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Awareness of Composing a Paragraph in FL: 沖縄地域学リポジトリ

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Title

Awareness of Composing a Paragraph in FL

Author(s)

Shibata, Miki

Citation

沖縄短大論叢 = OKINAWA TANDAI RONSO, 13(1): 123-

132

Issue Date

1999-03-01

URL

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12001/10682

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Awareness of Composing a Paragraph in FL

Miki Shibata

I . Background

How can teachers give the best feedback to help the students improve their composition? This has been a big issue in both first and second language writing (e.g., review in Leki, 1990 and Fathman & Whalley, 1990). Notice, however, what is an effective feedback and how the teacher should give it to the students have been argued but not the issue of training students. I propose that it is necessary for teachers to make students realize that successful writing in a foreign language (FL) includes more than syntactic rules, and that teachers should not provide too much feedback. In particular, they should limit their comment on surface-level issues in stu-dents' writing.

I have been aware that grammar has been too much emphasized in writing courses at Japanese universities. Little attention is paid to rhetori-cal issues in a classroom, which may lead students to believe that grammar is the most important for writing in English. I agree that grammar is a necessary component to enhance students to produce accurate sentences. Successful writing, however, entails not only linguistiC knowledge, but also other elements such as coherence and organization (e.g., Jacobs, 1982; Jones, 1982; Zamel, 1982). I do not see any theoretical or practical reasons for why the rhetorical values should be waited for to be introduced until the learners have learned all grammatical rules of a target language. Lack of linguistic knowledge in FL does not mean their unawareness of the rhetorical issues. Starting to teach the English grammar and composition course for

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freshmen at the University of Okinawa in April 1998, I found that my students had no concept about a paragraph, and that their linguistic knowl-edge of the target language (i.e., English) was relatjvely limited. When I assigned them to write a composition at the beginning, the most common question I was asked was 'Is this sentence correct?' That is, their focus was always on the sentence structure. I was busy hopping here and there among the students in class to answer this question. This made me feel urged to explain to them "what is composition?" and to introduce the paragraph writing. I have emphasized that there are three components necessary to consider in order to write a paragraph in English: content, syntactic rules, and paragraph rules (i.e., mechanics and spelling).

A theoretical assumption underlying my proposal is the theory of human information processing presented by Schneider and Shiffrin (1977), which consists of automatic processing and controlled processing. Because of the limitation of short-term memory capacity, the amount of information which humans can deal with at one time by means of controlled processing is limited. Through repetition, elements in controlled processing come to be activated automatically. Once ~ertain subtasks have been automatized, they require less time and mental capacity so that limited capacity is allocated to more demanding subtasks. Studies of second language (L2) learning have been conducted from the perspective of information process-ing load (Levelt, 1977; McLaughlin, Rossman, and McLeod, 1983; McLeod and McLaughlin, 1986; O'Malley, Chanot, and Walker, 1987; Kennedy, 1988). A considerable amount of cognitive effort is needed for L2 perception and production: L2 learners have to consider word meaning, syntactic rules, and social conventions as well as recognition of individual words.

As far as writing is concerned, writing task would be interacted with human cognitive processes (Bereiter, 1980; Bereiter and Scandamalia, 1983). Apparently, writers devote their limited mental capacity to subtasks

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involved in writing in order to achieve the major goal, namely composing a text. A number of subtasks are involved in the writing task: spelling, word choice, verbal inflections, syntactic structures, organization, rhetorical problems. Based on the information processing theory, paying attention to all these subtasks consciously would overload the information capacity of L2/FL writers. The amount of successful processing depends on how well individual skills are automatized. Some less demanding skills would be automatized and the automatization of lower level skills would allow limited capacity to be allocated to higher level or more demanding subtasks. For example, sufficient practice of rudimentary writers' lower-level skills such as the mechanics (e.g., comma, period, capitalization) of writing will eliminate their efforts for those subskills so that higher-level skills are concerned.

Given this, it must be cognitively demanding for the students with limited linguistic knowledge to be accurate in all grammatical items with equally paying attention to mechanics and considering rhetorical issues. Instead of expecting them to be accurate on all syntactic rules, an instructor could limit some target grammatical items to be focused on and have the students be conscious about only those in composing a text in FL. This might allow the students to be concerned about two other matters (i.e., mechanics and content).

Another problem is that they seem to go back to their old habit, namely worrying too much about grammar by the time when they do their writing assignment at home. In order for the students to retain their awareness of the three components for successful composition, I have used the feedback sheet that I would like to introduce here (See Appendix) which has helped them compose in English at home.

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II. Procedure

First, students write one paragraph on a certain topic and turn it in in the following class. Then, I give them feedback using the "writing report" attached to their first draft. Considering what I have commented on the " writing report," they are requested to revise their paper twice. I normally consider the third revision as the final paper.

As shown in Appendix, the table has three components; Grammar, Content, and Paragraph. Given that the writing in FL should be considerably demanding cognitively, I limit three items for each component to be checked, which students should focus on in their revision.

Feedback 1

I usually select three grammatical items commonly misused throughout all students' paper. Although surely teachers are keen to mark all grammati-cal mistakes, it must be frustrating and cognitively demanding for students to correct all of them. Rather teachers should bear with some inappropriate grammatical usage. I frequently assign students to use a certain grammati-cal item that we have covered in class. When I do, I include this item to be checked on their writing assignment. The items to be checked in terms of content are, for instance, whether students use appropriate transition words (e.g., In addition, However), whether their paragraph has a topic sentence and conclusion, and whether they provide enough examples to support their idea. Finally, the paragraph component includes mechanics (e.g., comma, period, and capitalization), spelling, and title (i.e., whether the paragraph has an appropriate title). All items are checked with a four-scale rating from A to D. Then, students revise their paper at home consulting feedback they have received on the "writing report."

I comment on their content as well by reacting to what they have written and clarifying their content through questions. I avoid comments

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like "What do you mean?" "Can you say this more concisely?" since these might be vague and abstract responses to them. Rather I provide more specific comments such as "When did you find this out?" and "How did you feel at this time?". These responses should help the students expand their content by answering my questions in revising their text for the second draft.

Feedback 2

The same process as the first one is repeated for the second draft. The feedback on the second draft is given on the same sheet and the same items as the first draft are checked. In order to differentiate from the first draft, znd in the parenthesis is marked and a different color pen is used to mark the four-scale grade for each item.

Final draft

The students revise their paper one more time and submit the final paper. The same procedure for feedback is repeated on the final draft. The sheet has all feedback recorded from the first draft through the final. Then, I give them a letter grade for the final draft in the total section. After giving the students their final draft back, I ask them to read through both their three papers (i.e., first, second, and final drafts) and the "writing report," and write a couple of points which they think they need to be careful about when working on the next writing assignment. At this stage, I normally have my students write the points in Japanese since they may feel more comfortable in doing so than in doing in English.

III. Conclusion

The feedback sheet I have introduced has successfully helped the students compose a paragraph in English in my grammar and composition

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class. At the end of the first semester, a brief student survey showed that they were aware of what a paragraph is and what they need to do in writing the paragraph. This kind of feedback sheet can be used with any profi-ciency level of English and possibly across any foreign language writings. Since the adult FL learners are cognitively mature and have writing experi-ence in their native language, there is no reason why teachers wait to introduce paragraph writing until they have been comfortable with syntac-tic rules of the target language.

I respond to what they write in English as well as how they write with the "writing report." The primary purpose of writing in a FL is communica-tion through paper, so teachers should react to what the students think and state in their paper. Two studies (Cumming, 1983; Zamel, 1985) have reported that the ESL (English as a Second Language) teachers comment on errors in student writing. Cumming (1983) examined responding procedures which ESL writing teachers had considered effective, and Zamel (1985) investigated actual teacher responses to ESL student writing. Their find-ings were that ESL writing teachers primarily responded to surface-level features of writing and checked errors at the sentence level. They hardly reacted to a whole unit of discourse in student writing. The results of both studies suggest that ESL writing teachers consider themselves as "lan-guage" teachers rather than writing teachers, and students as "lan"lan-guage" learners rather than writers.

Finally, writing a text in the target language is a good tool to reinforce grammatical knowledge and teach the students how to organize context with individual sentences. While writing, the FL learners could visually monitor their use of a certain grammar on paper and correct it if necessary. Yet this kind of composition in FL is rarely instructed at Japanese univer-sities. The most common writing text in Japan is grammar-centered and provides sentence-level exercises. In a real life, it might be unlikely to

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communicate with someone by means of only a single sentence. We often provide more than one sentence to convey our thoughts or achieve our desire. In order for communication to go forward smoothly (e.g., avoid misunderstanding), we need to know how to organize sentences. Given this, teaching composition in FL, in particular paragraph-level instruction, would lead the students to the better communicators in their target language.

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Appendix:

English Grammar & Composition Writing Report Topic: Due date: Name: Student ID: (1) Grammar (2) (3) (1) Content (2) (3) (1) Paragraph (2) (3) Total: final) A B

c

D A B

c

D A B

c

D A B

c

D A B

c

D A B

c

D A B

c

D A B

c

D A B

c

D

What will you be careful with in your writing next time? Write a couple of points below in Japanese.

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References

Bereiter, C. (1980). Development in writing. In L. W. Gregg and E. R. Steinbery (Eds.), Cognitive process in writing. New Jersey: Lawren-ce Erlbaum Associates.

Bereiter, C. and Scandamalia, M. (1983). Does learning to write have to be so difficult? In A. Freedom, I. Pringle, and J. Yalden (Eds.), Learning to write: First language/second language. New York: Longman Inc. Cumming, A. (1983). Teacher's procedures for responding to the writing of

students of English as a second language. Paper present at the 16th Annual Canadian Council of Teachers of English Convention, Montreal, May, 1983.

Fathman, A. & Whalley, E. (1990). Teacher response to student writing: focus on form versus content. In B. Kroll (Ed.), Second language writing: research insights for the classroom. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press.

Jacobs, S. (1982). Composing and coherence: the writing of eleven pre-medical students. Linguistics and Literacy Series 3. Washington, D. C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Jones, S. (1982). Attention to rhetorical form while composing in a second language. In C. Campbell, V. Flashner, T. Hudson, and J. Lubin (Eds.), Proceedings of the Los Angeles Second Language Research Forum, Vol.2 (pp. 130-143). Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles.

Kennedy, B. L. (1988). Adult versus child L2 acquisition: An information processing approach. Language Learning, 38, 477-495.

Leki, I. (1990). Coaching from the margins: issues in written response. In B.

Kroll (Ed.), Second language writing: research insights for the class-room. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press.

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Levelt, W. ]. M. (1977). Skill theory and language teaching. Studies m Second Langauge Acquisition, 1, 53-70.

McLaughlin, B., Rossman, T. and McLeod, B. (1983). Second language learning: an information-processing perspective. Language Learning, 33, 135-158.

McLeod, B. and McLaughlin, B. (1986). Restructuring or automaticity? Reading in a second language. Language Learning, 36, 109-123. O'Malley,]. M., Chamot, A. U., and Walker, C. (1987). Some applications of

cognitive theory to second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 9, 287-306.

Schneider, W. and Shiffrin, R. M. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: I. Detection, search, and attention. Psycho-logical Review, 84, 1-66.

Zamel, V. (1982). Writing: the process of discovering meaning. TESOL Quarterly, 16, 195-209.

Zamel, V. (1985). Responding to student writing. TESOL Quarterly, 19, 79-101.

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