Issues affecting Second Language (L2) Learning Students of Academic Writing

Issues affecting Second Language (L2) Learning Students of Academic Writing.

By

Anthony Brian Gallagher

M.A.ODE(Open), PGCODE(Open), PGCE, B.Sc.(Hons)

Introduction

This paper looks into the issues affecting students of English as a second language (L2) in their writing of academic level English reports and of the difficulties that lecturers face in teaching and preparing students for quality assessment of their writing abilities. Consideration of the important features of academic writing must be worked into quality assessment rubrics and guidance to provide consistency and equality. “Holistic” evaluation of essays in the literature seems to be a substitute for detailed scoring rubrics meaning that students are blinded from how to perform optimally.

Logical structure of ideas, critical thinking, demonstrating understanding, clarity of expression and quality of argument, are just some of the features which should be considered. Evidence of research, originality, individual effort, correct referencing, grammar, spelling, vocabulary and communication during the process, all need to be further investigated.

Word Count (4030)

Academic Writing for different purposes.

Academic writing is, for the majority of students, one of the more tedious subjects that they study at university but an essential part of their studies. It is a collection of skills that is slower to adapt than conversational language skills which is difficult to relate to as the written word is incredibly different from the spoken word. This disjoint makes it difficult for students to practice and to develop to competent levels. In ESL this becomes an extra level of difficulty.

Academic writing is a much desired skill in tertiary students, however in ESL students, academic writing is often perceived as overwhelming mainly due to ESL learners’ lack of grammatical and vocabulary competency. In an Asian context, most students have not engaged in academic discourse in their formal writing courses during secondary school education, and are often introduced to academic writing at university. Ultimately both context and inadequacies of English language proficiency compounds the academic writing difficulties experienced by ESL students at tertiary levels. Literature confirms the inadequacies experienced by university ESL students in their academic writing in English (Giridharan & Robson 2011).

ISSUES AFFECTING STUDENTS

Student concerns

Coffin et al (2003), state that providing feedback on learners’ writing is a key pedagogical practice in higher education. However, the quality of feedback provided to students plays a critical role in further advancing students’ academic writing skills. Instructor feedback assist students in monitoring their own progress and identifying specific language areas that need to be improved (Hedge, 2000). Instruction must be given to allay these concerns and to promote a more positive approach to engaging in this type of writing. “Research shows that student writing continues to pose challenges for English second language (ESL) teaching and learning throughout the world, in higher education institutions in particular” Chokwe & Lephalala, 2012) Clear instructions at all stages is required by students and should be explained as good practice to all instructors. Coffin et al (Ibid) break these into the following categories as can be seen in figure 1: Pre-writing, planning, drafting, reflection, peer/tutor review, revision, final editing and proofreading before submission.

Illustration 1: figure 1 Coffin (2003)

Before this process is complete, students should be aware of the marking system (rubric where possible) so as to optimize their result where results are important.

SMART Criteria ¹

Attempting the jigsaw without seeing the Box

Imagine if you were to attempt a jigsaw puzzle without ever seeing the picture on the box how difficult it would be to complete. How would you know where to begin or how to get a fantastic score? Perhaps if your lecturer was to week by week describe what the completed picture looks like or to show you a completely different looking picture and to ask you to imagine what the answer might look like. If this sounds unfair to you then imagine the difficulty that you might have if the explanations were given to you in a language other than your mother tongue. One could well begin to empathize with your apathy in the task that you are about to be set and assessed against based on your undergraduate course. What then are techniques that must be learned in order to complete such a puzzle? Normally one would begin with the edge pieces (structure) and then group these together with commonalities (thesis statement/arguments/)

Argumentative Essays (taking and defending a position) as well as Problem-Solution Report Writing (Agree/Disagree with a prompt) together can make up courses in academic writing with the goal of producing students with the collective skills necessary to be put in new situations and be able to perform such tasks with competence. Students being able to communicate as they work towards this goal and being able to self-assess and self-correct are collectively structured in order to produce the best analytical and academic results. Skills like these are then applicable to other tasks and topics producing quality individuals with well trained approaches.

Students believe that lecturers and learned people are supposed to teach them in ways that they can begin to understand how to perform types of tasks and not specific tasks. To write an academic essay a student does not need the lecturer to return to a beginners level of subject-verb-object sentence building and then expect them to submit a high quality piece of academic writing. This would be an unrealistic goal knowing that the student would need to improve an absurd amount in an unrealistic amount of time. This disjoint or vertical misalignment in undergraduate preparedness for writing can become a barrier to progress and a point for tension or apathy. Simply lowering the standard of accepted work is both frustrating for lecturers and defeating for students who are then provided with a course that is different from the quality that they were assured pre-commencement. There must be a trust between the standard that is advertised and the quality of the product if educational organizations are to remain attracting students with the opportunity for employment once they leave university. The universities who produce confident, skilled, academics to industry and other organizations are the ones whose reputations will grow and continue to be valued by the academic community, the business world and secondary educational establishments who wish to feed into them.

Key Implications

• Lecturers and students benefit from frequent feedback. Effective feedback contains information about how to improve rather than just evaluating levels of achievement.
• To be effective, assessments, both formative and summative need to be reliable (dependable) and valid (meaningful).
• Tests of general ability may be reliable but often lack validity.
• A majority of formative assessments should precede any summative assessments, and students should be astutely aware of which are which and why they are being used.
• Improvement of communicative skills and understanding should lead to improvement of cognitive skills.
• Types and styles of essays should be made clear to students in the learning stages as well as the creative stages.
• Timely students self assessment and the required skills to perform such self assessment must be included in the teaching practice in order for students to absorb this information and to adopt it as their own.

Reluctance to Write

“Motivation refers to whatever it is that leads us to engage in some activity.” (Long, 2000) . This motivation comes from the extent to which students feel empowered to change. “Empowerment means that teachers should provide students with the skills and knowledge to do important things that they would not do otherwise, and to develop their independent cognitive abilities and intellectual processes” (Ibid). For all students the initial reluctance to write comes from the process itself being cognitively complex, requiring academic vocabulary (often of highly specific and limited usability) and complex construction of language and content that may not enhance their learning experience or encourage independent learning (Snow, 2001).

Kedir (2012) suggests that a “reluctance to write among students falls into two major categories, namely complete avoidance reluctance and partial avoidance reluctance” which appears in various manifestations. (ibid) Instructors‘ perception of the reason for the student reluctance behaviours largely point to students‘ lack of requisite skills and preparedness to engage, while students‘ perception of their reluctance behaviour largely point to their instructors‘ failure to engage them actively. They recommend that “designing writing tasks and adopting classroom procedures” is the most important implication in planning for student success.

Unless a university instructor has taught in Japanese high, middle and elementary schools, how else can they expect to know and understand the expected skills of students having reached university level? Have students enrolled in the course the necessary writing behaviours and experience to tackle an academic writing course? Reluctance to write level appropriate work may be part to blame for varied results, while tension between students and instructors may build if reciprocity is not a factor in the classroom. If tutors develop quality in-class teaching materials, follow rigorous procedures and promote internal persistence during writing tasks that dynamic of each lesson and the retention of knowledge and skills of students can be optimised. Confidence comes from success and success must begin with small activities. These must be regular and built in to every lesson. Commonly these smaller activities are formative tasks. checked within each lesson and in the plenary of the lesson. Success in each small task builds confidence and gives students confidence to engage in the next task and the next. DeSena (2007) argues for “creating assignments that emphasize students’ original thinking through free-writing and the use of primary sources” to help build confidence and critical thinking skills so they are unlikely to plagiarise.

Reluctance to write is reduced with student confidence. Confidence comes from success and successful writing comes from mechanical development of grammar, Lexis and these most noticeably come from reading other material and putting into practice the new material and techniques that have been learned on the way. Myles (2002) states clearly that “ if students show an overall interest in the target language (integrative motivation), perceive that there is parental and social support, and have a desire to achieve their professional goals (instrumental motivation), they can become more proficient in their ability to write in English, despite the initial lack of self-motivation.” The ways in which students attribute causes for success or failure affect how they are likely to approach such tasks in future. A tasks often made more difficult in Japan due to the introspective nature of many a student. Allowing students to participate in class under the guise of their “English voice” invites them to shed the restraints of perhaps their own introvertive characteristics. Having and this “English voice” gives them a platform on which to build their new extrovertive character and to allow engagement in activities and processes that normally would be restrictive to them. Once proficiency in this new medium is attained, students can go on to further develop and feel confident in the new skill sets that they themselves have achieved.

Key implications

• Students' active participation is greater when they have a positive view of themselves as learners
• A platform to perform enables introvertive students to go beyond their normal comfort zone and risk engaging in activities and new experiences.
• Confidence comes from success and success must begin with small activities.

Research, Referencing and Risk of Plagiarism

Before beginning to create, one must think on the topic and research in enough detail to provide a decent argument. Both sides of the argument need to be explored, considering aspects of the counterargument, with enough detail to support the original argument, and bring it to a favoured conclusion. Research is required in order to get students to think and to write about topics they may or may not have ideas about themselves previously. By researching topics we can accrue ideas and begin to use them to support arguments. It must be made clear to students that they should look for (academic, or other) reliable sources that clearly state opinions, with ideally factually supported information that can be further analyzed and dissected if need be. Booth et al (2003) suggest a simple model for this as shown below:

Illustration 2: figure 2 Booth et al (2003)

Japanese students and International students researching is strongly affected by their own practices and conventions. “A significant cause of difficulty may lie in the different epistemologies in which these students have been trained and in which their identities as learners are rooted.” (Cadman, 1997). The absence of training altogether in schooling prior to entering university obviously has a severely detrimental effect on what they can achieve.

Referencing for students of first and second languages is problematic and even more so for Japanese students as there appears to be a lack of understanding of the term and conditions of plagiarism in a country where the copyright law is really quite different from the rest of the world Oyama (2011). In a country where customers can go to a rental store, buy blank DVDs and CDs then go home and copy them for themselves without infringing upon artists' rights it is confusing for students as to why they must reference materials for an “essay” or other piece of work.

Strategies to prevent plagiarism in academic writing (Wilkinson, Holladay, DeSena, DeHinkel) must be taught and stressed to students from their first year in university regardless of whether or not it has been taught to them previously. This initial training will minimize plagiarism and the culture of copying sections of text that are often paraphrased and misleadingly entered as the students own.

Difficulties for Lecturers

Quality Assessment Practices

As with any product, there needs to be both quality assurance as well as quality control. By forward planning of the implementation of courses the former can be assured, and with testing the latter can be controlled.

Assessment practices should be standardized within each university with clear guidance and/or scoring rubrics in order for students to understand where and when points are available for scoring and to give worth to important areas of attention. This process is time consuming and needs explanation to students and staff but does give security to students in knowing how their course scores are being formulated (quality assurance) before they begin and allowing transparency for all stakeholders in the assessment process. Assessment of academic writing is a subjective process that can be difficult to compact into a rubric but may allow students to understand the steps they must take in order to build up (through a series of drafts), quality pieces of writing before they submit them for scoring. A fuller understanding of the scoring system allows students to de-compact the rubrics and cognitively process the steps that they are taking en route to improvement. This process of understanding then becomes assessment as learning. The University of Adelaide's reliability and validity of assessment procedures was highlighted as a factor in:

“tensions and conflicts between what lecturers believe about their assessment of ESL students written work and how they actually go about the work of grading and marking students' work. Lecturers are influenced by a range of factors in assessing writing and their evaluation of students' work is, in the end, a highly subjective and somewhat fluid process” (Baik, n.d.)

Clear, consistent guidelines are important if universities are to ensure that their ESL students are neither disadvantaged by the assessment procedure, nor unfairly ‘advantaged’ by being marked

under a different (less rigorous) set of standards (Janopolous, 1992). Cumming (2001) noted that instructors practices for writing assessment depends on the specific purpose of that writing in that “clear rationales for selecting tasks for assessment and specifying standards for achievement” are normally employed. Internationally at this time the acceptable standard of English for Academic purposes is the (International English Language Testing System) IELTS examination. However, this testing system is a completely different structure to that which is taught in academic writing. The writing involved in this system is only one part of a more extensive examination and is not intended for University English Majors, rather it is aimed to be a tool for students to use in preparation for beginning tertiary education in English and for other purposes. Whatever the standards may begin to become they must, like all other standards, be quality controlled and undergo scrutiny by both positive and negative feedback by comparing taught content with assessed content, as well as questioning students and lecturers about the process involved by way of either questionnaire, interview or both (see appendix 1).

Guidance and the writing process

It can be argued that a focus on the writing process as a pedagogical tool is only appropriate for second language learners if attention is given to linguistic development, and if learners are able to get sufficient and effective feedback with regard to their writing errors. Myles (2002)

Jones (2011) suggests that regular quality feedback to students is therefore paramount to promoting confidence, providing realistic constructive criticism (positive points for progression) and maintaining close and regular communication with the students.

(Jones, 2011) wrote that “Feedback is a key element of both teaching and learning in academic writing. Students generally take note of feedback on the first draft of an essay, as they

are required to rewrite it and are motivated to achieve a good grade. However, feedback on final drafts is often ignored or forgotten before the next essay. This can be frustrating for teachers, as well as a missed opportunity for students to learn lessons from the final draft and take these forward to the next essay.” Supplemental to the idea of feeding back to students after their writing has been completed both in drafts and final essays is the idea of continuity and linking student learning together. Duncan (2007) describes the process of giving final draft feedback as a means to feed on to the next essay to be written the term “feed-forward”. Most instructors will use this type of assessment as learning, but when students completed semesters of 15 weeks normally including exams and other tests, there is normally only room for 3 essays in a term. Score weighting of the assessments must then be heavier on the latter essays as this learning is accumulative. Much like a train, the links between carriages (compartmentalized blocks of information) are critical for pulling student learning together to improve its performance.

Jones (2011) provides only anecdotal evidence to support her claims and recommends an emphasis on teacher feedback and student discussion. This research has a lack of summative data of actual student performance to making it difficult to gauge the student success in EFL this academic writing. In order to produce data that can be critically analyzed the use of clearly detailed rubrics should have been employed with more accuracy in the responses than the Likert scales and comments sections employed. Clearly regular, quality guidance must be given to students through their course of study both in written feedback and in discussions.

Classroom Discourse & Good Practice

Communicating instruction and broadening the channels of communicating both from and to teachers and students is critical.

In Japan there is the world famous “bullet train” or Shinkansen which people see as a high speed, quality piece of engineering that produces great results, in strict conditions, with a record of almost no failure. What many people do not know is that one secret to the success of this train is that each carriage is in itself an engine and the front and back carriages have no engines. If a student's learning were to be like this it would mean that each section of their learning powers them forward, could be swapped out and in at any location, and would produce a better quality product capable of much more and a greater overall productivity. Would it then be possible to forward plan and quality assure learning in this way so that students became much more autonomous? Teaching academic writing as a social practice and a student centred activity would promote ownership of each student's own learning and motivation to engage, write, record and absorb information at each opportunity.

Encouraging students to discuss their writing (with their peers) offers opportunity to analyze this discourse and exploration of concepts, contexts used, grammatical features, lexical analysis, risk-free sharing and exploration; all of which can be done more easily and freely than waiting for one teacher to go around each student. This does not mean that teacher responsibility is diminished, quite the contrary. Often teachers may suggest that the students are the main or only reason for differing amounts of failure in their own writing (Van Dijk, 1993). “Such a view implicates negatively in the ESL academic writing pedagogical practices especially where lecturers’ discourses, which are neither scrutinised nor critiqued, continue to dominate communicative practices in the university community of discourses.” Mohamed (2006).

Confidence in students and a willingness to fail are important facets to the practices of lecturers in university settings where 'professorial monologue' (Bourdieu et al, 1994) what many term “teacher talk time” is reduced allowing previously non-participating or rather silent participants to become engaged in content. Allowing also the lecturer to become more of a mentor than a didactic, rostrumed disseminator of information.

Standards and benchmarks do not appear to be collaboratively developed across universities and an international standard has yet to be developed. Standards serve as rigorous goals for teaching and learning, allowing students and educators to know what students would have learned at given points. Benchmarks are statements of learning that students are expected to master by the end of a given level and are commonly used in secondary education, although not in tertiary education. Competing universities often avoid collaborating on standards and benchmarks and shy away from publicising their internal workings. This avoids revealing curriculae to possible competitors and criticism. While easier to prepare rubrics for grammar, punctuation and lexical usage it is more difficult to create rubrics with clear standards and benchmarks for academic writing, although not impossible. Developing these fully requires inclusion of students with special needs and learning difficulties and more while possibly limiting those with accelerated needs, or returning students. The most central tenant or standard of academic writing in tertiary education is simply of academic honesty while most lecturers pay less attention to the grammatical and lexical errors in students writing.

The variation in quality control and standards of each course of study would benefit from more collaborative study and a standardization of acceptable and expected levels of competence in English writing at this academic level. This should be seen as quality control of teaching and learning and would allow quality assurance of courses for students and third parties to rate and to give accolade to. Quality control is normally performed in education by both formative and summative assessments, and in most circumstances, student appraisal of courses by way of questionnaire (Chokwe & Lephalala, 2012) at the end of each course. During lessons plenaries allow teachers to gauge student understanding if performed well and recorded in order to allow analysis and opportunity for improvement.

Key implications

• Classroom materials should enhance students' self motivation, and understanding of the tasks set and how to put this materials to best use (See appendix 2 for example).
• Acceptance of rigorous procedures in both classroom exercises and set homework, research practice, essay structure and flow, reportage of progression and communication.
• Persistence during writing tasks must be actively pursued and promoted by the teaching and learning of skills that best promote writing and engagement.

Conclusion / Points for Progression

Further qualitative research must be performed, with a case study approach to exemplify standards and benchmarks, in order to gain further insight into the issues. Participants should include ESL first, second and third year students and their tutors. Questionnaires, focus group interviews and marked student writing samples could be employed as data collection instruments.

Action research must be performed more extensively to gain better insight into asking students and lecturers the right questions and in a way that facilitates positive reciprocity and progression. Academic writing rubric creation is required to seek out standards and possible benchmarks that could be internationally seen as standards for students to attain.

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IELTS International English Language Testing System

http://www.ielts.org/test_takers_information/what_is_ielts.aspx

Appendix 1 http://www.studygs.net/fiveparag.htm

By conducting some "Action Research" on a cohort of students, tutors may be invited to write responses to the following research questions:

• What do you find to be the most common issues that students encounter while learning how to write academic arguments? (Please give as much information as you can)

• What techniques have you used that proved successful for students understanding?

• What do you consider the major barriers to success in academic writing?

• How prepared in writing skills are students on entering the programme?

• What classroom exercises produce best understanding of the APA reference system for students?

• How might the present process (2 assessment at 15% and 1 major assessment at 30%) be improved?

• Are there any other factors that affect student success in academic writing?

• And finally, What e-learning/online learning opportunities are there for students to understand academic writing and write quality arguments?

Appendix 2

Writing & answering:

1. Begin with a strong first sentence that states the main idea of your essay.
2. Continue this first paragraph by presenting key points
3. Develop your argument
   1. Begin each paragraph with a key point from the introduction
   2. Develop each point in a complete paragraph
   3. Use transitions, or enumerate, to connect your points
   4. Hold to your time allocation and organization
   5. Avoid very definite statements when possible; a qualified statement connotes a philosophic attitude, the mark of an educated person
   6. Qualify answers when in doubt.
      It is better to say "toward the end of the 19th century" than to say "in 1894" when you can't remember, whether it's 1884 or 1894. In many cases, the approximate time is all that is wanted; unfortunately 1894, though approximate, may be incorrect, and will usually be marked accordingly.
4. Summarize in your last paragraph
5. Restate your central idea and indicate why it is important.
6. Review, edit, correct misspellings, incomplete words and sentences, miswritten dates and numbers.

1SMART Criteria - Specific Measurable Attainable Relevant Time-Bound Goals.