Academic Writing as a Second Language

Before coming to the IWCA Summer Institute, I attended a workshop offered by Westminster ESL Director Jennifer Ritter, herself a former writing center director, on understanding language learning and working with non-native speakers. Among the popular ideas about language learning that Jen challenged are that most second-language errors are due to interference from one's native language and—most provocatively—that students learn what they are taught. As Jen explained, the kinds of advanced English language learners we see at the college level have acquired sufficient proficiency in English that most of the mistakes they make are in fact processing errors: it's not that they don't know the construction; they just don't produce it in the moment of speaking or writing. The second point addresses the difference between being told something and being able to do it. The teacher may explain a concept, but "getting it" takes plenty of practice over time. Both of these points made me wonder if teaching academic writing to native speakers of English didn't involve the same issues.

In yesterday's presentations on foundational ideas in teaching writing, Ben Rafoth, Dawn Mendzona, Michele Eodice, and Lori Salem raised points that cemented these connections for me. Reviewing longitudinal studies of writing development, Dawn mentioned the Pepperdine Study, which concluded that text is not the only indication of learning—a student could have learned the most from writing a paper that on the surface did not seem to be his or her best work—and that acquiring proficiency in writing a particular genre took about two years. Lori asked whether the whole concept of academic writing is a necessary fiction, a label of convenience that we place on a range of genres in different disciplines and at various education levels that on closer scrutiny bear more differences than similarities, much as we group mutually unintelligible dialects into the same language.

Let's think of our work with student writers, then, as teaching them a second language (and I'm not being metaphorical here as many English studies scholars are when they call something a "language").  We see that many of the problems students encounter are not because they don't understand an aspect of writing as a concept—the need to introduce a topic, for example, or the boundary between one sentence and another. Instead, they've hit a problem in the moment of performance—that real indication of whether they know something.* Those problems with performance will persist until writing in a particular way has become not something they think about but something they do. The Pepperdine Study says that will require around two years of effort.

So where does that leave those of us working with one student on one paper for thirty, forty-five minutes or a generous hour? Is our job, to return to Jen's presentation, to teach something students may not yet learn?



*I wish English still had different verbs to indicate knowing intellectually vs. knowing by experience.