By Cheyeon Lee

Introduction

Writing ability is one of the most important elements that determines students’ success in an academic setting, but ESL learners in U.S. public elementary schools have difficulty writing in English due to an insufficient amount of vocabulary, a lack of grammatical knowledge, an unfamiliarity with appropriate rhetorical styles in English, and sometimes a lack of experiences to write about. Thus, one of the important roles for ESL teachers of these young language learners is helping them to improve their English writing ability so that they can succeed academically in their mainstream classrooms.

Once ESL teachers have recognized the importance of writing for ESL learners, the next step they need to consider is how to provide their students with appropriate teaching. The ESL students’ various backgrounds, including age, nationality, and previous writing instruction, may create difficulty for ESL teachers in organizing or setting teaching priorities. Selecting appropriate teaching methods starts from a sound understanding of the characteristics of writing development and variables that cause differences in the process of development.

Literature Review

Grabe and Kaplan (1997) insist that "all second language learners need to attain some proficiency in writing and all second language teachers need to know how to teach a writing class in the L2" (p. 183). English-language learners in mainstream classrooms need to perform a wide variety of writing activities, including writing short answers, descriptions of historical events, book summaries, reports on experiments in a science class, and long essays. In some ESL classrooms, however, writing activities are limited to simple writing tasks. Edelsky (1989) has distinguished between authentic writing and writing simulations. She points out that a student is "likely to be simulating writing when he or she is filling in blanks on a worksheet, finishing a story starter, or producing a story that includes the week’s spelling words" (p. 167). In contrast, in authentic writing, the language is used to make meaning for some purposes. Edelsky contends that much of children’s writing is not authentic writing but simulations of writing.

Defining good writing is not a simple task because the criteria for good writing differ. Flower (1979) defines good writing as "the cognitively demanding transformation of the natural but private expressions of writer-based thought into a structure and style adapted to a reader" (p.17). Leki (1985) adds that "good writing, in fact, is shown to mean writing that meets particular requirements set for a particular readership at a particular time and place" (p. 41). Thus, the determination of good writing is influenced by the raters’ diverse perspectives or by the goals of writing. Even though it is not easy to determine conclusively what good writing is, grammatical maturity, appropriate rhetorical styles, and appropriate use of vocabulary are among the features of well-written texts. As Hudelson (1989b) points out, writing consists of displaying one’s knowledge by the use of specific structures and forms (p.14). In other words, knowing appropriate grammatical structures is a fundamental element that enables students to express their ideas or knowledge more clearly and effectively. Perera (1986) presents research findings on grammatical development in American and British children’s writing. According to her research, as children develop writing ability, they use longer clauses, an increased number of passive forms, more complex noun phrases, a wider range of tense and aspect forms, and a greater number of modal auxiliaries.

The importance of grammatical accuracy to the development of writing ability may cause teachers to stress grammatical forms with their students, but much stress on grammatical accuracy does not necessarily guarantee its development. Lightbown and Spada (1999) report their late 1970’s research that an exclusive focus on grammatical accuracy in students’ oral production does not guarantee that learners can use forms correctly or will continue to use them correctly after new forms are introduced (p.120). Zamel (1985) notes that ESL writing teachers whose focus is on grammar tend to view their students as language learners rather than developing writers (p. 91). In other words, even though these ESL teachers sometimes address issues of content and organization, they usually focus on just the grammatical errors in ESL learners’ writing.

Even if ESL teachers were to have a clear understanding of good writing and were to present instruction that can help their students increase writing ability, there are many factors that make it difficult to achieve similar results in writing development among different learners. Hudelson (1989b) notes there are significant individual differences in rates of learning English as a second language (p. 3). Reid (1993) points out that "a single class of ESL students often includes a wide range of motivation and language backgrounds, due in part to the different educational experiences, ages, needs, and language proficiencies of those students" (p. 132). Knowing individual differences of ESL learners can help ESL teachers select more effective teaching methods.

In recent years, there has been research on ESL learners’ writing development to increase understanding of individual differences. For example, Hudelson (1989a) conducted research on the individual differences in the rate of two ESL children’s writing development. In her study, two Spanish-speaking ESL-learning children showed different rates of development because they applied different strategies according to their personality traits and cognitive/social styles. Janice, who was more active in getting more information from her teacher and wanted to take the risk of making mistakes, progressed more rapidly in writing than Roberto, who was reluctant to ask for help or take risks in his writing.

Tabors (1997) introduces four factors that cause individual differences in second language learning: motivation, exposure, age, and personality. Regarding age, he claims that younger children have a disadvantage because their cognitive capacity is not as great as that of older children, and they are likely to take a longer period of time to move along the developmental pathway than older children (p. 83).

Research Questions

This study investigates two Korean ESL children’s writing ability over one year. The research questions are: First, what characteristics does the children’s writing development show, especially in the area of grammatical development? Second, how does the children’s writing development appear to differ because of their different ages? For grammatical development, four elements were examined: sentence length, tense-aspect variety, modal auxiliary variety, and passive forms.

Method

Participants

The participants in this study were two Korean ESL children who had been in the United States for one year and nine months and had been studying in mainstream classrooms with a pull-out ESL program. Jisub, who was in the 5^th grade at the time of this study, had prior experience in writing and reading in his native language and was able to decode and comprehend simple reading passages in English when he came to the US. Jiwon, who was in the 3^rd grade, had limited prior experience in writing in her native language because she had just one and a half years of schooling in Korea prior to coming to the U.S. Jiwon’s writing experience in Korean was limited to writing daily journal entries as a class assignment. Before this study, both participants had experience writing in English in their ESL classrooms as well as mainstream classrooms. Most of their writing activities in the ESL and mainstream classrooms were writing summaries of reading materials, fill-in-blank work sheets, and short answers to comprehension questions.

Procedure

Teaching procedure

The participants were provided with opportunities for writing journal entries or summaries of reading passages in English during this study. A basic assumption underlying the instruction provided to the participants was that teaching writing to ESL children needs to be different from teaching writing to adult ESL learners. In the case of adult ESL learners, it was assumed that what they need to develop is the ability to use appropriate English lexical, syntactical and rhetorical structures to express their ideas. In contrast, child ESL learners need first "what to write" and then "how to write." Unlike the adult ESL learners, they need experiences to use for content, and then the grammatical, lexical, and rhetorical knowledge to express the content.

Based on this assumption, the participants were first provided with ideas for what they might wish to write about, based on their experiences, and then with opportunities to write what they wanted to write without explicit grammar instruction or error correction. Because the participants were exposed to a large amount of natural English input in their schools and had opportunities to express themselves in English orally at school, the goal of the first period of teaching was just to provide them with opportunities to write freely using the English that they had acquired. The second period of teaching was to help the participants increase the length of their writing and their grammatical accuracy. To encourage the participants to increase the length of their writing, they were questioned about the content of the sentences they had written. For example, when Jiwon wrote down a sentence such as "I saw a cat," I asked her questions about the color of the cat, when she had seen it, and where she had seen it so that she could modify and enlarge her ideas as much as possible. After the oral questioning, Jiwon was able to add more ideas to the original sentence: "When I came back home, I saw a gray cat on Ashley’s porch." Starting in December 2002, the participants were instructed individually on the grammatical forms related to the errors in their writings. To increase grammatical accuracy, first, Jisub and Jiwon were asked to find the errors in their writing by themselves, and then they were instructed explicitly on the errors that they had not recognized. Right after the instruction on the errors, the participants were asked to write the journal entries again using correct grammatical forms to reinforce what they had learned.

Data collection

Data were collected from the participants’ journal entries written between May 2002 and April 2003. From among the data collected, writing samples written in May 2002, December 2002, and April 2003 were selected for primary consideration for this study because writing samples written in other periods were relatively scarce, and these periods were spaced at relatively even intervals, which facilitated the comparison of the participants’ writing development.

Results

The length of a sentence

The longest passage and sentence among the data written in each of the three periods, May and December 2002 and April 2003, were counted to compare the length of writing passages and the number of words in a sentence. An obvious change in the two participants’ writing throughout the year was that the overall length of writing passages and the number of words in a sentence increased. This was especially true during the second part of the period when instruction encouraged increased length.

A striking difference between the two participants was that the length of a sentence in Jisub’s writing became considerably longer than that of Jiwon’s even though Jiwon sometimes wrote longer passages than Jisub. This difference in sentence length resulted from the fact that Jisub used more complex structures within a sentence than Jiwon.

Table 1. The number of words in a passage and a sentence

Example sentences 1 – Jisub

1. We found more frogs that were all brown and had black spots. (May 2002)
2. Today I went to mom’s friend’s house because my mom always have to go school from 6 o’clock to 8 o’clock. (December 2002)
3. If I have big strawberries that I have imagined, I really want to plant bigger strawberries and want to sell them to other countries, people who need them because I can become rich so that I can plant more strawberries or buy other fruits. (April 2003)

Example sentences 2 – Jiwon

1. Today is a very fun day because brother and I caught the baby frogs. (May 2002)
2. I wanted to ride ice skate little more, but I couldn’t because my foot is hurt. (December 2002)
3. Next morning, Annie’s grandmother told her that every one would go back to the earth like the sun rose and set back. (April 2003)

Tense-Aspect Variety

Throughout the year of this study, the participants began to use a wide variety of tense aspect forms as they developed more writing ability. However, there was a difference in variety between the participants. Jiwon, who was younger than Jisub, did not use the present perfect or the past perfect in her writing. On the other hand, Jisub used present perfect forms in his writing in the April 2003 samples.

Table 2. Tense-Aspect Variety

Example sentences 3 - Jisub

1. People in that town don’t use any car or electricity because they have just lived in old-fashioned style. (April 2003)
2. If I have big strawberries that I have imagined, . . . (April 2003)
3. But it will be easy because I’ve already done this today. (April 2003)

This difference can be explained by the fact that Jiwon had difficulty understanding the notion of perfect forms even though she had been exposed to them. On the other hand, Jisub was able to use the present perfect forms in his writing after he was instructed on their use and meaning. This suggests that the degree of variety in ESL children’s use of tense and aspect in their writing in English may differ somewhat depending on the children’s age.

Modal Auxiliary Variety

The two participants were able to use various modal auxiliaries, such as can, could, and will and a phrasal modal, have to (had to), at an early stage of development. Would appeared relatively late in their writings. Some modals, such as may, might, shall, or should, were not used by either participant. This result may be partially explained by the fact that all the modals the children did not use, with the exception of should, are relatively infrequent in spoken English. (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finnegan, 1999, pp. 486-487).

Table 3. Modal Variety

Example sentences 4 – Jisub

1)…but my mom said play tomorrow and I will do like that. (May 2002)

2) Sunday school is fun because I can learn good things like the bible. (December 2002)

3) I would dream about if I have the biggest strawberries in the whole world. (April 2003)

Example sentences 5 – Jiwon

1) I am so sad because 3 frogs are dead. I will never have little frogs in a small box. (May 2002)

2) I wanted to ride ice skate little more, but I couldn’t. (December 2002)

3) She told… that she would go to the earth. (April 2003)

Passive Forms

The number of passive forms was counted from all writing samples written throughout the year because both participants rarely used passive forms in their writing in English. The infrequent use of passive constructions may be explained by the fact that passive forms are not frequently used in their first language. The two participants had been exposed to passive forms in their social studies and science texts at school and were instructed on the meaning and use of the forms.

Even though the participants seldom used passive constructions, Jisub and Jiwon increased the number of passive sentences in their writing as their writing ability in English developed. For instance, out of 16 passive sentences in his writing, Jisub used 10 passive sentences from March through April 2003. Likewise, Jiwon used 4 out of 5 passive sentences in her writing from February through April 2003.

Table 4. The number of passive forms

I think environment has to be protected by us. (March 2003)

Example sentence 7 – Jiwon

It was made of wood. (April 2003)

The difference in the total number of passive forms used by the participants was probably due to Jiwon’s continuing difficulty in understanding the meaning of passive constructions even after instruction.

Discussion

The results of this study demonstrate that grammatical maturity increased in the participants’ writing throughout the year. Much like Perera’s (1986) findings, the two participants in this study developed their grammatical competence by using lengthier sentences, a wider range of tense/aspect forms, various modal auxiliaries, and an increased number of passive forms.

The results of this study also show clear differences in the participants’ grammatical maturity. Jisub, who is two years older than Jiwon, was able to use more developed grammatical forms: he used longer and more complex sentence structures, an additional aspect form, and more passive sentences than Jiwon. The difference in the grammatical maturity displayed in the participants’ writing was due to their ages. Tabors (1997) contends that younger children may take longer to acquire formulaic phrases, to develop strategies for breaking down phrases into useful pieces, and to create productive phrases in a new language due to their more limited cognitive capacity (pp. 83-84). Even though Jiwon was provided with the same instruction in grammatical forms as Jisub, she was not able to develop the same degree of grammatical maturity as he did. This finding is especially surprising because Jiwon interacts more actively than Jisub with her peers and teachers.

An implication of this study is that teachers may need to understand differences in children’s development in ESL writing in terms of their ages. Hudelson (1989a) contends that teachers need to have patience and trust in each learner’s individual pattern of growth (p. 97). Regardless of whether the differences are derived from personality traits, age, or other factors, the ESL teacher’s role is to try to recognize each ESL child’s individual differences and support each child in improving his or her writing ability at his or her own rate.

Another implication of this study is that, based on the understanding of individual differences in ESL children’s writing, ESL teachers need to trust ESL children’s potential ability to improve their writing competence if they are provided with appropriate instruction focusing on meaning and form. Jisub and Jiwon were able to increase the length of their writing passages with encouragement. By increasing the amount of writing, they were able to express their ideas and experiences in more detail, but increased length of the writing passages alone did not guaranteed increased writing competence. Encouragement to write more on what learners wish to write must be followed by targeted instruction on grammatical structures. Jisub and Jiwon both developed increased grammatical maturity following instruction that was directly related to the grammatical errors that occurred in their writing.

Thus, this study indicates that ESL teachers need to keep in mind that they can lead child ESL learners to improve their writing skills by expecting differences in the skill development of learners of different ages and by providing appropriate instruction moving from meaning to form. With ESL teachers’ understanding and assistance, child ESL learners can become more successful, sophisticated writers.

References