3 posts tagged with "research"

Writing is hard for everyone, that’s a given.

But writing is hard in a different way for native speakers and non-native speakers of English.

Native speakers have been taught to write clearly, both implicitly for years and somewhat more explicitly in higher education. They can rely on their feeling about "what sounds good". I have spent years thinking about how we can best approach native speakers and non-native speakers differently when teaching them to write well.

First we have to acknowledge that these two populations have entirely different language experiences.

A native speaker​

Here is a typical native speaker's experience of language and writing:

I have only ever spoken one language in my life-- English. I have been exposed to the rhythm and nuance of the language every day since before I was born. I learned parallelism and rhythm on my parent's knees. I have been exposed to some of the best writing that English has to offer as part of my basic education because the art of language is valued in my culture (English class in school is called “language arts” for a reason!). In short, I’ve had a lifetime to develop a feeling for what makes writing “good”. I trust my feeling. I can use many different forms easily. My vocabulary is extensive and I know the feelings that different words evoke and which words they connect with. Even at university, I am required to take at least one course in writing composition, no matter my field. I am given writing style guides to read. Everything I do and will do is in English.

A non-native speaker​

And here is a typical non-native speaker´s experience (from the Netherlands, with a high level of English in society!):

I speak at least two languages, and I probably spoke a language other than English for most of my childhood. I have only been exposed to English since late childhood or early adolescence. Even then, my time learning other languages has been divided: as a teenager in the Netherlands, it was often divided between Dutch, French, German and English, not to mention Latin and Greek. And I have not learned other subjects (like biology, history, math) in English, but in my native language. When I did learn English, my teachers focused on teaching me grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. Then, at university, I suddenly had to start speaking, writing, and processing all the information in English. It has been exhausting, and I am constantly questioning myself. I am not taught what makes English writing “good”. Most of the what I read in English is "academic": badly written and complicated. I wonder if I am supposed to copy this style? I struggle to understand what some of these academic articles are saying. I think I must not be good enough. I think the problem is me: I need to work on my English so I can understand them. The other languages in my mind are constantly interfering with my English structure. I lack confidence. I think that I am not allowed to write in a way that makes sense to me.

Clearly, non-native speakers are at a disadvantage​

They have had so much less opportunity to develop their feeling for good writing in English, simply because the course of their lives has been different.

So how can we expect them to learn to write implicitly, based on feeling, like native speakers do?

What if we teach them more explicitly?

Learning explicitly​

When non-native English speakers are explicitly taught to write, they reap multiple benefits:

• They actively use critical thinking skills and logical reasoning. They do not blindly follow without understanding why.
• They feel more confident because they can recognize what makes a text objectively hard to read. In other words, they know they are not the problem.
• They play a more active role in team discussions because they can reason with their colleagues about the best solution for their situation. They do not feel confined to follow rules that may not fit their situation.

After almost 15 years of teaching highly educated non-native English speakers how to write clearly, I am convinced that explicit teaching is the way to help them improve. We cannot ask them to "use their ear". We can ask them to reason about their choices.

Most teachers don't have time to explicitly teach writing as well as their content matter, but they still want students to write decently.

Because of course, who will be reading those papers?

If this sounds familiar to you, then why not use ReallyWrite in your classes? It's minimal effort, zero risk, and high reward.

To get you started:

5 ways you can use ReallyWrite to make your teaching life easier​

1. Ask students to read the ReallyWrite learn pages​

Assign them as homework! Just add the link to your syllabus as a homework assignment early in the semester. Then they can work on using the information throughout the semester.

2. Ask students to name the techniques they see​

If your students give peer feedback, ask them to comment specifically on how the techniques from the learn pages are being applied (or not) in a text. They can do this during homework or in class. Ask them to explicitly label which techniques they see and which ones they think their peer would benefit from using. This exercise will help them shift their learning from theoretical to practical.

3. Ask students to show how they changed their text based on feedback from ReallyWrite​

As a warm-up, ask them to share with a partner how they changed three sentences based on the feedback from the ReallyWrite editor. This exchange may only need 10 minutes at the beginning of class. To use your time efficiently, you can ask them to come prepared to share the three changes they are most proud of.

For example:

1. Here I had a zombie noun and I changed it to this verb and cut four words in the process.
2. Here I had a list of prepositional phrases and I realized what was happening was [...] so I changed it like this.
3. Here I had an extremely complicated sentence and I noticed that I was trying to say three different things that are not connected very well, so I split it up into three sentences and used parallelism to show the relationships.

4. Let students analyze a peer's text for "given to new"​

Ask them to highlight a section of a partner's text: given (or old) information in one color and new information in another color. Encourage them to discuss their findings, either in class or on their own time. Use this exercise to help them see how what is in the writer's mind is not necessarily in the reader's mind.

5. Only accept papers with a minimum clarity score​

Instead of a minimum word count, why not give a minimum clarity score? Tell them you will only accept papers that have a certain minimum clarity score (I recommend 40 to start). Giving a bare minimum can push them to uncomplicate their complicated sentences and make it easier for you to read them!

Have you tried using ReallyWrite in your classes? I'd love to hear from you!​

Those articles haven't always been so heavy​

Do you ever put down an article and wonder if it really had to be so hard to read? If it couldn't have been easier, lighter, more interesting? If it couldn´t have been written in a way that made it a pleasure, not a burden, to read?

Research articles don't have to be so heavy. They haven't always been this way.

Until the late 19th century, most students learned rhetoric (the techniques we use to communicate). This widespread explicit communication instruction gave everyone the opportunity to develop their communication skills: how to get their point across clearly and succinctly, how to build up a logical argument.

What changed?​

Rhetoric was gradually cut to make space for other fields. It is still being taught in some places in the US, usually under a pseudonym ("communication" or "writing"), but not in non-native English speaking countries, where it could help enormously.

Learning explicit communication techniques can lessen the burden on non-native English researchers who need more help writing in English because they have less experience to draw from and fewer good examples to follow.

Because of this loss of explicit communication instruction, many of us no longer think consciously about how to communicate clearly.

A few rhetorical techniques, combined with a few linguistic theories, can help researchers make clear, logical decisions about how they convey their research, and these techniques are not hard to learn.¹

These techniques can help you write more clearly:

• parallelism
• given information to new information
• verbs instead of nouns
• light before heavy
• comparison
• repetition

We are writing unconsciously​

If you have never explicitly learned how to write clearly, you are writing unconsciously. Learning to write consciously will save you time because you will be able to identify problem areas and you will know which techniques can fix them.

My students tell me that they can never go back to being unaware. They can identify what is wrong with a text; they understand that they struggle to understand it because the writer failed to use easy rhetorical techniques that could have created elegance. They do not struggle because they are not smart enough.

Elegant simplicity is an ideal that rhetoric can help us achieve. If we want readers to focus entirely on the content, we should write sentences that are so clearly structured that the structure becomes invisible. If readers don't have to work to figure out the structure, they are free to focus entirely on the content.

Rhetoric can help us achieve that.