Rethinking the Teaching of English Writing in the Classroom.doc

Rethinking the Teaching of English Writing in the ClassroomRethinking the Teaching of English Writing in the ClassroomZhiyong Deng 1Zhiyong Deng, Ph.D, currently associate professor and deputy dean of College of Foreign Languages, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology (USST for short). His research fields are rhetoric, composition research and stylistics. His major publications include “A Socio-cognitive Model for the Teaching of English Writing” in Modern Foreign Languages（现代外语）(2002), Vol.4;“Rhetoric and Western Philosophical Thoughts” in Foreign Language Teaching (外语教学) (2001), Vol.1;“Analogy in Advertising” in Foreign Languages And Their Teaching (外语与外语教学) (2000), Vol. 2 and Research on English Rhetoric and Writing (英语修辞学与写作研究), Jilin Peoples Press (吉林人民出版社), 2002. Address: P.O.B. 436, 516 Jun Gong Road, Shanghai, China, 200093, Email: . Tel: Yang Tao2Tao Yang, Master, currently lecturer of University of Shanghai for Science and Technology. The authors research field is rhetoric and applied linguistics, Address: same as above, E-mail: , Tel:University of Shanghai for Science and TechnologyAbstract: The results of two surveys on Chinese college students of English prompt the authors of this paper to explore factors that result in the inefficiency of the teaching of English writing in the Chinese classroom. The factors include: misunderstanding of the nature of writing, and of the teachers role; problem with writing textbooks; insufficient English writing research.Key words: rethinking teaching of English writing problems 1. IntroductionTeaching English writing to Chinese students has long been recognized as one of the most daunting tasks of college education in our country. So often do we hear writing teachers uneasy remarks about the poor quality of student writings, which mainly manifests itself in lack of substance, improper way of textual development and poor grammar. And so often do we hear students grumbling complaints about having nothing to say and not knowing how to say properly. “I have little to say about it,” says one student. “Writing is nastily boring, because I really dont know how to write,” grumbles another. Such is a troubling scenario prevalent in our country, as is testified by one textbook I chanced upon one day when I was browsing a bookshelf in the largest book mall in Shanghai. The book presents a sharp observation of an alarming phenomenon: 对中国学生的作文调查, 有50%作文缺乏细节，中国学生英语写作中最突出的问题是写作内容的贫乏。他们对主要思想和细节的发现和挖掘远远不够。(Zhang Zaixin, 1995: 43)(Translation: A survey on Chinese students compositions shows that fifty percent of them lack details and that the most salient problem with them is that they lack substance because the students dont go far enough to elaborate the central idea and the minor points.) Hopefully we expect the situation to have changed for the better in the period of several years that followed. Unfortunately, however, our hope is dashed by another book I chanced upon that day which comes up with a more thought-provoking, bigger, related problem: 近年来我国大学生的总体英语水平和考试成绩有了明显的提高，但他们的英语写作能力和写作成绩并没有取得应有的进步。 ( Pan Jun, 2001：3-4)(Translation: Recently, the overall English competence and test results of college students in our country have improved substantially. However, their English writing competence and English writing test results have shown little improvement in return. ) Why, we as English writing teachers wonder, should the college students general language competence witness a substantial improvement while their writing competence remains, so to speak, stagnant? The lopsided phenomenon points to a methodological issue every writing teacher must think over. How can we foster students writing competence by teaching effectively? As a point of departure, this paper attempts to probe into the factors that lead to the present unsettling situation.2. Data from two surveysThe first survey was conducted on three classes of English-major sophomores of University of Shanghai for Science and Technology (USST for short) back in 1998, as an attempt to find some common problems the students might encounter. The questionnaire for the survey features two questions: “Are you aware of an audience when you are writing (an expository essay)?” and “What do you think is/are most difficult or troublesome in English composition?” To the first question, only six students (that is, 14.39 % of the total) responded positively and thirty-six (85. 61%) responded negatively. To the second question, thirteen students (31.43 %) ticked the choice “I have no ideas to write about,” sixteen (38.09 %) “I dont know how to express myself,” six (14.28%) “I dont know how to organize ideas,” and seven (16.2 %) “ Other problems.” For the same purpose, the second survey, which was conducted on senior English students, that is, three graduating classes, of USST, features not only the two questions that appear in the first questionnaire but also some others. As to the question “the most serious problem I have with English writing is ” seventeen (that is, 28 % of the total) ticked the choice “I have little to say.” It was revealed that only eight subjects (that is, 13.5 % of the total; two subjects invalidated) marked the choice “always bear audience in mind while writing an expository essay” and that twenty-three subjects (that is, 37.3 %) chose “have audience sense when writing an expository essay but dont like to analyze, and adapt my language to the audience”. The most unsettling revelation from the survey is that forty-one of the fifty nine subjects, that is, 70 % of the total, deemed their previous writing course, English Writing taught to sophomores, to be of little help. Though the two questionnaires were used on two different groups of subjects, the data yielded in both cases pointed to similar issues of great concern: a great many students feel at a loss as to what to write about; few students have audience sense, and even if they are aware of an audience, they dont adopt strategies in line with the audience; English writing course is not considered helpful. These findings must alert us to some problems with the current teaching of English writing in the classroom. 2.1 Misunderstanding of the nature of writingThe aforementioned situation is partly due to a common mistaken idea that writing is putting ideas down on the page, that is, clothing ideas in well-structured language. To this notion too many classroom practices seem to suggest. A typical classroom practice is that the teacher first lays out a rule or skill, a pattern of paragraph or textual development for instance, then elaborates it by using examples, and finally asks the students to write on a topic by following the rule or skill. Once the students are through with their writing practice, they submit their compositions to the teacher for evaluation or grading which in all likelihood may involve such aspects as diction, grammar, structure, and content. Such a classroom practice seems to imply: first, ideas exist out there, waiting to be put in a certain form; second, the process of writing can be divided into clear-cut, linear stages, with putting pen to paper as a marker of the beginning; third, writing is a solitary, individual act; fourth, once the students have memorized the rules, skills or patterns, they can turn out good compositions. Ironically, this notion of writing may directly or indirectly get support from the Chinese notion of rhetoric. As its name indicates, “修辞” (rhetoric) literally means modification of words or expressions. (“修”meaning modification; “辞” meaning words or expressions) The implication is that ideas exist out there, like an object, waiting for modification. For, if you want to modify something, you must have something to modify in the first place. To our understanding, writing is a process of thinking, verbal communication, and an interactive, socio-cognitive behaviour. Meaning is not thought up and then written down; the act of writing is an act of thought because language and thought do not bear one another a sequential relationship but are simultaneous. Language and thought are inseparable. However, ironically, it is this inseparability that is often misunderstood. For instance, writing teachers give writing assignments based on the assumption that writing begins after the thinking is concluded, and they respond to those assignments as if the etiquette of language were more important than the thinking represented by language. As a result, the teaching of writing pays, little, if any, attention to how to help students think rhetorically.Winterowd (1975: 33) made a very convincing argument about writing:Writing is not only the exposition of ideas, but also the working out of ideas. Often we really dont know what we want to say until weve said it. Essentially, writing is verbal communication. The very term “communication” connotes the sense of audience, without which no activity can claim to be communication. When you are writing a letter to your friend, for instance, you are communicating with him. In this case you have a mental representation of your friend whom you address while you are in the process of writing. The view that writing is verbal communication finds strongest support in Bakhtins dialogic theory of language (Thomas Kent, 1993:145-155). The view that writing is verbal communication implies the interactive nature of writing. Communication researchers remind us that communication is not a one-way transmission but a two-way interactive transaction. More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle defined rhetoric as the counterpart of dialectic. In his view, the interaction between speaker and audience has a different form in rhetoric. A rhetor, instead of using question and answer to achieve interaction with his audience, uses the enthymeme, which embodies rhetoric-audience interaction. Writing is also a socio-cognitive behaviour largely because the writer in action has to recognize, and subject to, constraints of the social context including the audience, that is, he enters an intertextual relationship with othershe brings to his social acts of communication much knowledge, including discourse knowledge, topic knowledge, and world knowledge that they have developed in prior experiences. From the social constructivist perspective, a writers language originates with the community to which he or she belongs. Such a notion of writing brings several things to bear on the teaching methodology, which we will discuss in the following section.2.2 Misunderstanding of the teachers role Closely related to the mistaken idea of writing is a product approach to the instruction of writing. Typically, classroom time is devoted to teaching constituents, and correct construction, of the sentence, then to patterns for paragraphs, and finally to organizational structures for essays. Relentless drills and practices focusing primarily on the correctness of finished products are carried out because they are considered essential to a mastery of the basics” that necessarily precede fluent writing and because it is assumed that, once students have mastered grammar and known the patterns, they themselves will turn out essays that are grammatically and structurally good. As a result, the teaching of writing is, to a great extent, reduced to dealing with grammar and the emulation of the so-called good essay patterns. Writings teachers, therefore, usually focus on their students compositions, that is, the written or typed words on the page, leaving the very act of composing to the students themselves. This practice is, as it were, what the Chinese saying shows: picking the sesame while losing the watermelon. Related to the above-mentioned phenomenon is a popular view that the writing teachers task is to teach students how to write, rather than what to write. A corollary is that what is traditionally referred to as Invention is more often than not marginalized or ignored entirely, which results in students feeling at a loss as what to write about. Unavoidably, student essays are often said to be lacking in substance and persuasive power. This is shown by data from the two questionnaires. In both cases a relatively high percentage of students regard writing as dull and not helpful. If the writing process should not be ignored, how, then, should teachers teach the process? That is, how should they intervene in the students process of composing, particularly the inventionthe process of generating ideas. They, we believe, should get involved by providing students with prompts or offering a variety of heuristics the student writers themselves can employ during the process. In this connection, we have recourse to modern rhetoric as well as classical rhetoric. For instance, we can draw on quite a few invention models formulated by rhetoricians such as Karle Wallace, Kenneth Burke, Richard Young, and so on. The recent collaborative approach is an example of intervening in the writing process. To intervene in the writing process is, in large measure, to help students write with respect to audience. As pointed out previously, writing is an interactive, socio-cognitive process. Therefore, the writer must take into consideration the audience that he may ignore because he is bent on expressing ideas in a foreign language he is not quite good at. Decades ago, James Moffett claims forcefully that “If anybody is going to do anything about the teaching of writing, the first priority is going to have to be the rekindling of the sense of audience, until that is done, nothing else is going to happen” (Gesa Kirsch & Duane H. Roen, eds, 1990:13). Researches show that there is a high correlation between audience awareness and writing competence. According to Flower and Hayes (1980), proficient writers attend to the broad rhetorical dimensionsincluding audienceof their writing task, while non-proficient writers show a compulsive attention to matters of surface correctness. To intervene in the process of writing is, therefore, to help the students consider the audiences perspectives: the audiences needs, emotions, attitudes, values, cognitions, etc., to identify with the audience therein. Writing teachers, we believe, should try all means to cultivate students rhetorical competence with audience sensitivity since, as Britton and others (1975: 58) put it, high audience sense is certainly one hallmark of a skilled writer because it concerns establishing and maintaining relations with the audience. 2.3 A Problem with writing textbooks: Lack of integration of theory and practice Another problem related to the aforementioned two is with writing textbooks. Currently, there are two types of writing textbooks: foreign textbooks introduced, and domestic textbooks compiled by Chinese scholars. Textbooks of the former type, for failing to capture the difficulty with which Chinese students learn English writing, are not quite effective in the classroom. Those of the latter type are widely used in the classroom teaching, but they are not as effective as they are expected, due to problems in themselves. One obvious defect is that the process of invention is eclipsed by the over-emphasis on sentence construction and pattern emulation. Few, if any, textbooks compiled by Chinese scholars give due attention to invention. Such a textbook usually starts with tips on diction, goes through sentence construction based on the knowledge of sentence classification from different perspectives, and a lengthy illustration of various patterns of paragraph development, and finally culminates in exemplification of essay structure. By contrast, writing textbooks compiled by native English speakers, thanks to the influence of traditional notion of rhetoric, which is conceived as “faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion,” often start with invention, analyzing audiences characteristics to pave the way for discussion of rhetorical strategies involving not only what to say but also how to say it properly (this notion is different from the classical notion of invention). A second defect is that little attention is given to the issue of context of situation. Many of our classroom writing practices seem to show that writing is nothing but a purely academic activity that takes place in a vacuum, devoid of social constraints, and concerns only grammatical rules and textual conventions. The truth is that writing is, among other things, an intellectual activity intertwined with the social cobweb. Thus, a convincing discussion of rhetorical strategies must be based on the context of situation in which the act of writing proceeds. For example, an incorrect sentence may be ironically perfect and accepted by the reader when it is intended to be spoken by a small child or a careless speaker or somebody with little education. A case in point is the initial sentences in Mark Twains novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finns, which, though containing several grammatical errors, are perfect for the description of a naughty small child with little formal schooling. As writing is communication that happens not in a vacuum but in a social context, any writing textbook must accord due attention to the treatment of context of situation when it comes to the discussion of rhetorical skills regarding any level of language. A third defect is that discussion of rhetorical skills is seldom under the guidance of theory, that is, a tip is seldom coupled with theoretical explanation. What we usually see in a textbook are many tips: the dos and donts, but we fail to see why. As a result, students have to learn the skills simply by rotethat proves dull and strenuous and ineffective. If the rout reason is not offered, students are liable to com