112 Branton 6.6: 14184.) yh! Introduction Reshaping ESL students’ perceptions of writing Linda Lonon Blanton ESL students bring to their courses perceptions about writing that work against their becoming proficient writers. They often respond to each act of writing as if it were a test, thereby denying themselves psychological and intellectual ‘space’ to work with written language, Students impatiently await the time when they can get it ‘right’. One of our jobs as ESL composi- tion teachers is to interact with our students in a variety of roles to allow them to perceive the development of their ability to write as the multi- faceted, gradual, and organic process that itis. This article outlines a multi- step writing programme in which students participate in the writing pro- cess and relate to their fellow writers (both classmates and teacher) in a number of different ways. Each of these ways is described in terms of the activities involved, and the degree to which writing proficiency is increased and students’ anxiety about themselves as writers is reduced. Most of my students are scared to death to write English. Or more accurately, they are scared to death that they will not write English well ‘enough to pass their examinations in English as a second language and then be able to move on in their academic work towards a university degree. And a university degree, often in engineering, is why they are here; proficiency ° in English is only 2 means to an end How do I know what my students feel about writing? They tell me—sometimes directly and then indirectly through their written work and their classroom behaviour, They dread writing examinations and are visibly nervous when they take them. Neither attitude tests nor statistical measurements of their anxiety about writing are'needed to tell the tale; their anxiety and the pressure they feel to write well are palpable in the classroom. ‘The pressure my students operate under and their high level of frustra- tion about writing are compounded by certain facts of their academic life. As immigrant residents, they have already been admitted to the state university under its open admissions policy, a policy that requires residents to submit only a high-school diploma or its equivalent. Once non-native English speakers are admitted, the university then requires them to sit for the ESL Proficiency Examination, consisting of a battery of tests of aural comprehension, reading, grammar, vocabulary, and writing. Depending on their test results, students are placed in one of three levels of intensive ESL (fifteen class hours each week, plus five laboratory hours), non- intensive ESL (three hours of advanced composition per week, to which they add other courses of their choice), or the regular mainstream curricu- lum forall students. Students placed in intensive ESL are pulled in opposite directions: they have already been admitted to the university, but then ELT Journal Volume 41/2 April 1987 © Oxford University Press 1987Using journals English and their ESL placement are holding them back, they feel, They simply fail to appreciate what an open admissions policy means, They have made it to the university, but then they are told to take courses that do not count towards a degree. Since T often work with students who have been placed in the bottom level of the ESL intensive programme, I work with those who bring to their ESL courses the heaviest load of anxiety; they are the farthest from the mainstream curriculum and their goal ofa university degree. And because students’ anxiety in the classroom reduces their effectiveness in becoming ‘more proficient writers, I see it as my job to reshape how they feel abous writing in order to have any chance of success with them at all. My sense is that I primarily need to increase their confidence in writing English; or as Krashen (1984:30) puts it, [need to help students feel that they can become members of the club of those who speak and write English. To increase their confidence, I need to make them aware of their own progress in expressing their ideas comprehensibly with ever-increasing control and accuracy. And T need to help them understand that control and accuracy do not come overnight, that writing is a messy activity, and that writing is not about ‘getting it right’, As Raimes (1983:261) says, icis not about being perfect; it is not about being tested or graded. In setting out to accomplish my goals, I have experimented in the classroom until I now juggle a combination of activities that involve me as the teacher playing a. number of different roles, with different writing activities serving different functions. The combination, charted in three cycles in Table 1, has emerged as the writing programme that works best for me in changing students’ perceptions about writing, lowering their anxiety, and increasing their writing proficiency. The activities are concurrent during a semester: journal writing five days a week, logs once a weck, and essay writing two or three days a week. We begin each class morning with five minutes of individual journal writing—five days a week. I write; students write. I do not read thelr Journal entries; they do not read mine. I find that it becomes a quiet, peacefull way to begin the morning, with each of us engaged with ourselves before we interact with each other. There are always some students in my class who work at night and hurry to class sleepy and exhausted. Others get up at dawn to do their cooking for the day and get their families off to work and school. Some drive great distances. However each person’s morning begins, our journal writing serves as a few minutes of meditation, allowing us to shift into ourselves while we process the reality of each new day. On the first morning I announced that there would be no titles; no set topics; no corrections. We would write about whatever was on our minds, and mark each entry only with the date. Then I sat down to write. For a few moments, all of the students sat and stared at me. I kept on writing. Then, Type of writing —_Purpoze of writing Autiene Teacher's role 1 Journal To unwind and reflect The weiter Fellow writer 2 Learning log To interact and share The teacher Responder 3 Essays To practise, get feedback, Mentor and Assistant editor and exercise thinking and fellow students expression oo — Table 1 Reshaping ESL students’ perceptions of writing 13Discussion Using learning logs 14 w out of the corner of my eye, I could see them one by one pick up their pens and begin to write. I breathed easier. By the second morning, a brief‘Good morning’ and ‘Let's write’ set them to work. By the end of the second week, some students were already writing in their journals when I got to class. Then I would be the one to sit down, take out my pen, and fall in stride. Journals in first-language writing classes are not new, but my sense is that ‘we have been more reluctant to use journals, or free writing of any kind, in second-language writing classes, especially with minimally proficient stu- dents. { am now convinced that the journal is an effective tool for promoting fluency, but my ‘proof is indirect and experimental. I really have no idea what my students wrote in their journals last semester or how close to edited English it was. I could ‘see’ them thinking and writing in English as they rehearsed with mouths moving and brows furrowing. Pages began to fill up faster as the semester passed. More importantly, I could see greater fiuency at a faster pace in the pieces of writing that I did read than at other times in my teaching at that level. How does the journal work to promote fluency? I am not sure, but I think that during free writing, more than at any other time, an organic connec- tion between language, thought, and feeling is possible. I have no doubt that my students make more grammar errors in their journal writing than in drafts of other pieces written for me and their classmates to read, but I am convinced that making errors, and making them with impunity, is essential to students’ development as writers. As Moffett (1968:199) put it, errors are the essential learning instrument as writers heed the results of having plunged into the act of writing. Making errors is a by-product of what students are doing when they write in their journals; and what they are doing is making meaning out of their own realities. I do the same when I write in my journal, and my entries are not written for others to read either. At first I found that students fretted about writing without being cor rected, a perception that I thought needed to be reshaped. I assured them that I would indeed find plenty of time to correct them, and I asked them just to give journals a chance. always tell myself that even if nothing results fom journal writing, I will have lost only five minutes’ worth of class time. Each time, though, I am convinced anew that as a result of journal writing students begin to feel differently about themselves as writers, about me as their writing teacher, and about what writing is. These are all affective considerations that can promote writing fluency. It makes sense to me that when writing is part of our everyday routine, the less awesome and anguished an act it becomes. This in turn helps my students feel that, with time, they themselves can expect to become fluent writers. In various ways and at different times, I get enough feedback to convince me that the messages get through. My strongest source of feedback is the learning logs that students write once a week. And here is where I change roles. Students’ learning logs are different from their journal entries in several ways: they are written at home once a week, not in class; the topic is always our ESL class and writing, not whatever is on people’s minds. Also the logs are written for me to read, unlike the journals written for the writers’ eyes only. Simply put, writing learning logs gives students a reason, a purpose, to reflect on and process what is going on with their learning and to write Linda Lonon BlantonDiscussion ” about it. And it provides a situation for them to write to a specific reader. It is not an overwhelming task either, since I limit it to one page. I respond to the content in each log—on the back or at the bottom ofeach student's page—often sharing a similar experience, applauding a discov- ery, commiserating with a writer’s frustration, or acknowledging diffi- culties that writers encounter, Often I have to remember and promise to blind myself to their errors and see only content; I have to remind myself that students are writing their logs to communicate to me and that I will violate their trust iT try to slip in a correction. I sometimes sit on my hands as I read. I participate further by matching students’ logs with a collective response of my own. In my weekly log to them, I share how I think the class is going and general problems we need to work on; I also select a couple of dividual observations or discoveries from students’ logs to quote or paraphrase in my log each time. Each Monday as I hand out my log to them, I sense a general stir of excitement as they read to see whose names and comments appear in my log. Many times a student’s observations expressed in a learning log profoundly affect my teaching, I remember in particular one week when I was having unusually grave doubts about dealing with grammar so indirectly and informally in the class, and then I read a log containing this discovery’ in conversation with someone around, I still confused in the using of tenses and there were still many grammatical mistakes in ry questions or my answers. The more I thought of these, the more I felt confused! Therefore, I spoke English uninfluently. Sometimes, I was ashemed, because T'was aftaid that they would laugh ... at me... But when I spoke English reflectly without minding of grammar or structure—I realized that many times, my sentences were correct. I surprised about this very much . .. when I began to talk about something to someone, the first words which appeared in my mind were sentences that my teacher often used, even if sometimes I didn’t review those sentences at home! (POP) Tread this to mean that the student intuitively sensed the power of his own language acquisition process. And my doubts about grammar disappeared, ‘as did my concern over his ability to use the language to express his ideas succinctly! ‘As the term progressed, I sensed in students’ logs an increased willing- ness to share themselves and their thoughts: this was revealed in writing that was not stiff and opaque, but writing that was open, honest, and expressive. I interpreted this as a form of trust—their trusting me to respond respecifully and humanly to them, without thcir needing to protect themselves from evaluation. In the same way that Spack and Sadow (1983:589) use working journals in their ESL freshman composition classes, I use learning logs with minimally proficient ESL writers to help them ‘experience the satisfaction that comes with writing to be read and acknowledged’ (p. 589). I suspect that is what every writer basically wants. What I see in students’ writing is a gradual shift away from writing to nobody, writing that has an unfocused direction, to focused writing—or, as Spack and Sadow saw in their students’ working journals, ‘writing to a specific audience within a specific context’. After a while, POP's ‘my teacher’ became ‘you’ when he really perceived that I, personally and Reshaping ESL students” perceptions of writing U3Using essays 4 individually, was the audicnce. Details begin to flourish and explanations expand as students gain a more precise sense of what I do not know about, them, [t dawns on them individually that J, the reader, cannot read their minds, and that they have to explain fully and thoroughly what they mean; in other words what Odeli (1983:104) calls decentered writing—mature writ- ing that provides «context and content thatthe reader might not be aware of Thinking last semester that I might not be able to perceive enough changes week by week in students’ logs to know ifI were on the right track, I asked students to write autobiographies on the first day of the semester and, without re-reading their first-day papers, to do the same during the last week of class. I hoped the consistency of the assignments and the lapse of time would allow me to focus on some changes in their writing. The most remarkable difference was along the continuum towards decentered writ- ing, writing with an awareness of audience, and I attributed the bulk of the difference to the learning logs. Parallel excerpts from one student's papers, the first written at the end of January and the second at the beginning of May, illustrate progress along this continuum. My names I was born in Leningrad in Soviet Union. I finished there higher school and after that I graduated from Railway “ Institute, I obtained my master degree as electrical engineer. After that I worked in the Underground in Leningrd. Seven years ago, my husband, his mother, and I arrived to Israel .. . (AB) Iwas born in 1953 in Leningrad in the Soviet Union. I went to school when I was seven years old and I finished my high school when I was seventeen in 1970. The same year I started to study at the Railway Institute in Leningrad. I studied there five years and in 1975 I obtained a diploma in electrical engineering. After my graduation from the Insti- tute, I began to work at one of the substations of the Leningrad under- ground and I worked there almost three years. In 1977, I got married. In @ year, my husband, my mother-in-law, and I submitted an application to leave the Soviet Union. And exactly seven years ago, on the 1-st of May, 1978, we left the Soviet Union and came to Israel... (AB) Even though AB was not writing her autobiography to me individually, the second excerpt provides a fullness of details and clarity of meaning so lacking in the first that I take the difference to indicate a new awareness of what the reader probably doesn’t know. I, for one, needed to appreciate more fully the meaning in the first piece of ‘Underground’, and the precise chronology of the events in the writer's life. At the beginning of the semester, students are not at all surprised by my request for a weekly composition; in fact, they seem relieved that at least ‘one of their assignments fits their traditional notions of a writing class. In preparation for each week's composition, we read on the subject of the weck—a memorable trip, an interesting person, everyday lives, and so on. We read essays from reading textbooks and essays from their composition book. W: share our own experiences on these topics in class discussions. And we analyse essays for what they tell us about other writers’ experi- ences, and for the rhetorical choices that writers make in writing about these topics. Then 1 ask students to bring to class drafts of their compositions on the Linda Lonon BlantonDiscussion week's topic. In class, cach student finds a partner to listen to the draft, the idea being that the writer might catch unclear meaning and ungrammatical constructions while reading the essay aloud—a technique advocated by Raimes (1983:148). In this way, writers become their own editors, and the partner becomes the audience; the partner also becomes an editor in turn in responding to the paper. After reading, discussing, and editing, each student's job is to redraft the original essay and hand it in to me the next day. I read these drafts primarily as an editor, as well. Is a point clear? Are ideas well supported? Is the topic thoroughly explored? In my role as editor, 1 act most directly to promote rhetorical skills, and I ask students to ask themselves and their partners the same questions as they read and listen to each other’s paper. I like playing editor; I feel helpful as a provider of feedback. In the margins of students’ papers, I write ‘a good detail’ here, a ‘needs more explanation’ there. The next assignment is to write another draft, the writers being guided by the editor's suggestions for change and their own thrust for clarity of meaning. I find that by the time we get to the final draft most of the rhetorical problems and grammatical kinks are worked out without fanfare or direct intervention on my part. And it is only on the weekly final draft that I mark grammatical errors, selecting a different type of error each week to under- dine. When I give the papers back, I always take a few minutes of class time to look at examples from their papers that nced repair, and this is mainly where students ‘get’ grammar instruction. The next assignment is a short one: to repair the sentences that need work and turn in the rewrites. The list is usually no more than half a dozen sentences long. It is in this last work that we are adding the icing to the cake, the cake itself being baked during the writing'of the journals and logs, and the early drafts of their essays. ‘The class activities centred around essay writing provide a kind of linguistic security that students feel immensely comfortable with and almost relieved about after foraging into uncharted lingusitic territory in writing their Journals and learning logs. At least, this is the message I get from them. Each week they are surrounded by readings, discussion, and brainstorming within a semantic context before they write their own essays: words and phrasings appropriate to the topic undoubtedly dance before their eyes and ring in their ears as they write, In their essays, students invent their own sentences, yet the topic is shared and owned by all. Here writing is less lonely and more collaborative. Working with a student partner and then in response to the teacher as editor creates an interactive relationship with fellow writers. The readings themselves are a way into the topic, a means to stimulate students’ thinking about comparable experiences and ideas, and a guide to available vocabulary, grammar, and organizational strategies. This is mod- clling in its best sense and, I suspect, in its most common sense, despite the characterization of Zamel (1983:165) and others of such’ structured approaches to writing as ‘prescriptive, formulaic, and overly concerned with correctness’. Raimes’s term ‘parallel writing” (1983:109) rather than the term ‘modelling’ is perhaps more apt for what students do when they go from readings on a theme through various activities into writing on the same or a similar theme. In their essay writing, I see students, and I think they begin to see themselves, as practitioners ofa craft. This is the way we talk about it. They are reassured that there is patterning above the sentence level for them to Reshaping ESL students’ perceptions of writing "7x assimilate, not as a form to mould their content into, but as tools for the craftsperson to work with in shaping meaning. In fact, I sense that they tolerate the free writing of their journals and logs more because they know that the-form and shape of their work will get attention during the essay- i writing cycle. And they insist on some direct correction. Besides, in this cycle they are practising the vital skills of editing, redrafting, proof reading, i and correcting. Conclusion Just as I was ready to begin working on the conclusion to this paper, I happened to pick up an article by McDonald (1986:6) on using metaphor i ‘xo help us restructure our thinking and radically change our teaching styles. and the way we approach everything we do in the writing classroom’. Her article provided me with an insight that should have been obvious to me, and one that seems more fitting as a conclusion than the one I had originally envisaged. What struck me was that while [had started out using metaphor to reshape students’ perceptions of writing and of themselves as. writers, somewhere along the way my use of metaphor had profoundly restructured my perceptions of myself as a writing teacher. We all know the old adage ‘We are what we cat’, Along with McDonald, I now also believe that we are what we think we are, O * Received June 1986 References Zamel, V. 1983. “The composing process of advanced Freedman, A., I. Pringle, and J. Yalden (eds.) 1983. Learning to Write: First Language/Second Language. New York: Longman Krashen, S. 1984. Writing: Research, Theory, and Appli- cations. Oxford: Pergamon. McDonald, A. 1985. ‘Metaphor, self'image and the writing teacher.” The Quarterly ofthe National Writing Project and the Center for the Study of Writing. 8/2:8-9, Moffett, J. 1968, Teaching the Universe of Discourse Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Odell, L. 1983. ‘Redefining maturity in writing’ in Freedman, Pringle, and Yaldeti (eds.) 1983. Raimes, A. 1983. Téchnigues in Teaching Writing. New York: Oxford University Press Spack, R. and C. Sadow. 1983. ‘Student-teacher ‘working journals in ESL freshman composition.” TESOL Quarterly 17/4:575-93. 18. Linda Lonon Blanton ESL’ students: six case studies.” TESOL Quarterly 17/2:165-87. The author Linda Lonon Blanton is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of New Orleans (Louisiana). She isthe former Coordinator of ESL and the current Chair of Freshman English there. She obtained her Ph.D. in linguistics from the Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago). In addition to teaching English in New Orleans and Chicago, she taught for two years in Tunisia under the auspices of the US Peace Corps. She has published four ESL composition textbooks and an article on reading in The ESP Journal. Another of her interests is the study of ‘American English dialects