A Synthesis of Research on Second Language Writing in English

Ilona Leki,Alister Cumming,Tony Silva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135601522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

'I applaud the authors for this sizeable undertaking, as well as the care exercised in selecting and sequencing topics and subtopics. A major strength and salient feature of this volume is its range: It will serve as a key reference tool for researchers working in L2 composition and in allied fields.' – John Hedgcock, Monterey Institute for International Studies

Synthesizing twenty-five years of the most significant and influential findings of published research on second language writing in English, this volume promotes understanding and provides access to research developments in the field. Overall, it distinguishes the major contexts of English L2 learning in North America, synthesizes the research themes, issues, and findings that span these contexts, and interprets the methodological progression and substantive findings of this body of knowledge. Of particular interest is the extensive bibliography, which makes this volume an essential reference tool for libraries and serious writing professionals, both researchers and practitioners, both L1 and L2. This book is designed to allow researchers to become familiar with the most important research on this topic, to promote understanding of pedagogical needs of L2 writing students, and to introduce graduate students to L2 writing research findings.

Section I
Contexts for L2 Writing

Since the early 1980s the L2 writing profession has increasingly acknowledged that it is counterproductive to analyze English learners’ writing or language development without embedding the inquiry in the human, material, institutional, and political contexts where they occur. This section on Contexts for L2 Writing is predicated on views of language use and education as the enactments of particular discourses (Gee, 1996, 2005). Taking an ecological view of activities, human agency, and contexts as enmeshed and woven together, the approach in this section has been to describe the contexts in which L2 writers write by constructing a loosely thematic narrative based on the study of the individuals and groups who have been the focus of L2 writing research in the last 25 years.

Some of the categories selected for inclusion in this section presented themselves as obvious to such an endeavor, for example, the chapter covering research on L2 undergraduates in North American universities. In other cases, categories that incorporated a body of literature were included even when that body was relatively small, for example, the chapter on workplace writing; though a relatively small category in L2, nevertheless the context of writing in the workplace presents an intriguing and important intersection of concerns for L2 writing professionals. Finally, in some cases, such as L2 writing in secondary schools, research on writing itself could not be properly discussed without consideration of the institutional, social, cultural, and affective contexts in which the writing was embedded.

Any discussion of L2 writers requires an acknowledgement that it is difficult to come to a decision about how to refer to them, or indeed, whom to include in the discussion. Terms referring to these writers such as English as a Second Language (ESL), English as an Additional Language (EAL), bilingual, multilingual, and others are each inappropriate in some ways for the many varieties of writers that might be included here. However, since some term is required, we have for the most part settled upon L2 writers as one of the more neutral.

Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 group writers working in educational contexts, prekindergarten through graduate school in English-medium institutions in North America. The students in each of these levels of education might be grouped differently, for example by legal status as visa students versus more permanent residents, and these different categorizations would unquestionably have led to a different kind of synthesis of the literature. The decision was made to group these writers instead by the educational context in which they worked and lived and consequently by the literacy demands encountered there. We nevertheless recognize that these demands are inevitably perceived, experienced, and responded to differently depending in part on the students’ length of residence in the target community, intended length of residence, language proficiency, educational background, and a host of other factors so disparate as to make the resulting discussion too diffuse to be useful to understand the phenomenon of L2 writing. In categorizing research by writing context we are also making a claim about the importance and impact of context on all individuals and hoping at the same time to avoid the knotty issue of dividing people themselves into categories.

The next section (chapters 6, 7, and 8) examines the literature on L2 English writing outside classrooms, in the community, the workplace, and the professional settings of scholarly publications in English. The role of writing in these contexts varies widely, and the accomplishment of writing tasks is less individual and often more widely distributed among the members of the social or professional group. Finally, permeating all these previous contexts are the broader sociopolitical dimensions of L2 writing in English. The literature on these dimensions encompasses some of the social identities of these writers and examines the political and ideological climate surrounding L2 writing in English and the influence of that climate on pedagogical practices and disciplinary and societal attitudes.

Chapter 1
Young Writers

Research on the writing of young beginning L2 writers over the last 25 years has been characterized by its consistent portrayal of these writers as capable, usually able to do more with writing than might be imagined. Unlike descriptions of the wrenching disruptions and loneliness of many teen L2 writers, the story of younger L2 writers has generally been hopeful, more often reporting success and increasing power, self-confidence, and flexibility in writing. (See, however, darker pictures of how schooling is experienced by young L2 learners in Toohey, 1998, 2000, and Hawkins, 2005, and the influence of school programs on beginning writers in Edelsky, 1996.)

Researchers of the 1980s were well aware of the differences between early L1 writing and early L2 writing among children. First, unlike L1 writers, L2 writers may have little oral language to draw upon in developing literacy, and thus are not and cannot be moving from oral to written forms in their writing development, an analysis often offered in discussing L1 beginning writers. The second significant potential difference is that L2 beginning readers and writers may already be literate to some degree in L1 and can therefore potentially rely partially on that literacy both to create texts and to advance their developing L2 literacy (Edelsky, 1986).

Nevertheless, because many of the efforts of researchers in the 1980s were specifically focused on improving instruction, including in bilingual education programs, their initial apparent mission was to show

1. that beginning L2 writers were much like beginning L1 writers and that
2. in supportive, meaning-oriented writing contexts, beginning L2 writers brought with them and were able to draw upon a variety of resources and strategies to successfully create expressive texts that communicated meaning (Ammon, 1985; Blanton, 1998, 2002; Edelsky, 1986, 1989; Genishi, Stires, & Yung-Chan, 2001; Han & Ernst-Slavit, 1999; Hudelson, 1989a; Peyton, 1990; Urzua, 1986, 1987).

Like beginning L1 writers, L2 writers were also observed to use invented spellings (Edelsky, 1986; Hudelson, 1989a); to use marks (such as drawings) other than letters to supplement texts (Blanton, 1998; Han & Ernst-Slavit, 1999; Hudelson, 1989a; Huss, 1995); to show awareness that print conveys meanings (Hudelson, 1984); to respond positively to opportunities to write (Hudelson, 1984, 1989a, 1989b); to use writing for a variety of purposes, including non-narrative writing (Early, 1990), and to shift stances for different audiences (Edelsky, 1986; Hudelson, 1984, 1986; Urzua, 1987); to demonstrate the ability to look at text as text and critically evaluate it (Samway, 1993); and to exhibit a general sense of what writing looks like, including across different script systems, for example, knowing that Arabic is written right to left rather than left to right (Huss, 1995) or that Chinese characters have a particular boxy look (Buckwalter & Lo, 2002). Much of this research worked against prevailing dogma and served to debunk such myths as the following notions:

• L2 writers must learn to speak before learning to read or write. Rather, young learners may feel more comfortable writing and be more willing to write than speak (Hudelson, 1984, 1986; Saville-Troike, 1984); furthermore, their writing differs from their speech even in early stages (Edelsky, 1986).
• L2 writers must learn to read before they can write. Instead learners use existing knowledge as best they can to accomplish their goals (Han & Ernst-Slavit, 1999; Hudelson, 1984, 1986).
• Children must learn correct spellings from the beginning or they may develop bad spelling habits that will be difficult to break later (Edelsky, 1986; Hudelson, 1984).
• Grammar instruction aids literacy development. In fact it appears to have little effect (Elley, 1994; Saville-Troike, 1984).
• Reliance on L1 serves only to confuse children and so should be discouraged. Rather, L1 has been shown to be an important resource (Carlisle, 1989; Dávila de Silva, 2004; Hudelson, 1989a; Long, 1998; Moll, Saez, & Dworkin, 2001; Saville-Troike, 1984).
• Because writing is a solitary affair and an individual cognitive achievement, children should each work to develop their writing abilities and texts individually. Instead, children have been shown to work best with the timely help of peers and teachers (Blanton, 1998, 2002; Clark, 1995; Dávila de Silva, 2004; Early, 1990; Goodman, 1984; Hudelson, 1986; Urzua, 1987).

Research in the 1980s and early 1990s also supported a drive away from copying texts in lieu of creating them, filling in blanks instead of writing more extended language, and encouraging (or forcing) children to function in only the target language instead of making use of L1 borrowing or code-switching strategies (Early, 1990; Edelsky, 1986; Elley, 1994; Francis, 2000). It also generally supported Whole Language approaches (Edelsky, 1996; Freeman & Freeman, 1989; Hudelson, 1989a, 1989b; Kitagawa, 1989; Westerbrook & Bergquist-Moody, 1996), the notion that writing helps develop other language and social skills (Hudelson, 1984; Urzua, 1987), and the potential importance of teachers’ roles (Francis, 2000; Goodman, 1984).

Although case studies were not infrequent, because the thrust of this research was to argue a position, or at least minimally to describe contexts that promoted literacy acquisition in this population, the emphasis was somewhat synchronic, looking at groups of young writers often within bilingual programs (Ammon, 1985; Edelsky, 1982, 1986; Geva & Wade-Woolley, 1998). Nevertheless, a consistent finding in these studies was the wide variation shown between individual young writers and individual pieces of writing by the same child (Hudelson, 1986; Saville-Troike, 1984). Perrotta (1994) offered a useful summary of the positions that researchers were taking for granted by the beginning of the 1990s. At the end of the 1990s a report sponsored by a series of government, health, and education agencies (addressing reading rather than writing, however) reviewed the research to date on schooling and literacy generally for L2 students (August & Hakuta, 1997).

In this body of literature, as in others focused on writing, the 1990s saw a “social turn” (Trimbur, 1994), on one hand, and on the other a more diachronic focus with greater emphasis on the complicated paths that writing skill development took with individual children and on the way writing skills interacted with identity, positioning, and variations in familial or cultural orientations (Edelsky, 1996; Goodman, 1984; Hudelson, 1986; Hunter, 1997; Maguire & Graves, 2001; Solsken, Willett, & Wilson-Keenan, 2000; Volk & de Acosta, 2003). Recurring themes through 2005 centered around the importance to writing of talk, including talking to one’s self; this meant not learning to talk before writing, as had been promoted in the 1970s, but using oral interaction to scaffold text construction and model texts (Gutierrez, 1994; Han & Ernst-Slavit, 1999; Patthey-Chavez & Clare, 1996) and to build influential social relations with peers and teachers (Blanton, 2002; Day, 2002; Gutierrez, 1994; Hawkins, 2005; Hunter, 1997; Huss, 1995; Long, 1998; Maguire, 1997; Nassaji & Cumming, 2000). McCarthey, Garcia, Lopez-Velasquez, Lin, & Guo (2004) found that the lack of opportunity to talk (between students and teachers and among teachers) about expectations for writing tasks and topics led some young English learners to transfer L1 schooling understandings about writing to their English learning context in ways that were not particularly helpful, for example, believing that care in handwriting and forming letters was highly valued.

Writing was also seen as a means of allowing children to explore and make connections between home or native culture and school or target culture (Edelsky, 1996; Han & Ernst-Slavit, 1999; Long, 1998; Maguire, 1997; Maguire & Graves, 2001; Masny & Ghahremani-Ghajar, 1999; Patthey-Chavez & Clare, 1996). In addition, examining children’s journal writing became less an exercise in discovering the nature of L2 beginning writers’ texts, as it had been in earlier research, and more a means of monitoring these writers’ social, educational, and cultural adjustment experiences (Gutierrez, 1994; Kreeft, Shuy, Staton, Reed, & Morroy, 1984; Maguire & Graves, 2001; Nassaji & Cumming, 2000; Peyton, 1993). In contrast to the previous several years of research, with those assessments came also a recognition of the frustration experienced by these children as they lost self-confidence in their literate abilities and developed a sense of their own incompetence (Platt & Troudi, 1997), causing in some cases a loss of interest in extended reading and writing for school (Han & Ernst-Slavit, 1999; Long, 1998), though not necessarily in self-initiated writing (Long, 1998). (Similar findings occur for high school students and community writers; see for example Fu, 1995, and Guerra, 1998.)

As sociocultural theories came to predominate over more developmental and cognitive orientations, the roles and attitudes of teachers in particular were considered critical in delimiting or opening literacy possibilities for the children (Gutierrez, 1994; Masny & Ghahremani-Ghajar, 1999; Platt & Troudi, 1997). See also Toohey (1998, 2000) and Toohey and Day (1999); although not focused on literacy development specifically, this research richly contextualizes sample environments in which child literacy develops in schools. In recognition of the importance of teachers, L2 child writing researchers began also to urge that both teachers and administrators learn more about the cultural and family backgrounds of L2 students in their classes (Masny & Ghahremani-Ghajar, 1999; McCarthey, 2002; McCarthey et al., 2004) and exercise particular critical vigilance so as not to be led by dominant school-based discourses to undervalue the hybridity of young writers’ texts as they weave social and personal agendas and varying background cultures into their writing (Solsken, Willett, & Wilson-Keenan, 2000). Trends in the early 2000s have converged around the examination of how writing develops in biliterate children and how being bilingual affects literacy development in both languages, in other words, the examination not of the similarities between monolingual and bilingual beginning writers but of their differences, with the differences viewed as advantages rather than as deficits (Buckwalter & Lo, 2002; Durgunoglu, 1998; Durgunoglu, Mir, & Arino-Martin, 2002; Francis, 2000; Reynolds, 2002). See especially Perez (2004a) for a useful discussion of L1/L2 literacy development in children from a variety of L1 backgrounds.

An important line of research traces the influence that opportunities and encouragements to write a variety of texts in mainstream (Au, 1993; Gutierrez, 1992; Moll, Saez, & Dworkin, 2001; Reyes, 1992) and heritage language schools and at home exert on nascent L2 literacy, on the continued development of L1 literacy, and on children’s attitudes toward writing in L1 and L2 (McCarthey & Garcia, 2005; McCarthey et al., 2004; McCarthey, Guo, & Cummins 2005; Xu, 1999) with successes reported particularly in school contexts that encouraged writing in both (or more) languages (Manyak, 2001; Moll, Saez, & Dworkin, 2001). Biliterate children demonstrated a range of literacy competencies inside (McCarthey et al., 2004) and outside school contexts and the ability to strategically engage them (Jimenez, 2000; Solsken, Willett, & Wilson-Keenan, 2000). Furthermore, McCarthey’s (2002) series of case studies demonstrated how L2 students appropriated, resisted, and transformed school literacy contexts to suit their own culturally and historically developed sense of how to use writing to further preferred school identities. Also noted was the importance of parents’ attitudes toward their children’s development of biliteracy as well as the parents’ own educational and socioeconomic backgrounds (Hawkins, 2005; G. Li, 2002; McCarthey & Garcia, 2005; McCarthey et al., 2004; McCarthey, Guo, & Cummins 2005; Xu, 1999). Other factors examined in relation to the effort to develop L2 literacy included the degree of respect demonstrated by school systems for the children’s language and cultural heritage (August & Hakuta, 1997; Reyes, 1992; Solsken, Willett, & Wilson-Keenan, 2000; Townsend & Fu, 1998) and the immigrant community’s success in maintaining strong intracultural ties (Divoky, 1988). Despite the evidence arguing for L1 literacy development and maintenance, researchers have documented evidence that recent obsessive testing programs, particularly in Texas (McCarthey, 2002), have forced teachers’ and administrators’ focus away from maintenance and encouragement of L1 writing among young bilingual writers with debilitating effects (McCarthey & Garcia, 2005; McCarthey, Guo, & Cummins, 2005; Xu, 1999).

Summary

In all, far from viewing L2 literacy development among young learners as a simple matter of teaching and practicing L2 reading and writing in classrooms, over the 25-year period examined researchers have become increasingly aware of the complex and often unpredictable constellations of individual histories, understandings, and resources and other kinds of contextual factors, including social standing among peers, that give young English learners access to the literacy practices and desirable subject positions that promote development of school language and literacy (Hawkins, 2005). Finally, Harklau (2002) and Elley (1994) have made explicit a previously implicit argument that second language acquisition research, historically focused primarily on spoken language, can benefit from more in-depth study of L2 writing and literacy development, particularly among young writers in elementary and secondary schools, where literacy is an essential modality for communicating subject matter (Harklau, 2002). In this sense the study of young L2 writers potentially contributes not only to an understanding of literacy development but also to the field of second language acquisition by capturing on paper the dynamic shifts of young learners’ language evolution.

Chapter 2
Writing in Secondary School

Not much of the published literature on junior and senior high school for L2 learners through the 1980s focused specifically on L2 writing. Rather, researchers were concerned primarily to suggest pedagogical possibilities (Freeman & Freeman, 1989) and explore issues related to bilingual education and teaching ESL through the content areas (Cantoni-Harvey, 1987; Chamot & O’Malley, 1987; Crandall, 1987; Rigg & Allen, 1989; Scarcella, 1990). Research from the early 1990s forward, however, has included a more direct focus on L2 writing development. Much of this research on L2 writing and writers in secondary schools has been qualitative in orientation, primarily involving observational and case studies of students and/or high schools, but also including questionnaire and interview research, some quantitative analyses of outcome data, and, especially abroad, investigations of pedagogical innovations. But in fact this adolescent population has generally suffered from a lack of attention to its writing needs in L2 (Harklau, 2000, 2001; Reynolds, 2001; Wald, 1987). Moreover, unlike the pervading optimistic tone of research on child or community L2 writers, the research literature on high school L2 students and their writing experiences paints a consistently pessimistic portrait of the overall predicament of high school L2 learners and writers. The qualitative focus of much of this research gives insight into the personal sadness, loneliness, stress, embarrassment at being placed into classes with younger domestic students, homesickness, and social isolation of many of these students. Most of the research has focused on students of Spanish-speaking, Asian, or Southeast Asian background; this distribution of interest probably more or less fairly represents the visible secondary school L2 student population in North America.

It is not possible to talk about writing research on L2 secondary students without first clarifying some of the complications inherent in that setting. Of all the contexts in which L2 writing occurs, high school is probably the most fraught and the most complex. Its complexity stems from several factors. In North America, high school is mandatory up to a certain age (though not free in Canada to students older than 19 [Watt, Roessingh, & Bosetti, 1996] or available at all to students over a certain age in some U.S. school districts [Muchinsky & Tangren, 1999]). This means that all immigrant teens, regardless of their previous literacy and educational background, are required to attend. They cannot simply choose not to attend, as both tertiary and adult or community learners can. And, unlike younger learners, the basic reality of high school English language learners is their stark variability along several dimensions. Although learners placed into the same level of high school may initially share a similar level of oral language proficiency (and sometimes not), the same high school ESL classroom may well hold students who have never been to school before at all, students with fourth grade L1 educations and little L1 literacy (Welaratna, 1992), some whose previous teachers themselves had little education (Garcia, 1999), students who already have high school degrees from their home countries (Fu, 1995; Muchinsky & Tangren, 1999), some whose education came from refugee camps, and others from elite private schools (Harklau, 1994a). Welaratna (1992), for example, described the case of a Khmer student who came to the US at age 17 after only 5 years of formal education in Cambodia, whose English at that time was limited to greetings, and who was placed into the sophomore year of high school.

To understand how literacy development constitutes a central means of educational communication in secondary school it is necessary to look at the broader picture of L2 students’ experiences there. If an 8-year-old English language learner begins school in the US having never been to school before, certainly the child has adjustments to make and quite a bit of catching up to do. But if a 17-year-old has never been to school, the catching up required is dramatic and in fact is unlikely to take place in the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• SECTION 1: Contexts for L2 Writing
• SECTION II: Instruction and Assessment
• SECTION III: Basic Research on Second Language Writing
• Afterword: Future Directions
• References