Stephen van Vlack
Sookmyung Women`s University
Graduate School of TESOL
Teaching Writing
Spring 2007
Raimes (1983), Chapter 4: Techniques in Using readings - Questions
Techniques in Using Readings
Here are the different types of exercises that Raimes (1983) points out as being useful in relation to using texts with writing. Thinking back about the reading and using what you know about each of them answer the following questions with a partner.
Copy, Examine Cohesive Links, Examine Punctuation and Grammar, Examine Sentence Arrangement, Summarize, Complete, Speculate, React
1. Which ones do you think are better suited to lower level students?
There is no clear answer to this question although it may seem deceptively simple. Deciding on the difficulty level of a task relies on a whole plethora of different variables including the level of the reading itself as well as the students who we are working with and the final expectations we have set for the completion of the task. In general, however, we can break these eight types of activities into two groups depending on the amount of possible control and or focus contained or even inherent within. The first four of these exercises suggested by Raimes (1983) can be seen as more mechanical and, therefore, much more form-focused types of exercises. Their purpose is to get the students to take notice of the structural elements of the texts and turn that more passive type of knowledge into use for writing. The latter four activities are designed around the actual meaning of the texts and as such, might be seen to be more challenging as the students often need to go beyond the text itself. The person trying to find a simple straight forward answer to this would then probably be quite happy to say that one of the first four and probably `copy` is the one best suited to low level students. It would seem to be the least cognitively demanding but does that really make a task easier?
In reality, more mechanical tasks can be quite challenging if only for the patience of the students. But really we can make very difficult mechanical tasks related to writing especially when we are looking at things like grammar. In many cases teachers think they need to get the students over this mechanical or form-focused hill before moving on to meaning but this is not the case. Meaning is only as hard as we make it. In reality, since writing and all language use is all about expressing meaning through forms, we want all the above-mentioned activities to have something to do with meaning and not just be mechanical exercises devoted to the internalization of grammar.
2. Which ones are better for higher level students?
Thinking about basic ideas of language teaching which have been very strongly affected by traditional grammar-focused models, it would seem apparent that we would wait until our students level was higher before having them engage in the four latter types of tasks. For higher level students, again, the tendency would be to use the latter four of these activities more often as they require more creation on the part of the writer. Obviously creation requires some knowledge of forms and how to use them but how is this knowledge to be developed without actually trying to create in the first place? This also does not mean that creation-based activities for writing are inherently less easy for lower level students provided you have tweaked the other variables mentioned briefly above.
The main point is that there is no type of activity or task which is inherently more easy than any other. There are a lot more variables to be considered than just task type. We also need to think about the pre and post tasks as they relates to each other in a chain. If the students have been primed and made ready for a task it will not be difficult and maybe that is the really the only way of assessing the difficulty of a task. It really depends on how you have made them ready for it.
3. Which are some of the best ones to use for large classes?
For larger classes it is, of course, much easier for the teacher to do tasks that have close-ended, or at least greatly limited, solutions. Having to run around the class and quite closely monitor a wide variety of different possible answers as the students are working is quite demanding and hard to do. Likewise, after class wading through vast amounts of poorly written compositions is a daunting task simply because of the time it takes to do so. In this respect it would seem easier to do things which have a much narrower range of possible answers in large classes. That way as a teacher you can better assess how your students are doing and you can go over these things together in the class as a whole class.
One way around this problem of trying to be everywhere at once is to try to initiate a system of peer correction. Students generally do not like to do this at first, but with well-designed questionnaires and some hard prodding it can work out very well given time. When doing peer review it important to guide the students in their reviewing. Don`t just give them another student`s writing and stay `fix it`. If you do so what you will end up with is them changing one or two nouns or articles (probably for the worse). Make questionnaires that ask direct yes/no questions, at least until they have gotten the hang of it. Peer review is good because it makes the writing more meaningful and pulls the class together as a unit and saves you grading time as well. This doesn`t mean that you should not read your students` writing, but you don`t have to go through it as carefully.
Also, if you are going to do more close-ended types of activities with your large classes, make sure they are meaningful and interesting. Just because an activity is close-ended does not mean it needs o me mechanical and boring. Add some twists or make it more challenging where they might need to process deeply.
4. What are some things you can do to make these exercises communicative or meaningful?
This is one of those things that is easy to say but much less easy to do. The simplest way of making rather routine grammar-focused exercises more communicative is to add some element of real purpose to them. This means you have to create a reason for doing the exercise. There must a reason that makes sense to the students. Also, make sure the texts that you use are interesting for the students. They should be entertaining or have some topic or value that the students are interested in. Authentic materials, of course, work best but you have to find a way to use them effectively. Simply bringing in texts that are authentic and expecting the students to love them simply for their authenticity is a mistake.
One other thing you need to think about, and this is something that we mentioned in class, is that there are two different types of tasks: real-world tasks and pedagogical tasks. As I described above obviously one way of making even the most mundane types of reading/writing tasks more interesting is to turn them into real-world tasks. At the same time, however, we realize that we can only have our students do real-world tasks simply because we have to get them to the point they actually have the skills and knowledge to be able to do these types of real-world tasks. For this reason we also want to make sure that we use pedagogical tasks. It might seem a little bit strange but by actually having students do pedagogical tasks we are also making the tasks more interesting and more useful for them, particularly closer to the real-world tasks through the pedagogical tasks. In short, what we want to do is actually chain together real-world tasks with probably real-world tasks coming more at the end of the chain, but not necessarily. Now, in order to make pedagogical tasks more interesting weekend link them to real-world tasks or we link them to the real world pedagogical tasks and in this case that involves things like the writing process.
So, last night in class we took a look at some mad lads and have a little fun going through them. This type of task is really very form focused and involves the type of examining which Raimes (1983) mentions in the chapter. It may look very much like a simple surface type of activity but we can make it much more interesting by bringing it into the writing process. We can use it as a type of revision practice but an interesting type of revision practice which allows us to focus not only on writing practices but also on language itself. In fact it is a deceptively simple integrated type of activity which forces students to use all four skills as they are moving through this seemingly mundane and maybe even ridiculous type of task. So there is a lot you can do if you just try to link these types of things to what the students already know and what they like either from the real world or from previous pedagogical types of practice.
5. If you were going to have to use several of these ideas in succession, what could you do? Make a short plan.
As with the picture-based activities that we saw last week, there is a tremendous amount of possible variation that goes with using texts as relates to perceived difficulty. The difficulty of the text itself, in contrast to the pictures, plays a pivotal role in the difficulty of the exercises that you will generate from it. There is a much closer cohesion between texts and writing than in visuals and writing. This connection, however, does not necessarily occur naturally to our students so don`t take too many things for granted.
Friedlander (1990) argues that cross-linguistic/cultural knowledge of writing transfers and we challenged that claim based on evidence we have seen in the classroom. Skills from reading to writing are transferable, but in my experience transfer does not occur naturally and automatically in many cases because students are not asked to think about things in the process of doing them. Connections must be made overtly at some point. For transfer to occur there needs to be an impetus - a starting point. Transfer occurs when the teacher forces it. She has to throw the proverbial ladder and rope out to help the students make the connection. This is what we want to use texts for in the teaching of writing.
This means that the texts we choose have be particularly good models for the target skill and good models in general. Unfortunately, what is published often fails to provide the modeling we need because many texts that are published are badly written or are unnatural. This is not such a terrible thing as it seems (we can use bad examples to our advantage) provided the teachers know why the texts are bad and can extend this critical view of reading on to the students. The best way to get your students to develop good writing skills for texts is to make them critical of what is out there. All good writers are critics, especially of their own work.
Now, if we are going to use these eight different types of activities in succession maybe the simplest thing would be to use them more or less in the order which Raimes (1983) has given them. The basic idea is that we want to move from more controlled to more free types of activities. But, like the writing process itself, we do not need to do this in any linear order. You can do some simple freer types of tasks and then more to more focused, but challenging tasks.
Eisterhold (1990)
6. Why is reading input seen as being very suitable to writing development?
According to Eisterhold (1990), and this is pretty common knowledge, reading input is essential for the development of writing because it provides models of what good writing is supposed to be like. All reading texts started as writing projects. Because reading is at the same time writing (it is all just a matter of point of view) the a person who is reading a text from a writer`s point of view will hopefully be able to better unlock the secrets of the text. In effect, reading seems to be necessary for writing in an absolute way. If somebody does not and therefore cannot read then there is no way that they are going to be able to write. This certainly true in first language and is probably also true in second language.
One might, however, argue that if one is a good writer in their first language then they should also be a good writer in their second language without actually going and reading a lot in the second language. The simple response to this is that to be a good writer in the first language they also need to be a good reader in their first language in these reading skills and the simple joy of reading will also hopefully jump onto or transfer to the second language. So, we can spend a lot of time arguing about this and that at the bottom line is good reading skills are absolutely necessary for good writing skills to develop. This means that we need to try to give our students good reading input.
7. What are her three hypotheses and how do they work?
Eisterhold (1990) introduces three different hypothesis about the relationship of reading and writing within the first language acquisition situation. They are basically based on directionality or the lack of it. The question to be determined is whether one skill affects the other and how. At stake is the further question of whether reading and writing comprise different or similar systems. Looking at these three different hypotheses probably the one that makes the most sense is the final one which basically says that reading and writing are separate systems but they are also integrated systems and do affect each other. As we mentioned both above and in class, the development of writing does seem to be related to development of reading and it is very hard to have writing without but it is possible to have reading without writing. Writing seems to be a further added step in the process of literacy development. Going back also to what we said in class, just because writing seems to be a further development from reading doesn`t necessarily mean that we need to postpone writing practice until students have reached this magical threshold level of reading proficiency. To get transfer we need to start integrating these things from the very beginning. There is anything that we need to learn from this chapter it is the simple lesson that transfer does not happen of and by itself in most students. Teachers need to overtly draw students attention to possibilities for transfer both from the L1 to the L2 and from certain skills within just the L2. The simple way of doing this is either by teaching overtly (boring but sometimes necessary) or by giving the students a need for transfer. This basically means we need to get our students to use the target language for purposes and purposes which mimics things they do with their L1.
8. How do literacy skills develop in second language and what does transfer have to do with this?
One of the most basic ideas of how literacy skills develop in a second language revolves around the idea of transfer of those skills form the L1. Confusing the issue is the idea of a threshold level of proficiency. Following Cummins we might want to believe that literacy skills do transfer automatically but our experience tells us something different. At least in Korea it seems that students who reach a certain level do not suddenly burst into this kind of transfer mode. This would seem to be a direct result of the actual English teaching practices which abound in Korea and simply do not ask students to produce language. Students are forever only experiencing language. They do an awful lot of examination and small carefully constructed pieces of input a given to them particularly for these purposes of examination but students are asked to do much else. They certainly never do things with English that they do with Korean. The two of them are never use for similar types of functions or in similar ways and for the simple reason there will not be transfer regardless of the Cummins might claim.
Eisterhold (1990) - An Aside
Introduction
In this article, we get a lot of information about connections between reading and writing. There seems to be a lot of debate as to which effects the other more in first language acquisition. All this seems a little distant for us as English teachers who want to know something about teaching writing to our Korean students. Let`s not worry about L1 acquisition too much. All we need to know, and no one will disagree with this, is that reading and writing are related skills and that information does or can transfer from one to the other particularly if we help it do so. We could further argue that the amount and direction of transfer is affected by how much and what is taught overtly (that is through focussed classroom teaching). Let`s take a good look at L2 acquisition and what this article tells us about what we need to do in class to teach writing and maybe even reading.
Argument
One thing which none of the researchers talks about is that reading and writing are fundamentally different from speaking and listening. What do you think the difference is?
The bottom line is that reading and writing are skills created by humans, whereas listening and speaking are natural. Baring this in mind, it seems clear that there should be large differences between the acquisition of reading/writing and listening/speaking both in the L1 and L2 principally because reading/writing are unnatural skills, the product of human intellect, rather than evolution (genes/memes). Of course they behave unnaturally. The LAD does not work on reading/writing. We must learn it overtly. Simple input will never make anyone learn to read/write.
The truth is that writing is a very new invention and puts a lot of pressure on the brain when acquiring it. Many people nowadays, however, equate writing/reading with language. This is a terrible mistake. It is probably easier to equate reading/writing with another learned skill, like typing. If you know how to type in Korean, for example, and you have to now type in English. Knowing how to type in Korean will only help you a little. You still need to memorize the keys. Once more, having a high level of English will not automatically make you a better typist.
Because reading/writing are unnatural this also means that the various systems will be more diverse than language itself. Some systems will be inherently harder to learn, both at the L1 and L2 level. This has implications for learning. In addition, reading/writing patterns will be much more closely linked to the culture of the society.
All this does not mean that there is no transfer of skills from L1 to L2 and that having a high level of proficiency will not help someone to be a better writer. Transfers does occur, but any kind of transfer has to be coerced, or forced, by an outside instructor to a large extent. It also is clear that if the target language culture is similar to the learners` L1, there will be more transfer than if the systems and cultures are dissimilar. This is due to the fact that things like cultural information, in addition to information about writing, is housed outside of the linguistic parts of the brain, i.e. the mental lexicon. It is easy to form connections there if there is a very strong overlap in the information. To illustrate this, let`s go back to the example of typing. We said that knowing how to type in Korean does not necessarily make you a better typist in English because the location of the characters is all different. A person, however, who can type well in German will have an easy time learning how to type in English because the differences between German and English keyboards are minimal. Writing, because it is a skill that functions to a large extent outside of our normal linguistic capacity (e-language).
Conclusion
As English teachers we need to teach reading and writing overtly. We can use reading instruction to help with writing and vice-versa, but we must mention specifically how the two are related. Transfer from one skill to another or from L1 to L2 will not occur naturally. Teachers should be careful to form links between skills and languages. It is important to pick reading texts and give writing assignments which are culturally sensitive and are calculated to address important issues.