Vivian Zamel

The Composing Processes of Advanced ESL Students: Six Case Studies

The most recent research in composition has given us important insights into the composing process. This research has revealed that composing is a non-linear, exploratory, and generative process whereby writers discover and reformulate their ideas as they attempt to approximate meaning. A study of the composing processes of advanced ESL students was undertaken to investigate the extent to which these students experience writing as a process of discovering and creating meaning and the extent to which second language factors affect this process. The findings indicate that skilled ESL writers explore and clarify ideas and attend to language-related concerns primarily after their ideas have been delineated. Since it is believed that the teaching of composition should be informed by and based upon what writing actually entails, an understanding of the composing process calls into question approaches that are prescriptive, formulaic, and overly concerned with correctness. Instead, it suggests the importance of instruction that gives students direct experiences with the composing process, that establishes a dynamic teaching/learning relationship between writers and their readers, and that enhances further linguistic development in the context of making and communicating meaning.

Language and content

The TESOL Quarterly welcomes evaluative reviews of publications of relevance to TESOL professionals. In addition to textbooks and reference materials, these include computer and video software, testing instruments, and other forms of nonprint materials.

Writing: The Process of Discovering Meaning.

Since writers do not seem to know beforehand what it is they will say, writing is a process through which meaning is created. This suggests composition instruction that recognizes the importance of generating, formulating, and refining ones ideas. It implies that revision should become the main component of this instruction, that writing teachers should intervene throughout the process, and that students should learn to view their writing as someone elses reading. Methods that emphasize form and correctness ignore how ideas get explored through writing and fail to teach students that writing is essentially a process of discovery. Research on composition has traditionally been concerned with the written product. The studies reported by Braddock et al. (1963) reflect this concern since, by and large, researchers investigated the effects that certain teaching methodologies had on writing. In many cases these studies sought to prove the efficacy of one grammar over another, thus perpetuating the belief that a better pedagogical approach, particularly one that focused on usage, structure, or correct form, would improve writing. Since this line of research depended upon the evaluation of compositions that students wrote after having received certain types of instruction, little attention was paid to other, more important considerations such as purpose, audience, and the process of composing itself. Questions dealing with why or for whom students were writing were not taken into account. The whole notion of how writers write-where ideas come from, how they are formulated and developed, what the various stages of composing entail--was ignored. And this state of the art was both influenced by and, in turn, influenced classroom practices and the textbooks that were written (Young 1978: 31-2). Given the emphasis on the composed product, teach

Recent Research on Writing Pedagogy

Process studies provide insight into the complexity of composing and may also reveal a relationship between instruction and writing. However, recent surveys of writing instruction indicate that what we have learned from process research is not informing pedagogy. Writing continues to be taught according to reductionist and mechanistic models, perhaps because of the problematic nature of incorporating change in the classroom or perhaps because process studies have typically not investigated writing in the naturalistic settings in which it takes place. Researchers have therefore undertaken classroom-based investigations, often ethnographic in nature, in an effort to understand better the links between writing behavior and writing pedagogy and to demonstrate that alternatives to the teacher-dominated paradigm are possible. This research is making us aware of the ways in which contextual factors impinge on the development of students as writers. These studies challenge traditional practices and imply a pedagogy that establishes a supportive environment in which students are acknowledged as writers, encouraged to take risks, and engaged in creating meaning. Finally, recent research suggests that teachers should become researchers themselves and investigate the relationship between teaching and writing development in their own classrooms. Before researchers undertook their important work in the investigation of writing processes, numerous studies were conducted to determine the effectiveness of different approaches to the teaching of writing. Research of this sort, comparing one kind of instruction with another, provided us few significant findings, and these were often contradictory (Zamel, 1976). Given what we now understand about the complexity of writing, this comes as no surprise. These past efforts to establish the best method were based on the faulty assumptions that there was a best method and one just had to find it, that teaching writing was a matter of prescribing a logically ordered set of written tasks and exercises, and that good writing conformed to a predetermined and ideal model.

Toward a Model of Transculturation.

The TESOL Quarterly invites commentary on current trends or practices in the TESOL profession. It also welcomes responses to rebuttals to any articles or remarks published here in The Forum or elsewhere in the Quarterly.

Writing One's Way into Reading.

Despite research and theory to the contrary, approaches to the teaching of reading continue to reflect a transmission model of reading, focused on the retrieval of information from a text. This model prevents students from experiencing reading as an active, exploratory process, one that involves the making of meaning. It thus denies them their transactions with a text and the realization that reading involves such transactions. In order to give students experiences with reading that demonstrate the ways in which readers engage, contribute to, and make connections with texts, writing needs to be fully integrated with reading. Writing, because of its heuristic, generative, and recursive nature, allows students to write their way into reading and to discover that reading shares much in common with writing, that reading, too, is an act of composing. It has become commonplace to characterize the act of writing as a meaning making, purposeful, evolving, recursive, dialogic, tentative, fluid, exploratory process. Recent research and theory in reading have shown us that these terms can be applied as well to the act of reading, for like writing, reading is characterized by active engagement through which meaning is created. But although there have been ongoing attempts to incorporate the implications of writing research and theory into the classroom, the teaching of reading seems to be less responsive to what we know about the process of reading, perhaps because it is difficult to reconcile the kinds of outward performance and demonstrations required by schooling with the internal experience of reading.

Teaching Composition in the ESL Classroom: What We Can Learn from Research in the Teaching of English

Methodologists and teachers have suggested numerous approaches as to how composition should be taught in the ESL classroom. Whether or not these methods are truly effective, however, has not been established, for research in ESL composition is almost totally non-existent. In addition to the fact that research in this area has failed to provide us with answers, is the fact that we have ignored the research that has been done in the teaching of English composition, thus denying ourselves an important source of information. The ESL student who is ready to compose, i.e., express his or her own thoughts, opinions or ideas is similar to the student in the regular English composition class. Thus, the results of experimentation in English composition classes have as much to say to the ESL teacher as to the English teacher and undermine many of the assumptions that they both hold in common. Research in the teaching of English has demonstrated not only how oversimplified past approaches have been, but is beginning to suggest the complexities that the writing process entails. The time has come to recognize the important ramifications that this research has for the teaching of composition in the ESL classroom.

Re-evaluating Sentence-Combining Practice.

The research on sentence-combining practice seems to indicate that this practice in and of itself improves not only syntactic fluency but the overall quality of compositions. A closer examination of the research, however, raises some important questions about the effectiveness of sentence-combining practice. Furthermore, critics are challenging its a-rhetorical orientation. Thus, while sentence-combining practice can be a stimulating and effective way to help students understand the grammar of the sentence, there are doubts about its appropriateness as a total course of instruction, especially in the ESL classroom. ESL students may not possess the linguistic ability that sentence-combining proponents assume students to have and may therefore need focused work on key grammatical concepts. More importantly, they need rhetorically based writing experiences that take into account the difficulty of facing the blank page and the complexity of the composing process itself.

Cybernetics: A Model for Feedback in the ESL Classroom.

When students communicate in the ESL classroom, the messages teachers send back are critical: these messages inform students about their language performance. Feedback in second language instruction, however, has received scant attention and is usually thought of as reinforcing rather than informational. Cybernetics, a theory of communication that is concerned with the clear and unambiguous transmission of messages, stresses the informational importance of feedback, suggesting the interdependent and reciprocal nature of the sender and receiver of these messages (in this case the language teacher and learner). The cybernetic model assumes the existence of a dynamic system in which feedback that provides specific and relevant information can affect and alter behavior. The model thus provides us a framework with which to view both the communicators and the communications in the ESL classroom; it implies the kind of feedback that the learner can both assimilate and act upon.

Recent Publications on the Crises in U.S. Classrooms

Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of Americas Underprepared. Mike Rose. Small Victories. Samuel G. Freedman.