The Language Teacher

Writing is a very personal skill, with each individual having his or her own specific problems.

Writing teachers have long acknowledged these problems and have provided individual feedback to their students. The most common form of feedback in the past has been written comments on the student's final draft, pointing out problems and making suggestions for improvement of future papers. More recently, many teachers have started making comments on students' initial drafts, offering suggestions for the future development of the final drafts. Even so, many ESL/EFL students find written comments problematic.

Harris (1986) contends that if a person utilizes a discourse pattern from another language when writing in English, that person's writing is often labeled wordy, lacking coherence, unfocused, or unclear. Harris points out that Asian students will circle around a subject, showing it from a variety of tangential views but will not look directly at it. Consequently, says Harris, teachers often urge students to "keep to the point," or to provide more details.

Because written comments may prove very difficult for ESL students to comprehend and to act upon, Zamel (1985) recommends that teachers and students carry on a face-to-face dialogue so that "dynamic interchange and negotiation" can take place. Xu (1989) contends that in one-on-one conferences, perceptive teachers can reduce students' anxiety, trace the cause of the problems, and apply strategies for enhancing language acquisition.

Types of Conferencing

Traditional conferencing involves a short meeting (10-15 minutes) between the student and the teacher. Other forms of conferencing include: collaborative conferencing, small group conferencing, third person conferencing, journaling, emailing, and journaling cum emailing.

In collaborative counseling, the teacher works individually with students in developing their papers. Marshall (1986) developed her classes around her conferencing sessions, in which she addressed meaning in the composition first, and then form. In the initial conference, students discussed their ideas for papers. In the next conference, students brought their first drafts and discussed them with the teacher. Marshall planned class lessons based on the needs students showed in the conferences. She found this method to be more efficient for the teacher and more effective for the student.

In small group conferencing, the teacher meets students in groups of three to ten, often divided according to writing weaknesses. Small group conferencing takes less time and offers students more feedback than regular classes. Group dynamics sometimes help students speak up and discuss their writing problems.

Third-person conferencing (often called tutoring) usually takes place in writing centers in the U.S., although many students also ask former teachers or peers they trust to check their papers. In the latter case, usually more editing of students' papers takes place than tutoring. In the writing center setting, students bring their papers to tutors to discuss. Tutors are instructed first to deal with content before they deal with form, even though most ESL students will ask them to check their grammar. According to Harris (1986), tutorial instruction differs from traditional classroom learning in that it introduces a middle person (the tutor) between student and teacher.

In journaling, teachers carry on a dialogue with students by responding to their journal entries. Some writing teachers ask their students to focus their journal writing on development of essay topics and on writing problems. Journaling allows the teacher and student to enter a dialogue. Moreover, students can have significant control over what they wish to discuss. For teachers, this method does not demand as much of their time as conferencing does. Still, it has many of the drawbacks of written communication, including long lead times between question and response.

Many teachers have started using emailto communicate with their students because of the swift turn-around time. Cassidy (1996), in a description of a series of emailassignments and other writing activities for ESL students, contends that these computer-generated exercises have improved her students' writing. Wang (1996) has combined e-mailing with journaling to induce what she contends is effective interaction between student and teacher. In her study, six randomly chosen ESL students in the class wrote dialogue journals using emailwhile the rest of the students in the class wrote dialogue journals to the instructor using paper and pen. Limited knowledge about emailsystems prevented some students from taking full advantage of it as a tool. Still, a comparison of the emailjournals and paper journals in the study revealed that emailcreated a different writing style than that of paper and pen. For example, in the journal entries, participants in the emailgroup tended to: (a) use formula functions like opening and closing greetings (none of the students in the paper group used any), (b) ask more questions than those in the paper group, and (c) produce more language functions per writing session.

Merits and Challenges of Conferencing

In many ways, one-on-one conferencing, whether it is student-teacher or third-party conferencing, is the most advantageous method for ESL students. Students who have three or more conferences in a term not only improve their writing ability, but also significantly improve their listening and speaking skills (Brender, 1993). The teacher or tutor should, however, be aware of the special needs of these students. One serious problem that often occurs in conferencing is that teachers and tutors talk down to their students. Other areas in which students are at a disadvantage in one-on-one discussions include types of questions asked, the length of pauses after questions, turn-taking, and the proportion of time each participant speaks per turn, methods of negotiating meaning, and methods of wielding power. Harris (1986) contends that teachers and tutors need to listen to students more attentively and become more adept at a certain kind of listening in order to establish a non-judgmental setting where there is no penalty for trying out new ideas.

Part of the listening strategy is to pause long enough for students to have ample time to respond; however, many teachers do not wait long enough for their ESL students to do so. According to Wardswaugh (1985), long pauses are treated as embarrassments in conversations and often are regarded as failures. Lehtonen (1984) points out that threshold tolerances for length of pauses vary from culture to culture.

Saville-Troike (1984) contends that one has to distinguish between the absence of sound when no communication is taking place and the silence that is part of communication. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between the two because of the importance that silence may play in a culture. This is particularly true of Japanese. Saville-Troike points out that there is even a silence marker in Japanese writing. Hokari (1980, cited in Saville-Troike, 1984) calculated that in Kazetachinu by Hori Tatsu, the silence marker was used 133 times in 103 pages; in Kigodome by Abe Kobo it was used as frequently as 15 times per page. Archer (1991) contends that Americans can only wait seven seconds after asking a question before they feel compelled to repeat the question, rephrase it, or abandon it, while Japanese speakers can wait up to 14 seconds before they feel a need to intervene. In an analysis of differences between peer and student tutors conferencing Japanese students, I found that wait time was much less than the seven seconds cited by Archer (Brender, 1995). Peer tutors waited on average only 1.38 seconds before intervening, and faculty tutors waited 1.57 seconds.

In face-to-face conferencing, teachers can often see whether students understand what they are saying by reading their faces, and can respond accordingly. Moreover, teachers can also learn to be more culturally sensitive to their students by carefully paying attention not only to what they say but also to how they say it.

Effectiveness

In a review of numerous studies that discuss the effectiveness of one-on-one conferencing, Harris (1986) found only one study that showed a negative effect for conferencing. Among college students, Fritts (1977) claimed significantly better writing achievement for a group of students who had attended 15-minute conferences each week for thirteen weeks as compared to a control group.

Carnicelli (1980) polled 1,800 students at the University of New Hampshire on the effectiveness of weekly or bi-weekly conferences. All respondees wrote that the conferences were more useful than ordinary classes. Conferences were also found to be more effective than written communication because students could express their opinions and clarify the comments the teachers had made.

Eirsch (1988) conducted a study at a college where 63% of the students' L1 was Spanish. Tutors encouraged students to attain a form of learning that extended beyond doing well on tests or anticipating instructors' questions. These students were instructed to generalize to what they would later encounter. The experimental group did far better than the control group on pretests and posttests: 82% of the experimental group students received grades of C or better compared to 56% of the control group.

Jacobs & Karliner (1977, cited in Goldstein & Conrad, 1990) found that students who had engaged in exploratory talk and who had initiated discussion in conferences had revised their essays in order to include deeper analysis of the subject.

Conclusion

Although conferencing is a skill which can be extremely effective for students, teachers and third party tutors need to be aware of the dynamics of the conference. In my Featured Speaker Workshop at JALT98, I will discuss the techniques needed for successful conferences. Attendees who teach writing to EFL students in Japan can become familiar with the techniques of successful conferencing.

References

Archer, C. (1991). Living with strangers in the U.S.A.: Communicating beyond culture. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall Regents.

Brender, A. (1993). An ethnographic study of second-language student motivation for attending writing center tutorials. Paper presented at the First National Writing Center Conference, New Orleans.

Brender, A. (1995, September). An investigation of differences between peer tutors and faculty tutors. Paper presented at the (Inter) National Writing Center Conference, St. Louis, MO.

Carnicelli, T. (1980). The writing conference: A one-to-one conversation. In T. Donovan & B. McClelland (eds.), Eight approaches to teaching composition. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Cassidy, J. (1996). Computer Assisted Language Arts Instruction for the ESL Learner. English Journal 85(9), 55-57.

Eirsch, L. (1988). Talking and writing across the curriculum: A tutorial model for adult ESL students in content courses. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 294 195)

Fritts, M. (1972). The effect of individual teacher conferences on the writing achievement and self-concept of developmental junior college writing students. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 138 988)

Goldstein, L., & Conrad, S. (1990, Autumn). Student input and negotiation of meaning in ESL writing conferences. TESOL Quarterly, 24, 443-460.

Harris, M. (1986). Teaching one-to-one: The writing conference. Urbana IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Lehtonen, S. (1984). The silent Finn. In D. Tannen & M. Saville-Troike (Eds.), Perspectives in silence. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Co.

Marshall, M. (1986). Writing without tears: Advanced writing for academic success. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 271 962)

Saville-Troike, M. (1984). The place of silence in an integrated theory of communication. In D. Tannen & M. Saville-Troike (Eds.), Perspectives in silence. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Co.

Wang, Yu-mei. (1996). E-mail dialogue journaling in an ESL reading and writing classroom. Paper presented at the National Convention of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, Indianapolis, IN.

Wardswaugh, R. (1985). How conversation works. London: Basil Blackwell, Ltd.

Xu, G. (1989). Helping ESL students improve un-English sentences in one-to-one conferences. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 304 003)

Zamel, V. (1985). Responding to student writing. TESOL Quarterly,19(1), 79-97.