this time: I had finally developed a curriculum that really was *the* right way to teach ESL Academic Writing. And yet here I am 4 months later with a To Do list for next year.

The New Curriculum

The basic structure for this course comes from a curriculum that I helped a colleague develop at my previous institution. We had talked about the value of revision and helping students learn writing academic writing at an increasingly complex pace, and so one summer we implemented the Iterative Writing Model in the upper level academic writing classes at our Intensive English Language Program. It wasn’t perfect, but we were excited about it enough to continue experimenting/refining it and even presented on it at TESOL the following year.

Basically, the model involves asking student to write 3 papers over the course of the semester. The first paper is the shortest and deals with a limited aspect of a the organization of a typical research paper. The second paper requires students to repeat the organization of the first paper (in a slightly more condensed form) and add to it the next aspect of a typical research paper. In the final paper, students repeat the two previous parts (once again in a more condensed form) and then add the final rhetorical/organizational elements required to have a comprehensive research paper. By repeating the process three times, each with increasing difficulty, students are able to refine their English language writing skills along with their research writing skills without too great a cognitive load of a completely new rhetorical structure with each paper.

Additionally, the model has students “share” topics over the course of the semester. So while Student A may write about Topic X for paper one, she will also cover Topics Y and Z for her other papers, and Student B will cover the same topics, but in a different order. In this way, students can share research sources with one another AND can provide their own papers to classmates as a base text for those who will later write about that topic. This help reduce the amount of time that students need to spend locating sources, it helps students become aware of audience (because a classmate will ask them to clarify a poorly written paper), and it builds a sense of community.

The Good

Feedback from students this semester suggests that they liked the increasingly difficult nature of assignments that made the task of writing a 10-page paper approachable at the end of the semester. They also enjoyed reading one another’s papers which helped them gauge their ability and learn from their classmates. I also received strong feedback from students that they enjoyed the weekly activities that helped them learn and apply vocabulary from the Academic Word List. More than a few students highlighted the games such as Pass-It-On which students suggest were very helpful in applying the AWL vocabulary to their papers.

Students also cited “speed dating” as an effective learning activity. Essentially, this activity allowed students to receive feedback on an “oral draft” of their paper by being interviewed by a classmate. Students repeat the interview multiple times with different classmates, and, as one student explained, “as I would speak, I realized what part of my paper needed to be improved with better explanations.”

The Bad

The organization of the course management system (CMS) could have been better. Part of this is due to the fact that at the beginning of the course I was not sure exactly how and what students would share with one another. Another problem was that most of the students had little familiarity with the CMS and would frequently post things to the wrong place in the CMS making it difficult for me and for their classmates to find their materials. Lastly, when students missed deadlines for assignments, it made it impossible for me to rely on those assignments for peer reading class activities. I think that these issues could be improved by better explaining how the CMS worked, and by enforcing stricter deadlines (which I am always reluctant to do, so many students flounder when they are given flexible deadlines).

I also think that I need to provide more model papers (both good and bad) for the class to read and analyze. In conjunction with this, I need to make the grading rubrics available to student right from the start and show them how the model papers hold up to the rubric.

The Ugly

It seems as though every year that I teach ESL I encounter a student who has a bad experience. For example, in one year that I taught a double section of advanced university-prep ESL writing, I had one student whose essays contained large portions of text that had been copied from an internet source but were not attributed as such. When I informed him of the problem, he became immediately defensive and refused to discuss the problem with me. Then, on the subsequent assignment, I found the same problem, and on closer investigation, I realized that not only did the text plagiarize an internet source, but in fact the essay was written by a friend of his in a previous semester – in essence, he was plagiarizing a plagiarized paper (I also discovered that he was only studying in our program so that he could qualify for a student visa so that his children could live in the USA and study at a US public school).  Once again, he refused to discuss the issue with me. When the semester ended, he failed the course and left the program with a negative opinion of academic writing.

More recently, I struggled with another student whose papers had plagiarism problems. I caught these issues early in the semester and indicated to the student how they could be fixed, and the student claimed to fix the errors, but I still found the subsequent drafts to be unacceptable. This went on for over a month, and I would invite the student to speak with me about it in class or through office hours, but he would not do so. Instead he would respond to my concerns through email and it was not until the end of the semester that I realized what the problem was. Due to his spotty absence record in the class, he had missed out on crucial discussions of attribution, quotation, and paraphrasing. In the end, I was too late to help him resolve his misunderstandings, and I although he passed the course, I was fairly certain that he left with an incomplete understanding of proper citation practices.

The disgruntled student that I encountered at the end of this semester was perhaps the most surprising and definitely the rudest of any of these cases.  Right from the diagnostic test on the first day of class, I noticed that this student’s English language skills were drastically lower than her classmates. Not only was she less fluent (remarkably fewer total word written compared to the class average),  less accurate (far more errors in her writing compared to her classmates), and less complex (her vocabulary and grammar range was very limited), but her performance of tasks suggested that she also misunderstood the nature of assignment regardless of whether the instructions were provided orally or in writing.

As a result, her grades were lower than the class average (a fact that only I was aware of since I did not share the average grade with the class), but I felt that I was actually padding her grade in order to motivate her to keep trying (rather than give her a more appropriate lower grade that might discourage her from completing future assignments). My feedback was always encouraging, but also clear about what aspects of her papers fell short of the standard. I invited her to discuss her paper with me during office hours, but she never accepted these invitations. So this semester I tried something new; I required all students to meet with me at the end of the semester to discuss their performance and provide them with an opportunity to ask any parting questions. On the whole, these were positive experiences. However, when this particular student arrived for her interview, it was obvious from the start in that she was not satisfied with the quite generous grade (from my point of view) that I was prepared to assign to her performance. Instead she demanded a perfect grade, and when I refused, explaining my decision as evidenced by the feedback I had given her all semester long, she resorted to shouting, and then crying, and then a refusal to leave until she got what she wanted. Of course, she did not get what she wanted, and left accusing me of a double standard (?) and of not recognizing her effort during the semester (apparently she felt that her grade ought to reflect her effort regardless of her skill or her performance). It was an exhausting 30 minutes, and it is experiences like this one that are so disappointing, especially when I feel like I’ve worked hard all semester to help students.

The ugly truth is that education does not change students. Rather, students can choose to change themselves via education, but it has to be a voluntary process; we can’t force it on them. So if a student insists on being lazy, ignorant, or self-righteous (and filled with a sense of entitlement), sometimes there might not be a lot that an instructor can do. We can provide experiences that can help motivate students to become better versions of themselves, but unless they want to change, those experiences may not do a lot of good. It saddens me to think that our educational system may encourage students to pursue grades rather than learning, because grades are a short-term goal whereas learning is eternal.

The New New Curriculum

Although I learned a lot from The Bad that will help me to design a better course next year, I’m not that there’s a whole lot that I can to prevent The Ugly. I will say that I feel that I have done a far better job of teaching citation/paraphrasing/anti-plagiarism then ever before, and I think it has had a positive impact on students’ ability to use sources in their research writing.

But can I foresee and prevent all student attitude issues? Maybe not, but I suppose that I will keep trying. For example, next year, I am going to be much more direct and strict about deadlines and grades. Weak writers will need to be prepared for the fact that their writing  fails to meet appropriate standards will be graded as such, but they will also know that the course is generously weighted towards the second half of the semester which enables students to improve their skills and receive a grade that acknowledges this. And I will try not to become jaded by The Ugly experiences that do not generally reflect the excellent students that I work with each year.

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