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CONTENTS nos. in parentheses

ARTICLES
(8-25)
Tradition and Revolution in ESL Teaching 535
Ann Raimes
Schema Theory and ESL Reading Pedagogy 553 (26-46)
Patricia L. Carrell and Joan C. Eisterhold
Student-Teacher Working Journals in ESL Freshman Composition 575 (48-66)
Ruth Spack and Catherine Sadow
Increasing Learner Involvement in Course Management 595 (68-81)
Andrew Peter Littlejohn
The Least You Should Know About Arabic: Implications for the ESL
Writing Instructor 609 (82-96)
Karyn Thompson-Panos and Maria Thomas-Ruzic
Recent Language Research and Some Language Teaching Principles 625 (97-121)
Karl J. Krahnke and Mary Ann Christison
On the Use of Composition Scoring Techniques, Objective Measures,
and Objective Tests to Evaluate ESL Writing Ability 651 (122-142)
Kyle Perkins

REVIEWS
Language and Culture in Conflict: Problem-Posing
in the ESL Classroom 673
Nina Wallerstein
Reviewed by Linda M. Crawford-Lange
Essential Idioms in English—A New Revised Edition 676
Robert J. Dixon
Reviewed by Helen K. Fragiadakis

BRIEF REPORTS AND SUMMARIES 679

THE FORUM 685
INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS 693
Editorial Policy
General Information for Authors
Guidelines for the Preparation of Manuscripts
Publications Received 701
Publications Available from the TESOL Central Office 703
TESOL Membership Application 728
OFFICERS AND EXECUTIVE BOARD 1983-84
President Penelope M. Alatis Holly L. Jacobs
JOHN F. HASKELL Francis C. Hammond Atlanta, Georgia
Northeastern Illinois University Junior High School Darlene Larson
Chicago, Illinois Alexandria, Virginia New York University
Andrew D. Cohen New York, New York
First Vice President
Hebrew University Lin Lougheed
CHARLES H. BLATCHFORD Jerusalem, Israel
Fair Oaks, California United States
JoAnn Crandall Information Agency
Second Vice President Center for Applied Linguistics Washington, D.C.
PENNY LARSON Washington, D.C. Marsha Robbins Santelli
Alemany Community Chicago Public Schools
College Center John F. Fanselow
Teachers College Chicago, Illinois
San Francisco, California Columbia University
Executive Director New York, New York Executive Assistant
JAMES E. ALATIS Jean Handscombe CAROL M. LeCLAIR
Georgetown University North York Board of Education Georgetown University
Washington, D.C. Toronto, Ontario Washington, D.C.

530 TESOL QUARTERLY

TESOL QUARTERLY
A Journal for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages
and of Standard English as a Second Dialect

Editor
BARRY P. TAYLOR, University of Pennsylvania
Review Editor
CHARLENE J. SATO, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Brief Reports and Summaries Editor
ANN FATHMAN, Cañada College
Assistants to the Editor
SUSAN ARLIN, CATHERINE DOUGHTY,
LINDA KEEHN, University of Pennsylvania

Editorial Advisory Board

Paul J. Angelis Ann Raimes
Southern Illinois University Hunter College, City University of New York
Christopher Brumfit Arnulfo G. Ramirez
University of London State University of New York at Albany
Michael Canale Jack C. Richards
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Hawaii at Manoa
Marianne Celce-Murcia Pat Rigg
University of California, Los Angeles Center for the Expansion of
Richard Day Language and Thinking
University of Hawaii at Manoa Muriel Saville-Troike
David E. Eskey University of Illinois
University of Southern California Thomas Scovel
Stephen J. Gaies San Francisco State University
University of Northern Iowa G. Richard Tucker
Grace S. Holt Center for Applied Linguistics
University of Illinois at Chicago Rita Wong
Ann M. Johns San Francisco State University
San Diego State University Carlos A. Yorio
Michael H. Long University of Toronto
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Joan Morley
University of Michigan

Additional Readers
Lyle Bachman, Patricia Carrell, JoAnn Crandall, Allene Grognet, Holly Jacobs, Carol Kreidler,
John Oller, Fay Pallen, Teresa Pica, Charlene Sato, Jacquelyn Schachter, Linda Schinke-Llano,
Richard Schreck, Charles Stansfield, Thurston Womack, Vivian Zamel

Credits
Advertising arranged by Aaron Berman, TESOL Development and Promotions, San Francisco,
California
Typesetting, printing, and binding by Pantagraph Printing, Bloomington, Illinois
Design by Chuck Thayer Advertising, San Francisco, California

TESOL QUARTERLY 531

TESOL QUARTERLY

Editor's Note

Charlene Sato, recently appointed Review Editor of the TESOL

Quarterly, has informed me that a very heavy workload makes it
necessary for her to give up her Quarterly position. Although Charlie
had warned me at the time of her appointment that this might turn out to
be the case, it is nevertheless with disappointment that I have accepted
her resignation. Despite her short tenure, Charlie has been a strong
contributor to the Quarterly, and we thank her for editing the December
1983 and March 1984 Review sections.
Starting with the June 1984 issue, the Review section will be edited by
Vivian Zamel, a faculty member in the English Department at the
University of Massachusetts/Boston. Over the years Vivian has con-
tributed to the Quarterly both as the author of a number of articles and
as an evaluator of manuscripts submitted for consideration for publica-
tion. We are all fortunate to have Vivian on the Quarterly staff, and we
welcome her.
Effective January 1, 1984, reviewers of publishers’ materials are invited
to sent their submissions directly to Vivian Zamel at the address listed in
the Information for Contributors section of this issue.

In This Issue

This issue of the TESOL Quarterly has a decidedly pedagogical

focus. With few exceptions, the articles published here address issues
that should be particularly relevant to those ESL professionals whose
work brings them in contact with students in classroom settings.
• Ann Raimes looks at the field of ESL in terms of Thomas Kuhn’s
theory of the structure of scientific revolutions. But unlike others who
have used Kuhn’s model to posit one or more “revolutions” in ESL
teaching during this century, Raimes argues that a new set of shared
assumptions about our discipline (a paradigm) is not emerging since
our practices are still firmly entrenched in a positivist tradition.
532 TESOL QUARTERLY
 Although Raimes points out the signs to indicate that our orientation
is in flux, she maintains that the field of language teaching is not
experiencing a revolution, but rather a paradigm shift.
• Patricia Carrell and Joan Eisterhold examine the role of background
knowledge (what the reader already knows) within the context of
schema theory, which maintains that reading comprehension is
characterized by an interaction between a text and the reader’s prior
background knowledge. They argue for the relevance of schema-
theoretic views in the teaching of reading to non-native speakers of
English and provide guidelines to help classroom teachers manipu-
late the variables of the text and/or the reader in order to devise
classroom activities which foster reader-centered reading.
• Ruth Spack and Catherine Sadow, taking a process-oriented ap-
proach to the teaching of writing, discuss the use of student-teacher
working journals in ESL composition classes. Unlike many writing
instructors who have their students keep diary-like journals, how-
ever, Spack and Sadow propose an interactive process in which
teachers also write journals and in which topics are motivated not
by personal, but rather by academic and class-related, concerns.
• Andrew Littlejohn addresses the currently popular question of how
to increase learners’ involvement in the management of their
language courses. After outlining some of the arguments which have
been offered to support a learner-centered approach to teaching, he
discusses some activities and techniques which were found to be
successful with a group of ESL students who had been categorized
as unmotivated and demoralized. Littlejohn argues that the imple-
mentation of a learner-centered approach needs to be gradual,
especially when classes are composed of students who have specific
expectations based on their prior language learning experiences.
•
salient features of the Arabic language which they feel can help ESL
instructors (particularly those who teach writing) understand the
problems which their Arabic-speaking students experience. They
argue that although contrastive analysis is no longer considered an
appropriate foundation for contemporary language instruction, an
overview of some of the contrastive linguistic and rhetorical features
of Arabic and English can help ESL professionals deal with some of
the weaknesses in writing which, based on the authors’ experiences,
Arab students typically exhibit.
• Karl Krahnke and Mary Ann Christison synthesize a large body of
current research in linguistics and second language acquisition, fo-
cusing primarily on findings from research on learning/acquisition,
conversational interaction, pragmatic, repair, error, and affective
variables. From this research and their discussion of it, they extract
four basic principles which they recommend to classroom instructors.

IN THIS ISSUE 533

 • Kyle Perkins summarizes and evaluates the major direct methods of
assessing writing ability (holistic scoring, analytical scoring, and
primary trait scoring) and the most popular indirect methods of
predicting students’ ability to write (T-unit analysis and a variety of
published standardized tests). Examining each in turn, Perkins
highlights their principle uses as well as their strengths and limita-
tions. He concludes that all have their drawbacks. As he writes, “no
test or composition scoring procedure is perfect. ”
Also in this issue:
• Reviews
• Brief Reports and Summaries
• The Forum, in which Mohsen Ghadessy reacts to Patricia Carrell’s
article, “Cohesion Is Not Coherence”; Carrell’s response follows.

Barry P. Taylor

534 TESOL QUARTERLY

 TESOL QUARTERLY, VOI. 17, No.4, December 1983

Tradition and Revolution

in ESL Teaching
ANN RAIMES
Hunter College, City University of New York

Revolutions in science, Thomas Kuhn argues, occur when the shared

set of intellectual assumptions that form the tradition of a discipline (a
paradigm) breaks down and gives way to another, causing contro-
versy and insecurity in the process. This article begins by exploring
the development of language teaching in the light of Kuhn’s theory. It
summarizes the theory, points to analogies in the field of the teaching
of writing, briefly defines our positivist tradition, and describes the
signs of confusion and controversy that mark a paradigm shift. Then
it proposes that the current emphasis on communication, far from
marking the emergence of a new paradigm, still operates very much
within the positivist tradition; the fact that scholars outside and within
our discipline are asking more questions about the conceptual and
creative function of language indicates that we are still firmly in the
middle of a paradigm shift, engaged in philosophical debate. The
article concludes by identifying a cluster of mentors who are raising
challenging issues and by discussing possible directions for the future
in research and method.

You are sitting in a room with an experimenter who shows you

playing cards quickly, one after the other. You identify each card.
Among them is a six of spades, but it is a red six of spades. Without
hesitation, you identify it as a six of spades—or perhaps as a six of
hearts. Then the experimenter shows you the same cards again, but
you see each one for a little longer time. Now when you see the red six
of spades, you hesitate and become confused. With more exposure
time, you finally identify the red six of spades as a red six of spades.
Or, you might just give up and retreat, saying something like “I’m not
even sure now what a spade looks like.”
Such an experiment (Bruner and Postman 1949) paints a picture in
miniature of a theory of scientific discovery, proposed by Thomas
Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970). This influential
book has generated discussion about the development of intellectual
disciplines, humanistic as well as scientific. In a period of “normal

535
science,” Kuhn says, the scientists, just like you in that card experiment,
work according to a clear set of conceptual categories, an established
paradigm. A paradigm can be seen to exist when “most of the
practitioners in the discipline hold a common body of beliefs and
assumptions; they agree on the problems that need to be solved, the
rules that govern research, and on the standards by which performance
is to be measured” (Hairston 1982:76). When an anomaly comes along
it is not always identified as such, and scientists try to fit it into their
established categories. But only initially. Then, as anomalies recur, the
scientists, increasingly beset by indecision, confusion, or even distress,
respond by resisting and ignoring the inconsistencies, by improvising
ways of coping with the crisis, or by addressing the problems directly.
This period between the recognition of the anomaly and the estab-
lishment of a new paradigm which accommodates the anomaly Kuhn
calls the time of the paradigm shift. After an uneasy time of transition,
a new model finally emerges; scientists either lapse into disgruntled
incomprehension and cease to be active participants in the discipline,
or they adjust their categories so that they can anticipate what was
initially anomalous. That is, they subscribe to a new paradigm which
breaks from the old. Kuhn thus does not see science as a steady
acquisition of knowledge, with a gradual progression toward an
ultimate truth. Instead, peaceful periods of “normal” science are
punctuated by intellectual revolutions which introduce a new concep-
tual view.
Such intellectual revolutions are not necessarily swift. Between 1690
and 1781, for example, when a new celestial body was observed,
scientists first of all categorized it, in accordance with the prevailing
conceptual scheme, as a star. More observations over a long period of
time led to dissatisfaction with this category. Perhaps, after all, it was a
comet? But it did not appear to fit the usual pattern of cometary orbit.
Finally, the new celestial body was identified as a planet—Uranus.
Kuhn sees this as one paradigm superseding another: “A celestial body
that had been observed off and on for almost a century was seen dif-
ferently after 1781, because, like an anomalous playing card, it could
no longer be fitted to the perceptual categories (star or comet) pro-
vided by the paradigm that had previously prevailed” (1970:115-116).
Although Kuhn based his theory on facts that emerge from the
history of scientific discovery in fields such as physics, chemistry, and
astronomy, he acknowledges borrowing his theses from other areas of
human activity: in literature, music, the arts, and political develop-
ment, historians have noted “revolutionary breaks in style, taste, and
institutional structure” (1970;208). And certainly the stages Kuhn cites
have sounded familiar to scholars outside the pure sciences and in

536 TESOL QUARTERLY

fields close to our own. In the field of the teaching of writing to native
speakers, for instance, there is much talk of that profession being in the
first stages of a paradigm shift, moving from an emphasis on the
written product to an emphasis on the writing process and thus calling
for new directions in research, particularly in rhetorical invention
(Young 1978). Researchers in this field are busy describing the tradi-
tional paradigm, documenting the features of the emerging paradigm,
identifying the scholars who are the authorities of the new tradition
(Emig 1980), and predicting the future directions of the profession
(Hairston 1982).
And what of our own field, the teaching of English to speakers of
other languages? Is it useful to examine our non-scientific discipline in
the light of Kuhn’s theory? I believe it is, for such an analogy gives us a
new vantage point from which to view the nature and development of
our discipline and to consider our roles as teachers, researchers,
administrators, writers, or publishers. The very process of thinking and
reflecting about how our work compares to other disciplines is
productive. It gives us a chance to be students of our own profession
and to do what Bruner says is essential to student learning—“to climb
on your own shoulders to be able to look down at what you’ve just
done and then to represent it to yourself” (1965:101). The analogy with
Kuhn’s theory also gives us a framework in which to examine not just
how we teach but all the other features that makeup the paradigm of a
discipline, namely “what is included in the discipline and what is
excluded from it, what is taught and not taught, what problems are
regarded as important and unimportant, and, by implication, what
research is regarded as valuable in developing the discipline”
(Young 1978:29). In short, using the analogy forces us to look at what
we know as well as what we do.
We can begin to do that by scrutinizing our textbooks, our profes-
sional literature, and our classroom practices in an attempt to explore
the same three questions that scholars in the field of the teaching of
writing have been asking:
1. Can we define a traditional paradigm?
2. Are there signs of a paradigm shift?
3. Is a new paradigm emerging?
However, the danger of asking the same questions about our discipline
is that we might then be seduced into seeing the same patterns and
finding the same affirmative answers. To avoid being trapped in a nice
neat analogy, parallel with the teaching of writing, I want to add a
fourth question:
4. If a new paradigm isn’t emerging, where are we headed?

TRADITION AND REVOLUTION 537

CAN WE DEFINE A TRADITIONAL PARADIGM?
In Kuhn’s terms, the recognition of a traditional paradigm implies
the existence of theoretical presuppositions on which the discipline’s
activity is based. It also implies that there will be a revolution against
tradition. And it is this idea of revolution that has caught the attention
of some theorists in our field, though they do not always see it as
happening in the same way at the same time or even agree that it
happens at all. A past President of TESOL, in referring to Kuhn and
cyclical theories, sees no fewer than four revolutions this century, with
a new paradigm emerging every twenty-five years (H. D. Brown
1975). We have, he posits, gone from the direct method to the gram-
mar-translation method to the audiolingual method, and now, “in the
last quarter of the century we are still searching for the ultimate meth-
od, though we understand more clearly that there will be no such pana-
cea in teaching a behavior as complex as a second language” (H. D.
Brown 1980:243). But others have counted differently, and we hear
about “two major revolutions in methodology during this century,” one
of which was the “post-World War II break from the traditional, or
grammar-translation, method,” while the other was the “proliferation
of new affectively-based methods or approaches” (Kunz 1980:170).
The most recent count is down to no revolutions at all: even though
teachers are confronted by a bewildering array of methodologies, they
are urged not to conclude that our field “has moved away from a
generally accepted body of principles as a basis for the organization of
language teaching,” nor to see current practices as “random or radical
departures from the mainstream of applied, linguistic thought and
practice” since the present innovations are but “variations on familiar
themes” (J. Richards and Rodgers 1982:153-154).
The problem with these counts is that the scholars are looking only at
classroom methodology and not at the underlying intellectual assump-
tions which generate methods. Most of us would agree, though, on the
familiar themes that have characterized classroom instruction in the
past: patterns/drills/rules/accuracy/sequence, all of which reflect
assumptions in disciplines related to our own. The basic and still
frequently practiced classroom technique of “imitation and memoriza-
tion of basic conversational sentences” (Lado 1964:6) stems mostly
from psychology and linguistics. From psychology comes Skinner’s
behaviorist stimulus-response theory that emphasized positive rein-
forcement of correct responses to form habits. From linguistics, from
Bloomfield, Sapir, and Fries, comes the view of language as an
observable set of structures. And it is not only classroom instruction
that borrows from psychology and linguistics. Our research, too, takes
its emphasis on quantifiable data from these two fields; research
studies in our field measure, count, and compare. The prevailing

538 TESOL QUARTERLY

assumptions of our discipline can thus be summed up as rooted firmly
in the positivist tradition, which prizes the empirical, the identifiable,
the countable, and the verifiable.
When guided by such a positivistic “governing gaze” (Emig 1982:65),
a profession like ours, in its desire to be scientific and objective,
excludes everything except observable phenomena. So we have em-
phasized language as structure and form, we have divided language up
into discrete units, we have stressed assembling and not creating. It is
important to note, too, what we have “excluded . . . not taught . . . and
regarded as unimportant” (Young 1978:290). We have paid little atten-
tion to real communication and to language as making meaning.
Perhaps some of you are by now muttering, “Yes, we know all that.
That’s all old hat. Nobody subscribes to that stuff any more. Look at all
the communicating, all the sharing of meaning that goes on in our
classes. ” And you are right—up to a point. The authorities who used to
dominate our literature and our classrooms—Fries and Lado and their
followers—simply are not our mentors any more. There have indeed
been changes. Contrary to what many in our profession would believe,
however, I hold that those changes, while evident, have not yet been
radical. This leads us to our next question.

ARE THERE SIGNS OF A PARADIGM SHIFT?

We have been living with dissonance in our profession for many
years. Red sixes of spades keep appearing. Many of us will remember
being interested some twenty years ago in Chomsky’s refutation (1959)
of Skinner’s view of language. We were not, however, immediately
rattled from the security of our fast-paced, finger-snapping oral-aural
drills. Then, in 1966, Hymes raised the issue of real language use, of the
importance of context and of the socio-cultural factors that influence
any linguistic act. He redefined Chomsky’s notion of competence,
coining a phrase that has since become a new ESL watchword:
communicative competence. Suddenly rules of grammar were jostled
by rules of use. In that same year a paper on “How Not to Interfere
with Language Learning” was published, which maintained that “lan-
guage is learned a whole act at a time rather than learned as an assem-
blage of constituent skills” (Newmark 1966/1979:163). Methodologies
started competing with each other for the one way of dealing with all
of these anomalies, methodologies as different from each other as the
Silent Way, Community Language Learning, and Suggestopedia. With
evangelistic zeal, teachers turned to these, found new mentors in the
originators, and saw themselves as in the forefront of a revolution. At
the same time, some scholars turned their attention to wider issues than
methodology: they examined how we view and divide up language,

TRADITION AND REVOLUTION 539

developing new syllabuses to replace the grammatical structure
syllabus. The terms notional and functional worked their way insistent-
ly into our literature.
Outside the classroom things began to move faster in the mid-1970s.
Researchers turned their attention to second language acquisition,
seeking new theories to explain the nature of language and language
learning. The topic index of the TESOL Quarterly shows us how the
field is changing. The index for 1967-76 (ten years) lists 29 articles on
second language learning. For 1979-80 (two years) it lists 24 articles on
what is re-named second language acquisition—a four-fold growth.
Insights from the study of first language acquisition (R. Brown 1973,
Bloom 1978) now inform our researchers’ literal re-search for new
theories. The work of one of the researchers, Stephen Krashen, has
done a great deal to attempt to explain the anomalies that are troubling
us. His Input Hypothesis (1981) has emphasized language acquisition
through real communication and has provided us with a theoretical
basis for questioning instructional techniques that focus on patterns,
drills, and rules. In addition, the willingness of Krashen to use self-
report (1981: 122-124, 133-136) and of other researchers to use diaries,
introspective journals, and first-hand accounts in interviews to record
the language learning process (F. Schumann and J. Schumann 1977,
Bailey 1980, F. Schumann 1980, Stevick 1982) has shown us the value of
the case study and of ethnographic research as an alternative to the
empirical studies that dominate in the positivist tradition.
Much of the dissonance and much of the activity in methods,
curriculum, and research are revealed in the numbers of new questions
that occupy us. We find ourselves now beset by questions that we
never even used to ask because the answers were once so clear:
• Which grammar do we teach? Traditional, transformational, sector
analysis, case grammar, none . . .?
• Which syllabus do we use? Structural, situational, notional, func-
tional, student-initiated, none . . .?
• What part of the student do we address? The affective or the
cognitive domain; the right or left hemisphere of the brain; the
Parent, Child, or Adult (Stevick 1976); or the whole person . . .?
We also question our own role as we ask:
• What are we? Guide, model, counselor, judge, carer and sharer,
facilitator, or, dare we say it, teacher?
All of these questions lead us further away from the “common body
of assumptions” of our tradition. Now controversy and indecision
abound in our literature and in our classrooms. And no one is immune,
not even well-known and influential figures in the language teaching

540 TESOL QUARTERLY

field. Earl Stevick, for instance, describes deciding to leave “Audiolin-
guia for the new land of Cognitia when something caused [him] to
change [his] mind and leave Cognitia, not to return to Audiolinguia but
to explore Terra Incognita” (1976:104). That Terra Incognita is the
place of the paradigm shift, now a heavily populated land, thronging
with ESL teachers.
Some step into the new unknown territory decisively. Others, more
cautious, hold on to traditions as long as possible. Kuhn points out that
when scientists are first confronted by anomaly “they will devise ad
hoc modifications of their theory in order to eliminate any apparent
conflict” (1970:78). Such ad hoc modifications are abundant in our
field, providing evidence of a tentative questioning of tradition and yet
reflecting a basic distrust and fear of abandoning it completely. The
following are some of the solutions that we can see practitioners of our
discipline using.
One ad hoc solution is to include the new as a kind of overlay on the
old. Textbooks that still divide and sequence the language into gram-
matical structures deal with the anomaly of “What about real language
use?” by turning to functions. They add to the table of contents the
functions covered in each chapter and include a few charts or exercises
in the body of the text. A chapter devoted to the grammatical form of
the imperative, of the traditional give me that book variety, now
includes one short exercise where the students, with no change of
context or of audience, are also instructed to use “May I have that
book?” and “Excuse me, would you mind handing me that book?”
(Lanzano and Bodman 1981:63).
Some practitioners do not go that far. They just change labels. They
incorporate the terminology but not the concepts of the new theories.
The 1980 second edition of a book originally published in 1973 retains
20 of the original lessons. Each chapter head, however, now includes a
function as well as a grammatical structure as the focus of the chapter:
“How many; need and want” is joined by “Expressing need and
offering help.” But the material is unchanged and students are still
instructed to say things like “Does the clerk yell? Yes, he does. He
yells” (Hines 1980:77-79). Another textbook, a composition book,
trying to reflect the current focus on process in composition, uses a
label of process prominently in its title yet states in its preface that one
of its four assumptions is that “American university writing is linear
and straightforward in structure” (Reid 1982:ix). The assumption is
sound, but it is not an assumption about process. It is about product.
And the pedagogy of the text is matched to this assumption.
Yet another ad hoc solution is to stick firmly to the old tradition but
to add a component that includes new theory and incorporates it into
old practice so that it becomes so disguised as to be unrecognizable as

TRADITION AND REVOLUTION 541

new. Our literature urges us in the name of “communication” to
increase the opportunities for interaction in the classroom by asking
students to work in pairs or in small groups. In one lesson, the students
are given cards. One card says on it:
You are in London on a business trip and you have Saturday free.
You want to know if the British Museum is open and how much the
entrance fee is.
Another student has a card which says:
The British Museum is open Monday through Saturday, 9:00 a.m. to
5:00 p.m.
There is no entrance fee (Paulston 1974:360).
The students have to pretend to call each other up and ask for
information using the Could you please tell me . . .? questioning form.
Cited in a theoretical article as a “communicative act,” such a technique
as this one makes us question the way communicative competence is
being viewed. For this technique seems to be only a slight modification
of techniques anchored firmly in the positivist tradition, with language
viewed as a set of patterns. The students do little more than what they
do in a question and answer pattern drill: they address a question they
have not made up to a designated person who has to be told the answer
and then they wait for an answer that makes no difference to them
whatsoever.
These ad hoc solutions to problems in our discipline provide
effective ways for teachers, theorists, and textbook-writers to cope
with the anomalies around them, but they cannot really hide the
conflicts or dispatch the anomalies that confront us as a profession.
The scene before us in our discipline is still one of competing
syllabuses, divergent methodologies, contradictory views of our pro-
fession, various attempts to deal with change, and innovative theories
of second language acquisition, with all of us teachers trying to find
our way in Terra Incognita. Kuhn describes the symptoms of the “pre-
paradigmatic stage” of a revolution in a discipline as these: “the
proliferation of competing articulations, the willingness to try anything,
the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to
debate over fundamentals” (1970:91). That’s a paradigm shift and that
certainly sounds like us.

IS A NEW PARADIGM EMERGING?

I have been able to point to some rather clear parallels between
Kuhn’s theory and our own discipline for the first two questions I
posed. I identified a traditional paradigm and saw signs of activity that
fit the picture of the paradigm shift. It would not be difficult now to

542 TESOL QUARTERLY

continue the affirmative responses to our questions and to document
from our literature ample evidence for the existence of an emerging
paradigm.
We have only to skim through articles in professional journals,
conference presentations, accounts of research and of classroom
activities, and new textbooks, and they would all provide abundant
evidence for a set of beliefs about language with communication as the
cornerstone. From various sources, we could quite easily compile a
description of an emerging paradigm as one which:
sees language as communication
emphasizes real language use, as opposed to usage (Widdowson
1978)
recommends a student-centered classroom
encourages language acquisition
develops humanistic, interpersonal approaches
considers the nature of the learner, the learning process, and the
learning environment.
The old familiar themes of patterns/drills/rules/accuracy/sequence
are being replaced by a new set: communication/functions/use/real-
ity/affective approaches.
This compilation of features certainly appears revolutionary next to
our traditional paradigm. There is no doubt that we are trying to
incorporate into our work much that is being discovered about
language acquisition and the value of foreigner talk outside the
classroom and teacher talk and interlanguage talk inside the classroom
in order to provide comprehensible input for the language learner
(Krashen 1981:137). Yet however much we learn about the value of
interactive, communicative activities, however much we try to change
our approach, it is interesting to note how tradition can still claim us in
subtle ways.
Examining a few instances of something as simple as one common
type of classroom activity— the asking of questions—helps us realize
how singularly unrevolutionary we in fact can be. It has been found,
for example, that in informal conversation between a native and a
non-native speaker, that is, in a real communicative situation, informa-
tion questions are asked (Where do you live?) and display questions
(What’s the capital of France?) are “virtually unknown” (Long and
Sato 1983). In ESL instruction, however, Long and Sato have found
that display questions still predominate and only 14% of the questions
we teachers ask are information questions. From data collected from
the classes of experienced, informed, and eclectic teachers, it was
found that “contrary to the recommendations of many writers on
second language teaching methodology, communicative use of the

TRADITION AND REVOLUTION 543

target language makes up only a minor part of typical classroom
activities,” The researchers concluded that “ ‘Is the clock on the wall?’
and ‘Are you a student?’ are still the staple diet, at least for beginners”
(Long and Sato 1983).
Jack Richards, too, finds from analyses of interviews, novels and
plays, and classroom textbooks that, despite the evidence provided by
an examination of real discourse, yes/no questions are regularly
treated in the classroom as request for information/answer and seldom
as request/grant (1977). So, to the question Are these apples fresh?,
students are routinely taught to reply Yes, they are rather than I just
bought them, Help yourself (1980:421).
Even when a textbook tries hard to pay more attention to communi-
cative aims by asking students to say “Do you have any quarters?”
“No, only nickels” (Lanzano and Bodman 1981:19), that exercise is still
just language practice and not real discourse. The students get no sense
of why one speaker might want a quarter, no inkling of why the
respondent feels inclined to offer nickels as a substitute. There is no
context and no purpose. Interpersonal, yes, but the focus is still
primarily—and traditionally—on form and discrete units of language.
If no one needs or even pretends to need a quarter, what are these
interacting persons really communicating to each other? What we have
here is, of course, the paradox of a “communicative drill,” which surely
has more to do with traditional drill than with “contextually rich,
meaningful communication” (Taylor 1982:33).
So, even though we can find evidence of an increase of communica-
tive activities in the classroom and of a trend toward more real
language use, we have to ask where the many traditional features are
coming from. They could be just some practitioners’ interim ad hoc
solutions to the anomalies in our discipline. Or their very existence,
frequent and recurrent as it is, might indicate that the changes in our
profession have been more in the design and procedure of our
language teaching than in our underlying philosophical approach (J.
Richards and Rodgers 1982). To discuss an emerging paradigm in the
light of these issues, I now need to move from a description of
phenomena in our field to speculation about the causes and contexts of
those phenomena and about future directions.
I propose that there are two reasons why it is not appropriate for us
to regard our current emphasis on communication as an emerging
paradigm for our discipline. First, it is occurring in a climate still too
heavily influenced by our positivist tradition for the result to be truly
revolutionary. In language teaching that has people talking to each
other about quarters and nickels or about the hours of the British
Museum for no identifiable purpose other than to practice a sentence
pattern or a function, what is being emphasized is still the message

544 TESOL QUARTERLY

itself (language), as it was in the traditional paradigm. Students can be
talking to each other in a language class and the focus can still be on the
form of the language itself and not on the context of reality, the
speaker, or the audience. Fanselow distinguishes between categories
of language teaching content in the classroom: the content can be
classified as “language” itself (with the purpose of practicing grammar,
structure, and pronunciation), “procedure” (classroom administration),
“life” (personal information or discussion of issues), or “subject matter”
(skills and school subjects) (1977:24-25). To fit a new emphasis on
communicative procedures into an approach which traditionally views
language as the content of the language class is to push communication
mm-e into line with drill and usage than with real life language use
(Widdowson 1978). The current emphasis on communication has, I
believe, been absorbed neatly into our positivist traditional framework.
Far from superseding tradition, it has been assimilated into it. It opens
up a variety of classroom procedures, such as interactive drills, while
for the most part leaving undisturbed the underlying approach to
language and language teaching. Our new interests are reflected in the
surface features of our teaching and not in the deep structure of our
theoretical underpinnings.
Second, the view of language as a tool for communication still lacks
the dimension of language that was missing from the traditional
paradigm—the view of language as it is related to thought and to the
mind of the language user. Whether the language used is a first or a
second language, a person who uses a language construes the represen-
tations of meaning and is creative in that language. Yet, traditionally in
second language teaching we have focused on form and have paid
little attention to meaning, function, and purpose. With our new
emphasis on communication, we are beginning to stress function along
with form. But without a simultaneous emphasis on purpose, on the
mind and intention of the new language user, language teaching
continues to foster learning rather than acquisition, drills rather than
discourse, and accuracy rather than fluency.
All this doubt about whether Communicatia can really be the land of
our new paradigm encourages us to look at alternatives and so leads us
straight into our fourth question.

IF A NEW PARADIGM ISN’T EMERGING, WHERE ARE WE HEADED?

Our readiness to espouse communication as a solution might be
caused by a desire to establish certainty in our profession again. With
our traditional paradigm in place, we relied on an established system
of beliefs and we felt secure. We had our answers. Now, with
confusion all around, we want to find new answers. Rather like

TRADITION AND REVOLUTION 545

children on a long car journey, we keep wanting to know “are we there
yet?” This desire to arrive somewhere drives us naturally to try to find
solutions to problems. But we will never be able to make a statement
like It isn’t a star and it isn’t a cornet, so it must be a planet. Nothing so
neat, absolute, and supportable can complete the sentence: Language
isn’t a set of patterns and habits, so it must be . . . Looking for simple
answers in a discipline like ours, concerned as it is with the complexi-
ties of language and mind, is too reductive.
There are, however, some signs that, in spite of the current emphasis
on “language as communication,” we are not settling for an easy
answer and a reductive view of language. We are continuing to ask
new questions, just like Gertrude Stein, who on her deathbed asked
“What is the answer?” and, when none came, asked “In that case, what
is the question?” (Toklas 1963:173). Both outside and inside our own
field, questions are beginning to address the range of complexity of
language by linking language with thought. If we turn again to the field
of the teaching of writing, we see that scholars there are beginning to
look at meaning as well as at form and function. They are asking more
and more questions about the heuristic function of language, that
function whereby language is used to discover and explore ideas, and
not just to communicate them. They are interested in language as a tool
to find out anew what we know and what we think. They emphasize,
above all, the creative power of language to inform the user of
language and not just the audience:
Language is itself the great heuristic: words come into being as verbal
generalizations . . . Clusters of words turn into syntax; it is the discursive
nature of language, its tendency to “run along’’—and that’s what discourse
means—language’s tendency to be syntactical brings thought along with it
(Berthoff 1981:38).
Teachers of writing are, in turn, consulting authorities outside their
field who are also addressing issues that link thought and language
philosophically. The acknowledged mentors of many in the field of the
teaching of writing are Susanne Langer, Michael Polanyi, I. A. Richards,
and Lev Vygotsky. Note the titles of their influential works, respec-
tively: Mind: An Essay in Human Feeling (1967, 1972); P e r s o n a l
Knowledge (1958); The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1965); and T h o u g h t
a n d L a n g u a g e ( 1 9 6 2 ) . Mind, feeling, knowledge, philosophy, a n d
thought . . . These are words that suggest that the exploration of
language is beginning to move away from positivist approaches and to
involve more than communication.
Within our field of second language learning there are signs that we,
too, are beginning to look beyond formal accuracy and beyond
isolated communicative exchanges. In the classroom, content other

546 TESOL QUARTERLY

than just language is a feature of English for Specific Purposes instruc-
tion, which teaches language and subject matter together. In immersion
programs, particularly those in Canada, children learn the new lan-
guage primarily through instruction in the content of the school subject
matter (Swain 1981). The students thus become real language users
while they are still language learners. Curran’s (1976) Counseling-
Learning/Community Language Learning also emphasizes real dis-
course, learner-initiated and with no limits imposed by a teacher.
Learners begin forming and expressing ideas and engaging in real
conversation in the very first classes.
These pedagogical directions run parallel to some of the theoretical
work in our discipline. More questions are now being raised about the
relationship of language to the user’s thoughts, feelings, ideas, and
knowledge—in short, to the language user’s mind. Halliday, for one,
distinguishes two other functions apart from the interpersonal function
of language: a textual function, “whereby language has to provide for
making links with itself,” and an ideational function, whereby “lan-
guage serves for the expression of ‘content,’ that is, of the speaker’s
experience of the real world, including the inner world of his own
consciousness” (1970: 143). Widdowson, on the other hand, includes the
textual within the interpersonal function and makes a case for “two
principal functions of language: the conceptual and the communica-
tive” (1980:235), the latter being dependent upon the former. He
describes language as working in two ways:
On the one hand it provides for conceptual activity whereby clear and
processible propositions are formulated in the mind. On the other hand, it
provides the means whereby such propositions can be conveyed in the
most effective manner for particular communicative purposes. These two
functions, potentially in conflict, have to be reconciled by negotiation on
every occasion of social use. This negotiation is realized in discourse
(1980:238).
He urges us not to neglect the conceptual function of language for it
“provides the individual with a means of establishing a relationship
with his environment, of conceptualizing, and so, in some degree,
controlling reality” (1980:235). Widdowson is worried about excessive
attention being paid to the communicative function of language while
we neglect “language used for thinking, formulating concepts, [and]
fashioning propositions” (1980:235). For him, creativity, that “human
capacity for making sense,” is a “crucial concept in language learning”
(1982:211-212). That language users adjust their speech for self-
presentational reasons is stressed by Beebe and Giles (in press), who
see that a function of language other than conveying content is the
presentation of self for the purpose of maintaining a positive social

TRADITION AND REVOLUTION 547

identity. Frank Smith, too, links language and self. He regrets the
tendency, “especially widespread in education, to regard language
primarily as communication, as a vehicle for transmitting information
from one person to another” (1982:66). He urges us to pay more
attention to “the arena of the imagination” for there we have “a
freedom to hypothesize, to test and to explore consequences that is
rarely available to us in the world outside” (1982:34).
An intensive exploration of this arena of the imagination is being
made in our field, particularly by scholars who are interested in the
process of reading or writing. Studies by Hosenfeld (1976, 1977), Jones
(in press), Zamel (1982, 1983), Carrell (1982), and Jones and Tetroe
(1983) focus on how writers or readers interact with the text and with
each other to create meaning and how that interaction is itself creative.
The more we look at language in terms of concepts, thought,
creativity, and imagination, the more questions we will continue to
raise. And our questions will be philosophical questions rather than
questions with quantifiable answers.
In research, for example, it would not be surprising if more
questions were raised about Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, which argues
that theoretically “one can acquire competence in a second language or
a first language without ever producing it” (1981:107-108). How much,
we might ask, of what goes on in our mind, in our own negotiation with
meaning, contributes to acquisition? How much of a learner’s under-
standing and comprehension comes from interaction with others—a
speaker or a piece of writing—and how much from the learner’s own
active processes of forming propositions which then might or might
not be translated into and adapted for a communicative act? Studies
on the reading and writing process are beginning to look at how
language users generate and negotiate meaning. Such studies will
probably multiply and eventually be joined by studies of how learners
acquire and generate concepts as well as morphemes and syntactic
structures. We will focus attention not on the discrete features of the
language the learners produce (their isolated product) but on how,
why, when, and where they produce it (their process in context). The
concept of research will also broaden to include contemplative first-
hand accounts from teachers and students of what actually goes on
when someone learns another language. We are all surrounded by
research data, not necessarily data that can be counted and fed into the
computer, but valuable data nevertheless. All teachers can be re-
searchers when research includes observing and making connections
with our knowledge and experience.
In the classroom, teachers will ask questions about content and will
seek out materials and methods that will allow their students the time,

548 TESOL QUARTERLY

space, and opportunity to generate and explore ideas by means of
language. That could mean that learners will produce real instead of
simulated discourse. It could also mean that with more questions being
raised about writing as an authentic and valuable mode of learning, we
might see writing become an integral part of every ESL program and
of every class. With more questions about the use of language to
discover and develop concepts, we will begin to pay as much attention
to subject matter and to the interpretation of content as to form,
function, and accuracy. Our students have been telling us for many
years, “What we need is vocabulary.” They are probably right. They
certainly do need vocabulary to engage with content, to turn clusters
of words into syntax, and to use those words and that syntax to make
sense of what is around them.
Finally, all the questions we ask about language, thought, and
meaning could have the effect that in our professional literature we
will read as much about creativity and imagination as about informa-
tion gaps, T-unit analysis, and the Spearman rank correlation coeffi-
cient.
All of these questions that we face can only mean that we are still
very far from “a common body of beliefs and assumptions” that makes
up a new paradigm. We are, rather, still very firmly in the middle of a
paradigm shift. We have a long way to go before we will be able to
establish a canon of beliefs about language and language learning that
forms a common core of our discipline and turns its back on the
positivist tradition. In the meantime, Terra Incognita will remain our
home. Let us look again at how Kuhn described the features of that
land of the paradigm shift: “the proliferation of competing articula-
tions, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discon-
tent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals”
(1970:91). That sounds like fertile ground for language teachers. What
could be better for a humanistic discipline than debate and philoso-
phy? We can all expect to continue to confront more and more red
sixes of spades.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the 17th Annual TESOL
Convention in Toronto, March 15-20, 1983. The author is grateful to Leslie Beebe, Ann
Berthoff, Vivian Zamel, the TESOL Quarterly editor, Barry P. Taylor, and an
anonymous TESOL Quarterly reviewer for their valuable suggestions on earlier drafts.

TRADITION AND REVOLUTION 549

THE AUTHOR
Ann Raimes is Coordinator of the Developmental English Program at Hunter College,
the City University of New York. She is a frequent presenter at professional
conferences, has published several articles on the teaching of writing, and is the author
of Focus on Composition and Techniques in Teaching Writing (Oxford University
Press), Currently she is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the TESOL
Quarterly.

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 TESOL QUARTERLY, VoI. 17, No.4, December 1983

Schema Theory and ESL Reading

Pedagogy
PATRICIA L. CARRELL
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

JOAN C. EISTERHOLD
Northwestern University

This article discusses the important role of background knowledge in

a psycholinguistic model of EFL/ESL reading and demonstrates the
relevance of schema-theoretic views of reading to the teaching of
reading to EFL/ESL students. According to schema theory, reading
comprehension is an interactive process between the text and the
reader’s prior background knowledge (Adams and Collins 1979, Rumel-
hart 1980). Reading comprehension involves one’s knowledge of the
world, which may be culturally based and culturally biased. Classroom
implications of the schema-theoretic view of reading for EFL/ESL
reading pedagogy are discussed, with techniques suggested for
bringing about reader-centered EFL/ESL reading.

Every act of comprehension involves one’s

knowledge O f the world as well.
(Anderson, Reynolds, Schallert, and Goetz 1977:369)

INTRODUCTION
The idea expressed by the above quote is certainly not new, but it is
one worth reminding ourselves of when we consider comprehension in
a second or foreign language, and specifically reading comprehension
in EFL/ESL. If, as Immanuel Kant claimed as long ago as 1781, new
information, new concepts, new ideas can have meaning only when
they can be related to something the individual already knows (Kant
1781/1963), this applies as much to second language comprehension as
it does to comprehension in one’s native language. Yet, traditionally in
the study of second language comprehension (as much as, if not more
so than, in the study of first language comprehension), the emphasis
has been almost exclusively on the language to be comprehended and
not on the comprehended (listener or reader). In this perspective, each
word, each well-formed sentence, and every well-formed text passage

553
is said to “have” a meaning. Meaning is often conceived to be “in” the
utterance or text, to have a separate, independent existence from both
the speaker or writer and the listener or reader. Also in this view,
failures to comprehend a non-defective communication are always
attributed to language-specific deficits—perhaps a word was not in the
reader’s vocabulary, a rule of grammar was misapplied, an anaphoric
cohesive tie was improperly coordinated, and so on.
Recent empirical research in the field which has come to be known
as schema theory has demonstrated the truth of Kant’s original
observation and of the opening quote from Anderson et al. Schema
theory research has shown the importance of background knowledge
within a psycholinguistic model of reading. The purpose of this article
is twofold. Our first goal is to give a brief overview of schema theory
as part of a reader-centered, psycholinguistic processing model of
EFL/ESL reading. This goal is addressed in the first part of this article,
in which we discuss how EFL/ESL reading comprehension involves
background knowledge which goes far beyond linguistic knowledge.
Our second purpose is to explore the relationship of culture-specific
background knowledge and EFL/ESL reading methodology and is
taken up in the second part of the article, where we review this
relationship as it has been discussed in the extant methodology
literature. We illustrate this discussion of the culturally based and
culturally biased nature of background knowledge with sample reading
passages which have actually caused comprehension problems for
EFL/ESL students. Finally, we suggest a variety of techniques and
classroom activities for accommodating this phenomenon in a reader-
centered EFL/ESL reading program.

THE PSYCHOLINGUISTIC MODEL OF READING

During the past decade, EFL/ESL reading theory has come under
the influence of psycholinguistics and Goodman’s (1967, 1971, 1973a)
psycholinguistic model of reading (see also Smith 1971). Goodman has
described reading as a “psycholinguistic guessing game” (1967) in
which the “reader reconstructs, as best as he can, a message which has
been encoded by a writer as a graphic display” (1971:135). Goodman
views this act of the construction of meaning as being an ongoing,
cyclical process of sampling from the input text, predicting, testing
and confirming or revising those predictions, and sampling further. In
this model, the reader need not (and the efficient reader does not) use
all of the textual cues. The better the reader is able to make correct
predictions, the less confirming via the text is necessary, that is, the less
visual perceptual information the reader requires:

554 TESOL QUARTERLY

 . . . the reader does not use all the information available to him. Reading is a
process in which the reader picks and chooses from the available information
only enough to select and predict a language structure which is decodable.
It is not in any sense a precise perceptual process (Goodman 1973b:164).
These views are by now generally well known and widely accepted in
our field.
Coady (1979) has elaborated on this basic psycholinguistic model
and has suggested a model in which the EFL/ESL reader’s background
knowledge interacts with conceptual abilities and process strategies,
more or less successfully, to produce comprehension (see Figure 1).

By conceptual ability, Coady means general intellectual capacity. By

processing strategies, Coady means various subcomponents of reading
ability, including many which are also more general language process-
ing skills which also apply to oral language (e. g., grapheme-morpho-
phoneme correspondences, syllable-morpheme information, syntactic
information [deep and surf ace], lexical meaning, and contextual
meaning). Coady says little more about the role of b a c k g r o u n d
knowledge other than to observe that
background knowledge becomes an important variable when we notice, as
many have, that students with a Western background of some kind learn
English faster, on the average, than those without such a background
(Coady 1979:7).
Coady also suggests that background knowledge may be able to
compensate for certain syntactic deficiencies:
The subject of reading materials should be of high interest and relate well to
the background of the reader, since strong semantic input can help
compensate when syntactic control is weak. The interest and background
knowledge will enable the student to comprehend at a reasonable rate and

SCHEMA THEORY AND READING 555

 keep him involved in the material in spite of its syntactic difficulty (Coady
1979:12).
It is this third factor, background knowledge, that has been the most
neglected in EFL/ESL reading. Even though the psycholinguistic
model of reading is seen as an interaction of factors, it has generally
failed to give sufficient emphasis to the role of background knowledge.
Recent research indicates that what the reader brings to the reading
task is more pervasive and more powerful than the general psycho-
linguistic model suggests:
More information is contributed by the reader than by the print on the
page. That is, readers understand what they read because they are able to
take the stimulus beyond its graphic representation and assign it membership
to an appropriate group of concepts already stored in their memories . . .
The reader brings to the task a formidable amount of information and
ideas, attitudes and beliefs. This knowledge, coupled with the ability to
make linguistic predictions, determines the expectations the reader will
develop as he reads. Skill in reading depends on the efficient interaction
between linguistic knowledge and knowledge of the world (Clarke and
Silberstein 1977:136-137).

THE SCHEMA THEORY MODEL

The role of background knowledge in language comprehension has
been formalized as schema theory (Bartlett 1932, Rumelhart and
Ortony 1977, Rumelhart 1980), which has as one of its fundamental
tenets that text, any text, either spoken or written, does not by itself
carry meaning. Rather, according to schema theory, a text only
provides directions for listeners or readers as to how they should
retrieve or construct meaning from their own, previously acquired
knowledge. This previously acquired knowledge is called the reader’s
background knowledge, and the previously acquired knowledge struc-
tures are called schemata (Bartlett 1932, Adams and Collins 1979,
Rumelhart 1980).1 According to schema theory, comprehending a text
is an interactive process between the reader’s background knowledge
and the text. Efficient comprehension requires the ability to relate the
1 Other closely related concepts, which are technically distinct from schemata but which may be
thought of as part of the same general, cognitive approach to text processing, are scripts, plans,
and goals (Schank and Abelson 1977), frames (Minsky 1975, Fillmore 1976, Tannen 1979),
expectations (Tannen 1978), and event chains (Warren, Nicholas, and Trabasso 1979). All of
these terms emanate from basic research at the intersection of artificial intelligence, cognitive
psychology, and linguistics in the new discipline called cognitive science. These terms are not
identical or even interchangeable; however, they may all be broadly characterized as part of a
schema-theoretical orientation to text processing.
Carrell (1983a) gives an extensive overview of schema theory and the relevant theoretical
literature as well as the empirical research in first language processing (children and adults) and
second language processing (adults).

556 TESOL QUARTERLY

textual material to one’s own knowledge. Comprehending words,
sentences, and entire texts involves more than just relying on one’s
linguistic knowledge. As the opening quote from Anderson et al. points
out, “every act of comprehension involves one’s knowledge of the
world as well” (Anderson et al. 1977:369).
According to schema theory, the process of interpretation is guided
by the principle that every input is mapped against some existing
schema and that all aspects of that schema must be compatible with
the input information. This principle results in two basic modes of
information processing, called bottom-up and top-down processing.
Bottom-up processing is evoked by the incoming data; the features of
the data enter the system through the best fitting, bottom-level sche-
mata. Schemata are hierarchically organized, from most general at the
top to most specific at the bottom. As these bottom-level schemata
converge into higher level, more general schemata, these too become
activated. Bottom-up processing is, therefore, called data-driven. Top-
down processing, on the other hand, occurs as the system makes
general predictions based on higher level, general schemata and then
searches the input for information to fit into these partially satisfied,
higher order schemata. Top-down processing is, therefore, called
conceptually-driven.
An important aspect of top-down and bottom-up processing is that
both should be occurring at all levels simultaneously (Rumelhart 1980).
The data that are needed to instantiate, or fill out, the schemata
become available through bottom-up processing; top-down processing
facilitates their assimilation if they are anticipated by or consistent with
the listener/reader’s conceptual expectations. Bottom-up processing
ensures that the listeners/readers will be sensitive to information that is
novel or that does not fit their ongoing hypotheses about the content or
structure of the text; top-down processing helps the listeners/readers
to resolve ambiguities or to select between alternative possible interpre-
tations of the incoming data.
To illustrate the effects of background knowledge, schematic inter-
pretation, and the simultaneity of top-down and bottom-up processing,
consider the following mini-text (originally from Collins and Quillian
1972; discussed in Rumelhart 1977:267):
The policeman held up his hand and stopped the car.
In the process of trying to understand this sentence, we try to relate it
to something familiar, some schema which will account for the event
described. There are many schemata possible, but perhaps the most
likely is the one involving a traffic cop who is signaling to a driver of a
car to stop. Notice that when we interpret this mini-text against that
schema, a number of related concepts come to the fore which are not

SCHEMA THEORY AND READING 557

literally mentioned in the text. In particular, we imagine that the car
has a driver and that the policeman got the car to stop through
signaling to the driver, who then put on the brakes of the car, which, in
turn, caused the car to stop. The proximal cause of the car’s stopping is,
in this interpretation, the operation of the car’s brakes. Further, the
significance of the policeman’s holding up his hand is that of a signal to
the driver to stop. This fact is neither stated in the sentence nor is it
even in the direct visual perception of such a situation, but is rather a
fact in our prior cultural knowledge about the way traffic police are
known to communicate with automobile drivers. Notice how the
interpretation of the text would change if the policeman were known
to be Superman and the car were known to be without a driver. A
completely different schema would be required to understand the text.
Notice how the relationship of the policeman’s holding up his hand and
the car’s stopping takes on an entirely different interpretation when the
text is interpreted against the Superman schema. Now, holding up the
hand is not interpreted as a signal at all, but rather the direct physical
mechanism for stopping the car. In this interpretation, the hand
actually comes into physical contact with the car and is the proximal
physical cause of the car’s halting. The brakes of the car do not come
into play in this schema.
Notice how sets of inferential reading comprehension questions
would receive diametrically opposed answers depending upon which
of the two schemata was activated in the mind of the reader:

Mary heard the ice cream man coming down the street. She remembered
her birthday money and rushed into the house . . . (1977:265)
Upon reading just these few lines, most readers are able to construct a
rather complete interpretation of the text. Presumably, Mary is a little
girl who heard the ice cream man coming and wanted to buy some ice
cream from this ice cream man. Buying ice cream costs money, so she
had to think quickly of a source of funds. She remembered some
money which she had been given for her birthday and which,
presumably, was in the house. So she hurried into the house to try to

558 TESOL QUARTERLY

get the money before the ice cream man arrived. Of course, the text
does not say all of this; we readers are inferring a lot of this in giving
the text an interpretation. Other interpretations are also possible. Yet,
most readers will probably give this text an interpretation quite similar
to the one suggested here, and most readers will retain this interpre-
tation unless some contradictory information is encountered. Notice
what happens if the reader next encounters the phrase:
. . . and locked the door.2
The reader is unable to fit this new piece of textual input information
into the developing interpretation. The reader is forced to revise the
interpretation in such a way as to make this new information compatible
with the previous information—to make the whole text cohere. If there
were no such thing as schemata guiding the developing interpretation
in a top-down processing mode, causing the reader to make conceptual
predictions about the meaning of the text, then why would encounter-
ing the added phrase cause the reaction it does in the reader? What has
happened, we claim, is that as long as the incoming information being
processed through bottom-up processing and the conceptual predic-
tions being made through top-down processing are compatible, we
have a satisfactory interpretation of the text. When we encounter a
mismatch between the top-down predictions and the bottom-up
information, we are forced to revise the interpretation in such a way as
to make the two compatible once again. In this example, we must
revise our interpretation to accommodate the information about
Mary’s locking the door. Perhaps we infer that for some reason Mary is
afraid that the ice cream man might steal her birthday money and that
she locks the door to protect it and herself. We believe these two
examples vividly demonstrate the existence and operation of schemata
in the process of text interpretation.
Thus, it seems clear that readers activate an appropriate schema
against which they try to give a text a consistent interpretation. To the
extent that they are successful, we may say that they have compre-
hended the text. However, one potential source of reading difficulties
may be that the reader has a consistent interpretation for the text, but it
may not be the one intended by the author. Nonetheless, the basic
point is that much of the meaning understood from a text is really not
actually in the text, per se, but in the reader, in the background or
schematic knowledge of the reader. What is understood from a text is a
function of the particular schema that is activated at the time of
processing (i.e., reading) the text.
2 This example was offered by Charles J. Fillmore in a class lecture at the University of
California, Berkeley, in 1980.

SCHEMA THEORY AND READING 559

 In seeking to understand the role of background knowledge in
reading comprehension, it is often useful to draw a distinction between
formal schemata (background knowledge of the formal, rhetorical
organizational structures of different types of texts) and content
schemata (background knowledge of the content area of a text)
(Carrell 1983b). In other words, one type of schema which readers are
said to possess is background knowledge about, and expectations of,
differences among rhetorical structures, such as differences in genre,
differences in the structure of fables, simple stories, scientific texts,
newspaper articles, poetry, and so forth. Our schema for simple
stories, for example, includes the information that the story should
have, minimally, a setting, a beginning, a development, and an end-
ing. Also for simple stories, Mandler (1978) distinguishes between
schemata for causally connected and temporally connected stories.
For expository texts, Meyer and her colleagues (Meyer 1975, 1977,
1981; Meyer and Rice 1982; Meyer and Freedle, in press) recognize
five different types of expository rhetorical organization: collection—
list, causation— cause and effect, response— problem and solution,
comparison— comparison and contrast, and description —attribution.
Each of these types, they say, represents a different abstract schema of
ways writers organize and readers understand topics.
In schema theory research, this type of formal schematic knowledge
is usually contrasted with content schematic knowledge, which is
claimed to be background knowledge about the content area of a text,
such as a text about washing clothes, celebrating New Year’s Eve in
Hawaii or Halloween in Carbondale, or about the economy of Mexico,
the history of Canada, problems of nuclear breeder reactors, and so
forth.
A reader’s failure to activate an appropriate schema (formal or
content) during reading results in various degrees of non-compre-
hension. This failure to activate an appropriate schema may either be
due to the writer’s not having provided sufficient clues in the text for
the reader to effectively utilize a bottom-up processing mode to
activate schemata the reader may already possess, or it may be due to
the fact that the reader does not possess the appropriate schema
anticipated by the author and thus fails to comprehend. In both
instances, there is a mismatch between what the writer anticipates the
reader can do to extract meaning from the text and what the reader is
actually able to to. The point is that the appropriate schemata must
exist and must be activated during text processing.
One of the most obvious reasons why a particular content schema
may fail to exist for a reader is that the schema is culturally specific and
is not part of a particular reader’s cultural background. Studies by

560 TESOL QUARTERLY

Steffensen, Joag-dev, and Anderson (1979), Johnson (1981), and Carrell
(1981a) have shown that the implicit cultural content knowledge
presupposed by a text interacts with the reader’s own cultural back-
ground knowledge of content to make texts whose content is based on
one’s own culture easier to read and understand than syntactically and
rhetorically equivalent texts based on a less familiar, more distant
culture.
Other research has shown general effects of content schemata on
EFL/ESL reading comprehension. Johnson (1982) has shown that a
text on a familiar topic is better recalled by ESL readers than a similar
text on an unfamiliar topic. Hudson (1982) reports a study showing an
interaction between overall linguistic proficiency in ESL and content-
induced schematic effects in ESL reading comprehension. Specifically,
that study demonstrates the facilitating effects on comprehension of
explicitly inducing content schemata through pre-reading activities,
especially at the beginning and intermediate proficiency levels, as
compared to two other methods of inducing content schemata (through
vocabulary activities and read-reread activities). Finally, Alderson and
Urquhart (1983) have found a discipline-specific effect of content
background knowledge in measuring reading comprehension in
ESP/EST.
Several recent studies have shown the effects of formal, rhetorical
schemata in EFL/ESL. In a study by Carrell (1981 b), two groups of
university-bound, intermediate-level ESL subjects each read a different
type of simple story—one type well structured according to a simple
story schema structure and the other type deliberately violating the
story schema structure. Results showed that when stories violating the
story schema are processed by second language learners, both the
quantity of recall and the temporal sequences of recall are affected. In
other words, when the content is kept constant but the rhetorical struc-
ture is varied, second language reading comprehension is affected.
Recent studies done in the area of contrastive rhetoric (Kaplan 1966)
also demonstrate the effects of formal schemata on both the compre-
hension and production of written texts in a second language (Ostler
and Kaplan 1982). In particular, Hinds’ research (1982, 1983) shows the
contrasting effects on different groups of readers of typical Japanese
rhetorical organization and typical English rhetorical organization.
Burtoff (1983) has found differences among the typical rhetorical
patterns of expository prose produced by writers with different formal
schemata according to their native-language/native-culture back-
grounds.
Thus, a growing body of empirical research attests to the role of
both content and formal schemata in EFL/ESL reading comprehension

SCHEMA THEORY AND READING 561

and to the potential cultural specificity of both types of schemata. In
the following sections, we focus on the implications of the cultural
specificity of content schemata for EFL/ESL readers and EFL/ESL
reading methodology.

IMPLICATIONS FOR EFL/ESL READERS

Given the role of content schemata in reading comprehension, there
are obvious implications for the EFL/ESL reader. The background
knowledge that second language readers bring to a text is often
culture-specific. Hudson notes that
the reading problems of the L2 reader are not due to an absence of attempts
at fitting and providing specific schemata . . . Rather, the problem lies in
projecting appropriate schemata (Hudson 1982:9).

Second language readers attempt to provide schemata to make sense

of texts, and they do so persistently. However, these efforts will fail if
the reader cannot access the appropriate existing schemata, or if the
reader does not possess the appropriate schemata necessary to under-
stand a text.
Most commonly, accessing appropriate content schemata depends
initially on textual cues; the graphic display must be somehow recon-
structed by the reader as meaningful language. At this point, general
language processing skills are most important. For second language
readers, then, obviously some language proficiency is required to
activate relevant schemata, and it is not surprising that failures to
access appropriate schemata (i.e., comprehend) are often interpreted
solely as deficiencies in language processing skills. Consequently, poor
readers are encouraged to expand their vocabularies and to gain
greater control over complex syntactic structures in order to improve
reading comprehension. Indeed, some reading problems are related to
such language skill deficiencies. However, as we have noted, reading
comprehension depends crucially on the reader’s being able to relate
information from the text to already existing background knowledge.
In the EFL/ESL classroom, we must be particularly sensitive to
reading problems that result from the implicit cultural knowledge
presupposed by a text. A review of the literature in EFL/ESL
methodology shows that the role of cultural knowledge as a factor in
reading comprehension has been an issue for some time. Fries (1945,
1963) talked about meaning at the social-cultural level—that is, the
meaning that transcends the language code and is related to the
background knowledge of the native speakers of that code. Reading
comprehension occurs when the total meaning of a passage is fitted
into this network of information organized in ways meaningful to a

562 TESOL QUARTERLY

society. The following passage from an ESL reading text3 illustrates
Fries’ concept of social-cultural meaning:
By voting against mass transportation, voters have chosen to continue on a
road to ruin. Our interstate highways, those much praised golden avenues
built to whisk suburban travelers in and out of downtown have turned into
the worlds most expensive parking lots. That expense is not only econo-
mic—it is social. These highways have created great walls separating
neighborhood from neighborhood, disrupting the complex social connec-
tions that help make a city livable (Baudoin et al. 1977:159).
In reading this passage, some ESL students fail to perceive the
connection between mass transportation and highways. In the United
States, where individual ownership of cars results in an overabundance
of highways and a reduced need for mass transportation, this passage
makes sense. Sometimes, however, students perceive that highways
are built for mass transportation, which renders this passage (and
especially the critical reading question which asks whether the author
supports the idea of mass transportation) at best illogical, at worst
incomprehensible.
The social-cultural meaning in this passage relates to the culture-
specific schema of the cars/mass transportation opposition. Further-
more, comprehension can also be related to semantic associations
available when a schema is accessed. The notion of interstate high-
ways, here referred to narrowly as those in urban areas, invites the
semantic associations of crowding, congestion, and rush hour traffic.
The meaning of the phrase the world’s most expensive parking lots i s
associated with, and can only be understood with reference to, this
specific urban highway subschema.
Elsewhere in the EFL/ESL methodology literature, Rivers (1968)
recommends that the strong bond between culture and language must
be maintained for the student to have a complete understanding of the
meaning of language. She believes that differences in values and
attitudes are one of the main sources of problems in foreign language
learning. Culture-specific values can be a significant factor in compre-
hension if the values expressed by the text differ from the values held
by the reader. Devout Muslim students, for example, tend to have
problems with the following passage:
There is a question about the extent to which any one of us can be free of a
prejudiced view in the area of religion (Baudoin et al. 1977:185).
3 The passages chosen to illustrate reading problems related to culture-specific background
information are all drawn from Reader’s Choice ( Baudoin, Bober, Clarke, Dobson, and
Silberstein 1977), a widely used and widely respected ESL reading text. The difficulties noted
with the passages from this text are in no way intended as a criticism of the book, which we
consider an excellent text based on psycholinguistic principles. Rather, these passages were
chosen because they caused actual classroom problems and because they illustrate often subtle
or hidden problems which we, as EFL/ESL teachers, may find difficult to identify.

SCHEMA THEORY AND READING 563

While this sentence is excellent for developing critical reading skills,
the mention of religion in this context does not coincide with Islamic
values. A subsequent exercise requires the student to analyze the
relation of the original text to the following sentence: Because we can’t
be free of prejudice in the area of religion, we should not practice a
religion. One student refused to even consider the premise of this
sentence; his only comment: “For me, it’s false. ”
More recently, Rivers and Temperley (1978) have emphasized the
importance of providing background information, explaining high-
frequency but culturally loaded terms, and using illustrations with
reading passages to provide additional meaning to texts. The important
point is that problems with individual lexical items may not be as
pervasive as problems related to the absence of appropriate generalized
information assumed by the writer and possessed by a reader sharing
that writer’s cultural background.
The relevance of appropriate generalized, underlying information is
illustrated by the following text:
Although housewives still make up the majority of volunteer groups, male
participation is reported on the rise nationwide as traditional distinctions
between men’s work and women’s work begin to fade (Baudoin et al.
1977:184).
The phrase volunteer groups requires appropriate underlying informa-
tion before this sentence can be understood. Although the lexical items
volunteer and groups were clearly understood by one student, the
concept of volunteer groups (predominantly female, unpaid social
workers) was clearly not understood since he wondered if these
women had volunteered to be housewives.
Paulston and Bruder (1976) also discuss covert information and
reading. Proficient readers, they say, must draw on their own experi-
ence in order to supply a semantic component to a message. They
argue that texts with familiar settings and even specialized low-
frequency vocabulary are appropriate (even though the texts may
“feel” as if they are not appropriate) because they are relevant to the
students’ world (and are, thus, easier to read). Robinett (1978) agrees
that covert cultural information is a factor in reading performance and
suggests that the teacher facilitate reading by providing specific
background experience.
When covert information is assumed by the writer, it must be
supplied by the reader and is sometimes done so erroneously.
I saw by the clock of the city jail that it was past eleven, so I decided to go
to the newspaper immediately (Baudoin et al. 1977:83).

564 TESOL QUARTERLY

After reading this sentence, one student was convinced that the writer
had been in jail at the time because, as he said, “an outside clock is only
on a church.” He had concluded that the only place the writer could
have seen the clock of the city jail was from inside the jail itself. If this
sentence merely “sets the scene,” then this misinterpretation is insignifi-
cant. However, if the misreading causes the reader to consider such a
scene significant (when it is not), or to dismiss it as in-significant (when
it is not), then a serious comprehension problem has resulted.
Finally in the methodology literature, Marquardt’s work (1967, 1969)
is representative of the pedagogical approach that holds that reading
should be in the literature of the target culture for the express purpose
of teaching that culture to foreign students. Such literature, however,
must be chosen carefully. Consider the following passage from Cheaper
by the Dozen:
Mother the psychologist and Dad the motion study man and general
contractor decided to look into the new field of the psychology of
management, and the old field of psychologically managing a houseful of
children. They believed that what would work in the home would work in
the factory, and what would work in the factory would work in the home.
Dad put the theory to a test shortly after we moved to Montclair. The house
was too big for Tom Grieves, the handyman, and Mrs. Cunningham, the
cook, to keep in order. Dad decided we were going to have to help them,
and he wanted us to offer the help willingly. He had found that the best
way to get cooperation out of employees in a factory was set up a joint
employer-employee board, which would make work assignments on a basis
of personal choice and aptitude. He and Mother set up a Family Council,
patterned after an employer-employee board. The Council met every
Sunday afternoon, immediately after dinner (Baudoin et al. 1977:91).
This text would require considerable background teaching before the
text itself could teach anything (even if we considered what it has to
teach to be culturally relevant). Using literature to teach culture m a y
be the most direct way to teach culture, but it certainly implies
thorough background preparation and may, in fact, not be the best
way to teach language.
There is much in these methods that is of value, but in light of the
broad message behind the schema-theoretic view of reading, are they
sufficiently sensitive to cross-cultural interference at all levels of
meaning? The factors noted above are important not just to “ground”
words and phrases for the reader. Rather, notions such as social-
cultural meaning, culture-specific values, and covert information r e f e r
to different aspects of the same problem, and that is how to deal with
reading difficulties caused by the mismatch of the background knowl-
edge presupposed by the text and the background knowledge possessed

SCHEMA THEORY AND READING 565

by the reader. A schema-theoretic view of reading suggests the
pervasive effects of such a mismatch and requires our being sensitive
to these reading difficulties on a more global level.

CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES
Our immediate goal as EFL/ESL reading teachers is to minimize
reading difficulties and to maximize comprehension by providing
culturally relevant information. Goodman puts the issue into focus
when he says that
even highly effective readers are severely limited in comprehension of texts
by what they already know before they read. The author may influence the
comprehensibility of a text particularly for specific targeted audiences. But
no author can completely compensate in writing for the range of differences
among all potential readers of a given text (Goodman 1979:658).
Since no author can compensate for the individual variation among
readers, especially readers from different cultural backgrounds, this is
one of the roles of the teacher in the EFL/ESL reading classroom. As
teachers we can approach this problem by manipulating either one of
the two variables: the text and/or the reader.

Text
What can we do with texts to minimize cultural conflicts and inter-
ference and to maximize comprehension? For the beginning reader,
the Language Experience Approach (LEA) (Rigg 1981) is an excellent
way to control vocabulary, structure, and content. The basic LEA technique
uses the students’ ideas and the students’ own words in the preparation
of beginning reading materials. The students decide what they want to
say and how to say it, and then dictate to the teacher, who acts as a
scribe. LEA works when the students’ beginning reading materials,
developed by them with the teacher’s help, have the students’ ideas in
their own words. LEA works because students tend to be able to read
what they have just said. The students, in effect, write their own texts,
neutralizing problems of unfamiliar content.
Another way to minimize interference from the text is to encourage
narrow reading, as suggested by Krashen (1981). Narrow reading
refers to reading that is confined to a single topic or to the texts of a
single author. Krashen suggests that “narrow reading, and perhaps
narrow input in general, is more efficient for second language acquisi-
tion” (Krashen 1981:23). Reading teachers usually provide short and
varied selections which never allow students to adjust to an author’s
style, to become familiar with the specialized vocabulary of the topic,

566 TESOL QUARTERLY

or to develop enough context to facilitate comprehension. Rather, such
selections force students to move from frustration to frustration.
However, students who read either a single topic or a single author
find that the text becomes easier to comprehend after the first few
pages. Readers adjust either to the repeated vocabulary of a particular
topic or to the particular style of a writer. Furthermore, repetitions of
vocabulary and structure mean that review is built into the reading.
The significant advantage from the schema-theoretic point of view is
that schemata are repeatedly accessed and further expanded and
refined, resulting in increased comprehension.
The third possibility of text facilitation is to develop materials along
the lines of those proposed by Paulston and Bruder (1976). As we have
noted, they suggest using texts with local settings and specialized low-
frequency vocabulary. These materials might be student or local
newspapers, pamphlets, brochures, or booklets about local places of
interest. English travel guides or National Geographic-type articles
from the students’ own countries are also good sources for the
EFL/ESL reader.
Finally, Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) is an excellent activity for
ESL readers. Through silent reading of texts, students become self-
directed agents seeking meaning. To be effective, however, an SSR
program must be based on student-selected texts so that the students
will be interested in what they are reading. Students select their own
reading texts with respect to content, level of difficulty, and length.
What is important, from our point of view, is that readers tend to be
interested in reading texts that are relevant to their own experiences.
Students who choose their own texts are, in effect, also providing their
own appropriate background knowledge for understanding the text.

Reader
Instead of, or in addition to, text control, we also need to consider
what we can do with the readers themselves. Providing background informa-
tion and previewing content for the reader seem to be the most
obvious strategies for the language teacher. We want to avoid having
students read material “cold.” Asking students to manipulate both the
linguistic and cultural codes (sometimes linguistically easy but culturally
difficult, and vice versa) is asking too much.
Providing background information and previewing are particularly
important for the less proficient language student (see the findings of
Hudson 1982). These readers are more word-bound, and meaning
tends to break down at the word level. Thus, less proficient students
tend to have vocabulary acquisition emphasized and, as such, are
encouraged to do a lot of specific (and less efficient) word-by-word

SCHEMA THEORY AND READING 567

processing exclusively in a bottom-up processing mode. Readers who
are more proficient in a language tend to receive content previews
because they are no longer as susceptible to vocabulary and structure
difficulties in reading. As a result, these more proficient students are
encouraged to do more global, predictive (and more efficient) process-
ing in the top-down processing mode. One thing we surely want to
remind ourselves of, however, is that less proficient readers also need
familiar content selections and/or content preview as much as, if not
more than, more proficient readers. Illustrations may be particularly
appropriate for students with minimal language skills. Providing the
semantic content component for low-level readers will free them to
focus on vocabulary and structure expressive of that content.
Previewing is an important activity in the reading classroom, but it is
not necessarily a process of simply providing a preliminary outline of
what is to be read. Sometimes, it involves teaching a key concept
which is culturally loaded, such as the one in the short story T h e
Lottery (Baudoin et al. 1977:140-145). If one does not understand the
process or purpose of a lottery, then this short story about one woman
who “wins” and is then killed by her neighbors will be totally
incomprehensible. In this case, a discussion of lotteries before assigning
the reading would be absolutely necessary.
Previewing can also include presenting specialized vocabulary and
structures that the teacher predicts will cause difficulties. In the mass
transportation passage cited earlier, students who could not come up
with the appropriate background information also had difficulty with
the phrase road to ruin (a road for ruining, as in an apple to eat?) a n d
expensive parking lots (parking will be expensive?). Even a sentence
that supposedly contains within it enough experiential context to
explain the word mildew is often incomprehensible to many students
from arid regions: What could John expect? He had left his wet
swimming trunks in the dark closet for over a week. Of course they
had begun to mildew (Baudoin et al. 1977:5).
Finally, by carefully listening to what our students say about the
texts they are asked to read, we can become further sensitized to their
hidden comprehension problems. As teachers, we should not respond
to what the reader does (right/wrong) as much as to what the reader is
trying to do. Given that the reader is trying to make sense of the text
(construct meaning), a teacher who listens carefully and responds to a
student’s efforts will become aware of both the background knowledge
and the cultural problems that students themselves bring to the text. In
any case, the most valuable information is in our students’ perceptions
and not our own. This is the type of information that is gleaned
through asking open-ended questions, probing for inferences from the
text, and asking students to justify answers to more direct questions

568 TESOL QUARTERLY

(for example, “Why do you think so?”). In addition, having students
provide oral or written summaries will help teachers to discern
problem areas in comprehension.

CONCLUSION
Thus, in achieving our immediate goals in the EFL/ESL reading
classroom, we must strive for an optimum balance between the
background knowledge presupposed by the texts our students read
and the background knowledge our students possess. As we have
shown by means of the foregoing classroom activities and techniques,
this balance may be achieved by manipulating either the text and/or
the reader variable.
Of course, our long-range goal as reading teachers is to develop
independent readers outside the EFL/ESL classroom, readers whose
purpose in learning to read in English as a foreign or second language
is to learn from the texts they read.4 But there, too, as Anderson notes,
“without some schema into which it can be assimilated, an experience
is incomprehensible, and therefore, little can be learned from it”
(Anderson 1977:429; emphasis added). What makes the classroom
activities and other techniques we have described valid is their
applicability to the “real” world beyond the EFL/ESL reading class-
room. Every culture-specific interference problem dealt with in the
classroom presents an opportunity to build new culture-specific sche-
mata that will be available to the EFL/ESL student outside the
classroom. In addition, however, and possibly more importantly, the
process of identifying and dealing with cultural interference in reading
should make our EFL/ESL students more sensitive to such interference
when they read on their own. By using the classroom activities and
techniques we have described, our EFL/ESL readers should become
more aware that reading is a highly interactive process between
themselves and their prior background knowledge, on the one hand,
and the text itself, on the other.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This article grew out of the authors’ portions of a workshop entitled “Reading in ESL:
Insights and Applications from Research,” presented at the 16th Annual TESOL
Convention in Honolulu, Hawaii, May 1, 1982.

4 We use the phrase “reading to learn from texts” in the broadest sense, including reading for
academic purposes, reading for survival purposes or for purposes of functioning in society at
various levels, and even reading for recreation or entertainment.

SCHEMA THEORY AND READING 569

THE AUTHORS
Patricia Carrell is Professor of Linguistics and EFL/ESL at Southern Illinois University
at Carbondale. Her current research interests include the role of background knowl-
edge and the interaction of text and reader variables in text comprehension. Her
research in this area has appeared in the TESOL Quarterly, Language Learning,
Language Learning and Communication, and On TESOL ’82.
Joan C. Eisterhold is a doctoral student at Northwestern University and a former
instructor of ESL at the University of Tennessee at Martin. She holds an M.A. in TEFL
from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

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 TESOL QUARTERLY, Vol. 17, No. 4, December 1983

Student-Teacher Working Journals

in ESL Freshman Composition
RUTH SPACK
Tufts University and Boston University

CATHERINE SADOW
Northeastern University and Boston University

Recently, first language composition researchers have shown that by

using a traditional composition teaching method which focuses on the
form and correctness of a finished product, teachers ask students to
produce writing which does not reflect the actual writing process.
Findings indicate that most school-sponsored writing does not involve
the self-motivation, contemplation, exploration, and commitment
which characterize real life writing. These researchers recommend
that in addition to being taught expository writing, students should
have more opportunity for expressive writing in their writing courses
to allow them to become better academic writers. According to some
second language composition researchers and teachers, these recom-
mendations are applicable to ESL college students because their
composing strategies are similar to those of native English-speaking
college students.
Ungraded, uncorrected journals can provide a non-threatening way
for students to express themselves in written English. However, the
student-teacher working journals which we describe in this article are
unlike student personal journals in two important ways: first, the topic
of working journals is not personal, but is rather an outgrowth of the
writing class; and second, the teacher regularly writes journals to the
class on the same subject and includes, in those journals, selected
student journal entries. The advantages of this approach are that a
group awareness develops around issues relevant to ESL composition,
that students come to see writing as a way to generate ideas and to
share them, and that teachers become participants in the writing
process.

Since 1980 our students have been regularly writing ungraded,

uncorrected working journals for our ESL Freshman Composition
courses, and we have been regularly writing working journals too.
Journal writing is an integral part of our classes, which are special
sections of composition for international students and which cover the
575
two semesters of the college writing requirement. During both semes-
ters students are required to write several expository essays and to
become familiar with research techniques; in the second semester
students also write a long research paper. These courses have two
major goals: to prepare students for the level of academic written work
established at the university in which they are enrolled, and to make
students aware that writing is a process of using language to discover
meaning and to communicate it (Murray 1978).
The students we teach are primarily college freshmen, although
upperclassmen and graduate students occasionally take the courses.
Students represent every academic field at the university and come
from all over the world. As is typical of foreign students studying in the
United States, their English proficiency varies; nevertheless, all of
these students carry a full academic load, can communicate orally with
some ease, have adequate reading and listening skills, have studied
formal grammar, and have some experience writing in English. Their
TOEFL scores are at least 550. Some have just arrived in the United
States after having studied English only as a class in high school, while
others have studied in high schools in the United States or in English-
speaking high schools overseas; all need strong writing skills in order to
compete academically with their American counterparts.
Until 1980, we followed the traditional composition teaching model
presented in most textbooks: we asked our students to fit a topic into a
rhetorical form, to imitate a model essay, to outline their main points
before writing, and to pay careful attention to the correctness of their
grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure. We then corrected,
commented on, and graded the finished products. But our students’
often stiff prose, repetition of mistakes, inadequate development of
ideas, lack of involvement in the topics, and lack of confidence in their
ability to write well in English convinced us that this method was not
meeting their needs or the goals of the course.
Because research on ESL composition was almost nonexistent at that
time (Zamel 1976, 1982), we looked for clarification and guidance to
those writers, teachers, and researchers in native English-speaking
contexts who were challenging the traditional method of teaching
composition. The focus of research and classroom practice, it turned
out, had recently shifted from the written product to the writing
process. We discovered that requiring our students to formulate their
thoughts beforehand and to fit those ideas into a rhetorical framework
according to someone else’s model was an unrealistic assignment.
Murray (1968), for example, maintains that since writers do not know
exactly what they are going to say before they start, they find it
necessary to see their words on paper in order to explore their thoughts
and to learn what their main points are. The act of writing itself can

576 TESOL QUARTERLY

change preconceived notions. Emig (1971), in a study of the composing
processes of native English-speaking twelfth graders, discovered that
students lack commitment to teacher-initiated topics when school-
sponsored writing, with its models and rules, does not reflect real life
writing, which involves a self-motivated, explorative, contemplative
process of composing. Perl’s study of the composing processes of
unskilled native English-speaking college writers confirms that com-
posing does not take place in linear fashion; rather, writing is a back-
and-forth movement in which writers write, reflect upon, change, and
develop their ideas (1979). Students who are required to write in an
outline-imitate-write order are therefore likely to produce artificially
structured writing. Judy (1980) points out that by studying forms first,
students come to view form as a pre-existent organizational mold into
which content is poured; instead, he suggests, they should be taught
that the form an essay will take is determined by the writer’s purpose
and message. In fact, it has been found that idea development can be
seriously inhibited by concern for correct form (Perl 1979) and
likewise by fear of error (Shaughnessy 1977). Similarly, Britton,
Burgess, Martin, McLeod, and Rosen (1975) have found that an
approach which emphasizes the final product leads student writers to
expect an evaluation of their writing rather than a response to their
writing and further leads them to view writing as a test of their ability
to master prescribed technical skills rather than as a body of work to
be read for itself.
All of these findings suggest that students should be made aware that
writing is an act of discovery. Writing can be viewed, too, as problem
solving or as a “thinking problem” whose goal is to communicate ideas
to someone else by adapting the intentions of the writer to the needs of
a reader (Flower and Hayes 1977:449). Emig’s practical suggestion is to
allow students more time and opportunity to practice “reflexive”
writing which allows them to immerse themselves in the topic as they
write and reformulate and rewrite in the process of discovering,
exploring, and developing what it is they have to say. Britton et al.
(1975) recommend that teachers assign more expressive writing, which
entails informal, loosely structured language. According to Britton et
al., the importance of expressive writing lies in its educational value as
a matrix from which, in favorable circumstances, transactional writ-
ing—writing to inform, instruct, or persuade—is developed. Reflexive
and expressive writing, then, can lead students toward better academic
writing.
Some ESL writing teachers and researchers have also begun to focus
on the composing process. Zamel (1976, 1982) has observed that the
findings and recommendations of first language composition research-
ers are applicable to ESL students because the composing strategies of

STUDENT-TEACHER WORKING JOURNALS 577

such students are similar to those of native speakers. Even though
many ESL students have less language proficiency than their native
English-speaking counterparts, they nevertheless need to practice the
non-linguistic intellectual and cognitive skills that constitute writing
(Taylor 1976, 1981). Language does not have to stand in the way of
ESL composition, and “an ESL student need not have to be able to
generate a perfect, eloquently flowing piece of writing the first time
around to be a successful academic writer” (Taylor 1981:9). Teachers
do not have to initially look for and comment on error in an ESL
student’s piece of writing; they should, at all levels, look at a composi-
tion as a message conveying the writer’s ideas (Raimes 1979). ESL
teachers cannot overlook the conceptual function of language (expres-
sion of self) while they stress its purposeful function (interaction with
others) (Raimes 1979).
These are the issues which led us to restructure our writing classes.
Our students are still taught throughout the course how to organize
ideas, but they are no longer asked to fit a topic into a form, imitate a
model essay, outline before they write, or attend to error in the early
stages of their writing. Instead, they are given a choice of topics
whose premises have grown out of ideas discussed in class based on a
series of readings with a common theme. These writing assignments
simulate authentic writing situations, including those the students face
in the academic setting and will face in technical and professional
fields. Students are then taught to use invention techniques, such as
those described by Flower and Hayes (1977) and Daubney-Davis
(1982a, 1982b, 1982c), in and out of class, in order to discover what
they know about the topic and to generate more ideas. As they
develop their topics, students begin to think about the appropriate
audience for the subject and to tailor their first draft for that specific
audience, whether it be the teacher, fellow students, or some hypo-
thetical authority. Trial drafts are shared orally with the class; students
discuss ideas and struggle for clarity. The drafts are then reworked,
sometimes reread in class or in conference, during which time stu-
dents are guided toward accuracy of expression; and then a paper is
handed in. We read the paper for ideas and make suggestions for
further development and changes in content, organization, and vocab-
ulary. Students make changes and turn in a revised paper which is
read for error and returned. Students then correct the paper in class,
under supervision. Because they are writing for (simulated) authentic
purposes, students understand that formal accuracy is important.
They are shown how to say precisely what they mean. Editing of
errors takes place in the final stage of writing after ideas are fully
developed. At that point, student and teacher together solve the
individual technical problems which arise out of the writing. Finally,

578 TESOL QUARTERLY

a fully revised and corrected copy is handed in, with all written
brainstorming and drafts, for a grade.
It is in the context of this course that working journals are introduced.
Until very recently, only isolated teachers of native English speakers
such as Macrorie (1968) and Elbow (1973), who recognized the need
for more expressive writing in composition courses, recommended
that students write journals. Today, student journal writing is accepted
as an integral part of the curriculum in many regular freshman
composition programs. There is general agreement that one of the
main reasons student journals succeed is because they establish a
dialogue between students, who write about what interests them, and
teachers, who respond non-judgmentally. What is created is a real life
writing situation, with a purpose, an audience, and a message, which
allows students to feel comfortable when they write (Wood 1978,
Staton 1980, Staton, Shuy, and Kreeft 1982, Kelly 1981). The act of
writing the journal itself generates ideas (Fulwiler 1980, Cloud 1981).
ESL teachers, too, have begun to introduce journal writing into their
courses (Root 1979, Taylor 1981, Staton 1981, Zamel 1982). The focus
of most of the journals proposed by these teachers is on personal issues
raised by the student. There are difficulties with this approach,
however. For example, personal writing encourages unskilled writers
to write egocentrically without anticipating the reader’s needs (Flower
and Hayes 1977, Perl 1979). It also causes some ESL students to feel
dissatisfied precisely because they do not feel that the topic of their
school writing should be personal (Zamel 1982). The teacher, too, may
find that some students’ journals cover extremely personal subjects
which are difficult to respond to. And even though personal journals
can help students in a number of ways and can strengthen some
student-teacher relationships, which are particularly important for
lonely international students, they do little for the overall development
of the course. In a writing class whose goal is to lead students toward
writing “reader-based prose” (Flower and Hayes 1977:459), a less
egocentric, more academic—yet still self-expressive—journal assign-
ment is called for.

PROCEDURE
The journal plan which we present in this article is based on a
program developed for native speakers (Cowan and Cowan 1980),
which we have adapted for non-native speakers. Our approach is a
departure from the student’s personal diary. Rather, we prefer to set
up a teacher-student interaction in which the teacher and the students
regularly write and exchange journals which have a common general
focus of ESL writing class issues and individual reactions relevant to

STUDENT-TEACHER WORKING JOURNALS 579

them. The sharing of selected journal entries with the group by means
of the teacher’s journal extends and enriches the interaction and leads
to a more dynamic group awareness and exchange of ideas. One
advantage of this format is that students need not feel compelled to
write about themselves if that makes them uncomfortable. Since the
topic of the journals is the English course, students may write about
class discussions, readings, essays, research, journals, exercises, other
students’ ideas, or the process of writing itself. This provides a focus
for the journals, a broad enough subject which gives students plenty of
leeway, yet which limits the number of extremely personal issues that
border on diary entries. Students are guided away from egocentric
writing toward writing which meets the needs of the readers.
Another advantage of the student-teacher working journal plan is
that the teacher’s journal gives students another perspective on the
writing process and another view of informal written English. They
can view writing teachers not only as critics but also as participants in
the writing process (Murray 1968). That is, teacher journals give
writing teachers credibility. Just as important, they also give teachers
an opportunity to write informally to and for their students. Emig
reports that teachers who do not write “under-conceptualize and
oversimplify the process of writing” (1971:98) and notes that all
teachers of writing need frequent opportunities for writing. One of the
best ways to learn about the writing process is to write (Kelly 1981,
Applebee 1981).
How do we begin? A typical first journal from teacher to students on
the first day of class explains the procedure and might look like this:
Welcome to Freshman Composition for International Students. This term
each of us will write a journal entry for each day of class, and this is my
first. It is difficult for me to sit herein front of my typewriter composing a
journal to a group of students I haven’t yet met. When you write your first
journal, you will have the advantage of having met me and the rest of the
class. It may be easier for you to write, but I doubt it. The first few journals
are a challenge. After a while, you will probably find that they are easier to
write.
The subjects of your journals should be something that grows out of the
class, for example, from the discussions, the readings, or the writing
assignments. You may use the journals to explore topics for papers, to
examine your own writing progress, or to discuss the process of writing
itself. Hand in a journal of any length at the beginning of every class on
looseleaf paper, and I will respond to it by commenting on the bottom and
then I will hand it back to you at the beginning of the next class. I read for
ideas only: I never correct or grade journals.
My journals, which I will mimeograph and hand out at the beginning of
each class, will be a response to the class, an outgrowth of discussion,

580 TESOL QUARTERLY

 reading, writing. When I think that something you wrote will interest your
classmates, I’ll publish it within my journal.
At the end of the semester, I am sure you will find the journal project a
valuable one, for it will open up a dialogue that is not possible in the
classroom, and it will give you the opportunity to use written English
informally to explore, develop, and communicate your thoughts.
I look forward to reading your first journals.
Our journals, the length of which varies from half a page to two
pages, consist of encouraging statements about writing, reactions to
what has transpired in class, reinforcement of concepts covered in
class, quotations from famous writers, and most important, excerpts
from our students’ journals. Students like to know what other students
write in their journals; not only does this help them overcome the
feeling that they are writing privately, in isolation, but it also gives
them ideas for their own journals (Fulwiler 1980). Understandably,
ESL students are astonished to see their own words printed in a
teacher’s journal. But all are pleased to be published once they get over
the initial shock:
Today in English class I saw my own diary was on the hand out. I was
really surprised, because I did not expect teacher would put junk like my
diary on an hand out. I settled down a little bit after I read the diary over. It
was not as bad as I though it was. (unedited)
Because our students’ journals are, of course, full of second language
errors, we edit them before we publish them in our journals. We make
corrections by using ellipsis when we omit words and brackets when
we fill in missing words; we correct all spelling errors. The above
student journal would be changed, when published, to:
Today in the English class I saw my own diary . . . on the handout. I was
really surprised because I did not expect that [the] teacher would put junk
like my diary on a handout. I settled down a little bit after I read the diary
over. It was not as bad as I thought it was. (edited)
Even as we present corrected English, we make our ESL students
aware that fellow classmates make mistakes, a normal and understood
result of second language writing (Taylor 1981). But our major concern
is to make it possible for students to read one another’s ideas without
the mistakes, for, as Shaughnessy points out, errors “demand energy
without giving any return in meaning” (1977:12).
Although we strongly state at the outset that we never correct
journals, we inevitably get one or two student journals at the beginning
of each term which question the lack of correction:
The best way to learn is by making mistakes and we obviously make a lot
of them. Spelling, sentence structure, even grammar mistakes. It would be

STUDENT-TEACHER WORKING JOURNALS 581

 very helpful if you could show us our mistakes in the journal. Maybe by
underlining a misspelled word so that we could look it up in the dictionary.
On the other hand it shouldn’t be too much work for you. Just a few
corrections would already be a great help for us.
In addition to responding individually to the student, we include such a
comment in a subsequent teacher journal and reply to the whole class
by saying that there is a lot more to writing than learning to correct
errors. When unskilled writers hunt for errors in the early stages of
writing, a breakdown of “the rhythms generated by thinking and
writing” occurs (Perl 1979:333). We want the students to be able to
write in their new language without fear of red marks (Raimes 1979).
They should be able to experiment with words and phrases without the
pressure of grades (Macrorie 1970). We tell them that sometimes
students make the mistake of trying to write grammar when they
should write ideas (Shaughnessy 1977). By the same token, sometimes
teachers make the mistake of correcting papers when they should be
reading them (Raimes 1979). Writing teachers should value writing
which is not evaluated. Through working journals, students can learn
to put the emphasis on correctness in its proper place. One student
described this realization in this way:
Journals have definitely helped us write. Basically I feel that they have
helped me to quickly get my thoughts down in writing. It may not [be]
grammatically revolutionary, but that can come later, once I have my
thoughts written down.
We find that the extensive time set aside for the detailed correction and
grading of other writing assignments adequately attends to the need
for accuracy in our students’ use of language.
Because we make simple comments on each entry we can spend as
little as twenty minutes reading through a group of fifteen journals. We
read them quickly, looking for meaning only, and make short, respon-
sive, non-judgmental comments. When spelling or sentence structure is
grossly incorrect, we can use misspelled words or convoluted syntax
correctly in our responses (Staton 1980). However, aware that the
native English-speaking student’s resistance to school-sponsored writ-
ing is combined in the ESL student with “a resistance to the language
itself,” which “presents an even more formidable challenge than that of
the student’s linguistic problems” (Raimes 1979:3), we provide only
positive feedback in our responses. Our goal is to teach students to
overcome a fear of being misunderstood in a second language and to
feel confident in their ability to communicate. They can use t h e
language rather than be concerned with its usage (Widdowson 1978).
Because the fear of error and criticism is removed from journal
assignments, students can become comfortable expressing their ideas

582 TESOL QUARTERLY

in English even if the grammar is faulty. We encourage them to
experiment with new vocabulary, idiomatic English, and recently
learned structures in their journals (Root 1979). The journals give them
invaluable experience in getting an idea out of their heads, onto a piece
of paper, and into someone else’s head. They see, through our
comments, that even in English they can invoke a response with their
written words.
When ESL students write journals regularly and often, many say that
it becomes easier for them to write journals (Root 1979). As one
student wrote:
This is my sixth journal to be passed up. I never knew that I can write six
journals in less than one month. (I just can’t forget when I got the journal
assignment . . . I thought Mrs. Spack must be mad asking us to write
journals twice a week. ) Now I am convinced that by writing journals you
have more confidence . . . no more hesitate, no such thing as I have run out
of ideas or any other excuses when I cannot write an article. I never realize
the benefit of writing journals, and I always feel I am forced to write in my
first few journals. But now (I guess the magic has work!) I am always ready
to write about anything willingly.
One of the benefits for teachers is the continuous feedback provided
in student working journals, which helps us to adjust our teaching
approaches throughout the semester. It is, of course, gratifying to learn
what students are gleaning from our classes and when they are
enjoying them: it is useful when they ask clarifying questions if there is
something they have not understood (Staton 1980) or when they make
suggestions about the course. Even more beneficial is learning about
specific language problems our students encounter when they work
with a new language. A student who was reluctant to speak in class
shared in her journal her thoughts about the difference between
speaking and writing:
IS writing more difficult than speaking? I’m skeptical about it. Because, the
advantages of speaking, which are pointed in our textbook, are, for me, not
meritorious—some of them . . . vice versa.
Examples are as follows:
x audience present—so I might be shy
x immediate feedback—I’m scared
x The listeners heard the words spoken, and the tone, volume, pitch,
speed, recognize the words and meanings—could it be possible even
if the speaker’s language is very poor?
x subjects will fit the person and the situation (so will the words)—I’m
not sure
On the contrary, writing benefits me to communicate with foreigners.
(1) In writing, I can spend enough time to think about how I should
explain my ideas in English.

STUDENT-TEACHER WORKING JOURNALS 583

 (2) I can use any dictionary and erase or correct errors of my sentences.
(3) As there is no audience face to face waiting my words, I feel at ease.
For nobody cares about my punctuation, intonation, and speed, etc.
There are many ways to establish good relationships with ESL
students, but establishing a writing relationship seems especially
appropriate in a composition class. There are students who are
culturally quieter or students who are uneasy speaking out in English.
These students who are afraid to speak in class discover that they can
use the journals to express and share their ideas in writing in a non-
threatening format. The journals, in a sense, liberate them.
Our students use working journals to explore their conscious and
unconscious thoughts about other class-related writing. When used in
that fashion, the journal entries themselves are a type of invention
technique. Many students approach their topic in a personalized
fashion to get themselves started on a writing assignment. For example,
after being given a choice of topics which grew out of a unit on the
Thirties in America, one student described in her journal the discovery
of the specific subject for her paper:
The other day I went to see the movie Manhattan. It was excellent and I
was very impressed by Woody Allen. The theme song of the movie was
Rhapsody in Blue. It gave a nice atmosphere throughout the whole movie. I
was in a special mood when this music came through the screen, and it
caught my mind. May be that because it reminded me that I once played
the music on the piano during the period that I was really sick of my lessons
in classical music. I wanted to try something different. My teacher
suggested me to try something from the field of jazz. I chose music sheets
by George Gershwin, and I loved his music. As George Gershwin’s music
attracted me, my interest in his life and himself increased. That is why I
picked the topic about Porgy and Bess for my paper.
Over the course of several days of class discussions on readings
concerned with fairy tales, students were encouraged to respond to the
readings in their journals. The following student journal, which is
shown as it appeared in a teacher journal, demonstrates how one
student used the working journal to discover more about the topic and
to develop a focus for the paper assigned:
I’d like to share Yosef’s journal with you because in it he focuses on the
readings which we will discuss in today’s class. Yosef may have found his
subject and thesis while writing this journal. Journals can be very useful for
findings things to write about.
Unfortunately for children, fairy tales are now disappearing to make
room for new modern heroes coming out of space and science fiction. I
remember, for instance, when I was a child in Lebanon, my grandmother
used to tell me the same fairy tale. And at the end of every fairy tale I

584 TESOL QUARTERLY

 used to beg my grandmother for one more time, until I fell asleep and at
last my grandmother could take a breath. Unfortunately, nowadays, the
irreplaceable way of telling fairy tales has almost disappeared especially
in the United States. Television is taking the place of the grandmother
and instead of giving to the child the softness of the fairy tales, it gives
tough and shining new extra-terrestrial or science fiction heroes. It is, I
think, not only an injury to the customs and traditions of our grand-
parents, but also a big loss in our children’s culture.
A teacher’s individual response to such journals serves to give the
students encouragement and feedback on their topics, possibly by
discussing the content and guiding the students to explore the subject
matter further. Although at this stage in the writing the topic is closely
linked to the student’s experience, the final paper is not necessarily
written in such a personal mode. The paper which grows out of the
early stages of writing is often written objectively, and teachers can,
through journal responses, direct the student to approach the material
in an objective fashion, if that is the purpose of the assignment.
Conversely, the paper may turn out to be a personal piece of writing,
and what is written in the journal may even appear verbatim as a
paragraph in the essay. The point is that this exploratory stage, which
gets students involved in their subjects and shows them that they can
learn through writing, is highly valued.
Some students may write about other class-related assignments only
once; others continue to discuss their work in each journal until the
assignment is due. The latter practice is more common during the
second semester, when students spend a great deal of time creating a
long research paper. Often, each stage of research is discussed in each
journal and there is a give-and-take between student and teacher as
problems arise and solutions are suggested. In the following exchange
between student and teacher, the student begins her journal with a
response to the teacher’s comment on a previous journal and then goes
on to raise a question about the development of a thesis sentence for
her research paper. The teacher’s response is included.
Student journal:
I finally did it. Last night I went to the library, and spent the whole evening
reading and taking notes from those books about “Modern Times”.
Managed to get what I want except three books were missing. I prefer to
do it this way. So that I know what I’m doing. Rather than bringing the
book everywhere I go and read it only when I’m free. Then I won’t know or
remember what’s what. This is what I mean when I told you I was going to
the library to do my research. There goes the answer to the mystery.
I have to apologize for written such a terrible thesis statement. I really take
it as a temporary one. When I wrote it, I never intend to use it. It’s just a
sentence to tell you where I’m heading. In fact, I find it difficult to have a

STUDENT-TEACHER WORKING JOURNALS 585

 thesis statement. What I’m aiming at is to use this silent movie as a mirror to
reflect as much about the 30’s as I could. IS this a valid research? Or must a
research paper be like an argumentative paper where the writer’s view is
clearly stated in the thesis statement?
Teacher response:
It doesn’t have to be argumentative, Your thesis could be “The silent movie
is a mirror which reflects the Thirties.” You may find that this is still too
broad a topic; more research and writing will help you narrow your focus.
However, you’re on the right track.
Not only can students use their working journals to search for and
develop topics and theses for papers, they can also discuss in them the
final stages of putting a paper together:
I am experiencing a very nice mood this week since it became clear that my
research paper has turned out decently. Before this past weekend I spent a
lot of time on reading and thinking. Most of the reading was “no dice” and
most of the thinking was dismal. I believe I did not get much out of my
reading because I turned up too few sources. I had to read almost every
sentence on a page where I would merely skim in Russian. The research
was so upsetting that my life lost its usual balance and rhythm for a month.
I did not pay the bills in time, did not reply to letters, hated a regular “How
are you?” question addressed to me. No question about normal sleep or
enjoying a movie.
When I put everything down, it turned out to be enough and it wasn’t so
bad. And I almost had two more weeks to polish it. When the first draft was
almost done, I hoped to make it more consistent by adding more to the
content. And then I saw the daylight. My confidence came back and I
changed my mind about adding more material (I also felt a space
constraint). I wrote a conclusion and stressed a few points there were in the
paper. Now I like it in general. It makes sense. I get back to it every night,
but for the last few days I have not changed anything.
Statistics is not a very pleasing topic for an English composition class and it
may take some effort to read it. I definitely failed to make the topic
enchanting but I hope I described it satisfactorily and showed my point of
view. I don’t have it typed yet, but life is blossoming again.
When we publish such student journals in our journals, we make the
whole class aware that writing is a process of discovery; all writers go
through several stages of composing, often in a back-and-forth move-
ment, as they attempt to clarify meaning (Murray 1978). As teachers,
we become aware that each of our students’ papers has its own history:
we learn about the difficulties and successes they have encountered
from inception to completion. This awareness has influenced the
comments we write on the papers we do correct and grade; we do not
evaluate only the final product but also take into consideration the
knowledge that writing is an enormously complex activity, especially
for second language learners.

586 TESOL QUARTERLY

 Although some students have trouble keeping journals regularly, we
find that the majority hand them in on time. We believe that the
teacher journal adds a dimension to the English class which inspires
students to take the journal assignment seriously, as it is part of a pact
made between the teacher and the students; we all have the same
assignment. Most students feel that because the teacher writes a
journal, it is an obligation on their part to do the same. One student
wrote:
Today I would like to write about my teacher’s journal that I get whenever
I give her mine. First of all, I think it is a good idea that she writes a journal
like her students, too. So I don’t consider it just as homework but something
that she likes to read it as well as I like to read hers. I personally think her
journal is like a message to me that makes me to give it an answer. It makes
me to write because I feel responsible to let her know what I got and am
getting from her or her class.
Writing our own journals takes very little time. Teacher journals can be
ready to hand out to a class in as few as ten minutes, if we handwrite a
short message directly onto a ditto master and then run it off on the
mimeograph machine; in as many as twenty minutes if we write or
type a longer message and/or include one or several quotations from
student journals. Of course what we write on any given day depends
on inspiration and time.
We find the more experience we have writing teacher working
journals, the easier it is to write them. When we first wrote, we were
not always sure what to say to our students. Even at the beginning of
each new course finding something to write can be difficult because
we do not know each student and the class does not initially have a
personality of its own. We sometimes find ourselves writing stiffly in
clichés, and using expressions such as “in this course you will discover
inner talents,” and of course feel dissatisfied with the results. At this
early point in the term we sometimes regret having made the commit-
ment to write.
But every term, without fail, something happens, something almost
magical. Our writing loosens up. We begin to look forward to writing
our journals. We sometimes have to stop ourselves to keep within a
self-imposed one-page limit. We often go over the limit because we are
brimming with quotations from student journals we want to share and
with ideas we want to express. We also use our journals to delineate
and formulate our own ideas. In the journals we communicate informa-
tion to the students and discuss our own ideas about the readings
and/or what has transpired in class. The following teacher journal, for
example, was written in response to several class discussions. Drawing
on a personal experience, the teacher was able to share a thought
related to the classroom experience:

STUDENT-TEACHER WORKING JOURNALS 587

 Do you ever wonder what makes some class discussions stimulating and
others less than that? I usually consider that subject from the point of view
of a teacher. Last week I reconsidered it as a student. I am participating in a
literature discussion class at the Cambridge Adult Education Center; we
are reading classic short stories: O’Connor, Singer, Joyce, Kafka, Chekhov,
etc. I embarrassingly admit to you that I didn’t do the reading for last
week’s class. I thought of skipping the class, but decided against that choice
since I usually enjoy the intellectual stimulation of the experience of
discussing literature with my peers.
But I didn’t enjoy myself at all. For one thing, I didn’t know what anyone
was referring to, so I felt left out. For another, I couldn’t contribute to the
conversation, so I felt frustrated. However, what bothered me most was the
apparent strain the teacher felt as she tried to evoke responses from the
class members. One normally expressive voice—mine—was silent and the
teacher had to work harder than usual to make the discussion lively. Every
time her questioning eyes met mine, I felt uncomfortable. After a while, I
just kept my head down, trying to give the impression that I was deeply
engrossed in the book. In fact, I did get a chance to speed read my way
through the rather long short story, but it was too late to contribute any
words of wisdom. I wanted to explain myself at the end of class, but that
seemed absurd; the class is a voluntary one, there are no grades, no tests, no
reprimands. So I simply went home and crawled into bed.
I learned more about teaching from this incident than I did about learning.
I’m not going to tell you all that you MUST do the reading and you MUST
participate in class. I just want you to realize that the relationship between a
teacher and her class is a mercurial one. It depends not only on a teacher’s
preparedness or on her ability to lead an invigorating discussion, but also on
the preparedness of the students and their ability or willingness to partici-
pate. Since these factors often do not coincide, it is obvious that not all
classes can possess the same quality. When they do, discussions are
energizing and will be remembered for a long time. They make it all
worthwhile.
This teacher journal had an impact on the class as a whole. After
students read it and had time to reflect upon it, they came to class
better prepared and the discussions improved dramatically. However,
although some of the teacher journals are attempts at the same kind of
creative activity the students are undertaking, not all of them have a
serious message. The next teacher journal was written while students
were working on papers concerning college-related problems:
One of our readings is about the problem of procrastination—the putting
off or postponing of things which need to get done, I know all about
procrastination. Procrastination and I are familiar companions, especially
when it comes to correcting papers. Some of you may feel that correcting
papers is easier than writing them, but having been both a student and a
teacher, I’m not convinced that that is true. I have mastered the art of

588 TESOL QUARTERLY

 postponing the correction process, and have become better at it than I ever
was at postponing the writing process.
For example: Last Monday, you gave me your completed papers. As
always, I gave myself one week to correct them. Since I also teach on
Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I could not, of course, correct them
on those days or on the nights before those classes, since I spent my time
reading and writing journals and preparing the lessons. Although I don’t
teach on Friday, I could not correct papers on Thursday night because I
myself take a class then. And since Friday is my only day off, I needed the
time to relax, shop, and cook. And that brought me to Friday night. I began
reading the essays, and thought, “oh these are wonderful; they’ll be easy to
correct. ” So I corrected two of them and then decided to finish them
Saturday morning. Saturday morning I did four more and then started
feeling sorry for myself. They weren’t so easy to correct. They took a lot of
concentration and required that I, as always, write my own little “essays” at
the end. So I took the rest of the day off. And, of course, I never work on
Saturday night.
Sunday morning, I did some more papers, all the while thinking, “is this any
way to spend a weekend?” So I went with the family to buy pumpkins, visit
a turkey farm, browse through some antique shops, and generally, to have
fun.
Sunday night. Sunday night! Sunday night? I thought I had left that
“Sunday-night-pit-in-the-stomach-sensation” behind me when I graduated.
How could I avoid that feeling? Procrastinate, of course. Watch “Master-
piece Theater” and read.
Of course I had to getup early this morning to face the task. I did the rest of
the papers (frantically, but with alacrity), then sat down to write this
journal. I have just enough time to eat, drive to work, run this off on the
machine, and be on time for class.
And, oh dear, on Wednesday, I will have another meeting with Procrastina-
tion. Problems, problems . . .
We have learned a lot since discovering the teacher working journal.
We empathize with our students; we know how difficult it can some-
times be to produce writing by a certain date, and to write even when
we are not inspired. We have learned about the writing process by
writing. We have learned, as they have, to find something to say just by
writing. We have learned to write honestly to a specific audience
within a specific context, to write frequently and easily, to experience
the delight of seeing our own words in print, and to experience the
satisfaction that comes with writing to be read and acknowledged.
Perhaps the significant feature of student-teacher working journals is
that they have enabled us to sustain an exchange of ideas with the
whole class; no one is writing in isolation. This frequent practice is
done for fifteen other living, breathing, interesting and interested

STUDENT-TEACHER WORKING JOURNALS 589

human beings. The journals establish a special spirit in the class, a
camaraderie. We learn from one another throughout the course. We
are not writing to a blank piece of paper; we are writing to one
another, trying to communicate within a context which is meaningful
to all of us. By reading our journals and by writing theirs, students
become more aware of the way most people really write, of some
ways in which they can learn to write, and of writing as a way to learn.

CONCLUSION
We and our students perceive some changes in their writing that
might be attributable to the journal project. However, we make no
claims about improvement in ESL student writing; the major thrust of
this article is a pedagogical one. Some research has been done on the
journal writing of native speakers, the focus of which is on amount and
frequency (Hull 1981) and on children’s communicative competence
and language functions (Staton, Shuy and Kreeft 1982). Our experience
with student-teacher working journals has raised questions about how
journals affect ESL college students’ writing attitudes, behaviors, and
ability.
We perceive, for example, that journal writing has had a positive
impact on ESL students’ writing attitudes and habits. As we discussed
earlier in this article, Raimes (1979) finds that ESL students are resistant
to classroom writing and to the English language itself. Does the
writing of journals in fact help to break down the barriers which exist
between the ESL student and school-sponsored writing and/or be-
tween the ESL student and the use of the written language? Are
students reluctant to write journals at the beginning of the course, and
do they find that journals are easier to write as the semester progresses
because they write journals regularly and often and/or because the
teacher also writes journals regularly and often? Are students afraid to
write because they are afraid of making mistakes, and do they lose
their fear of writing in the journals because the journals are not
corrected? Are students hesitant about experimenting with their writ-
ing, and do they use the journals to take risks because the journals are
not graded? If they find writing in journals easier and less intimidating,
does their new-found confidence affect their attitude toward other
class-related writing? Do students become more committed to writing
as a way of communicating ideas to others as a result of journal
writing, and does this commitment carry over to other writing assign-
ments? Do students generate more words faster in the journals as the
term progresses, and does this increase in amount and speed carry over
to other class-related writing because of the journals?

590 TESOL QUARTERLY

 How can such attitudes and behaviors be determined? One way is
through before-and-after questionnaires. Some instruments for mea-
suring attitude toward writing and writing anxiety already exist (see
Daly and Miller 1975, Bloom 1980). A case study approach which
includes interviews with students, observations of students in the
process of composing, and an analysis of their written work (see Zamel
1983) might be the most effective way to examine writing behaviors.
We also perceive that students better understand the purpose of
writing—to explore, develop, focus, organize, and finally to share
ideas with others—because they write journals. This, of course, is
difficult to measure. It has generally been the case that our students’
journals contain a focused and somewhat organized message which
they want to communicate to us and to which they expect a response.
To what extent does the expected teacher feedback, the awareness
that the student journal might be published in the teacher journal, and
the reading of the teacher journal itself contribute to the students’ sense
of the need for organization and purpose? Another complete study
could focus on the differences between writing samples of students
who have taken a writing course which includes the student-teacher
working journal component and students who have taken a similar
course which does not include this journal component. Writing samples
could be taken before, during, and after the courses. These writing
samples could be studied to determine whether there is a difference in
the ways in which the students incorporate principles of organization
and the rhetorical conventions of writing such as audience, purpose,
and thesis into their own writing. Do students who write working
journals exhibit more skill in their approach to these principles and
conventions than students who do not write working journals? Can it
be said that those students who have a better grasp of these principles
and conventions are more competent expository writers?
Of course, each question raises other questions; our suggestions are
not meant to be exhaustive or definitive. The working journals, it
seems clear, would be a rich resource for investigation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This article expands on a demonstration given at the 17th Annual TESOL Convention,
in Toronto, March, 1983.

STUDENT-TEACHER WORKING JOURNALS 591

THE AUTHORS
Ruth Spack is Adjunct Lecturer/Special Instructor for Foreign Students in the English
Department at Tufts University and Lecturer in English in the English Department at
Boston University. Her professional background includes ESL consulting and ESL
teaching in secondary schools and in adult education programs. She currently teaches
Freshman Composition and Intermediate Composition.

Catherine Sadow, a Coordinator at the English Language Center at Northeastern

University and a Lecturer in English in the English Department at Boston University,
teaches Intensive English and Freshman Composition for International Students. She
has taught English and ESL at the elementary and secondary levels and has had
extensive experience teaching immigrants in adult education programs.

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Book Company, Inc.
Macrorie, Ken. 1970. Uptaught. New York: Hayden Book Company, Inc.
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Staton, Jana. 1980. Writing and counseling: using a dialogue journal. Language
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Wood, Hugh B. 1978. Opening the classroom through the use of student
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(1):67-76.
Zamel, Vivian. 1982. Writing: the process of discovering meaning. TESOL
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STUDENT-TEACHER WORKING JOURNALS 593

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 TESOL QUARTERLY, Vol. 17, No. 4, December 1983

Increasing Learner Involvement

in Course Management
ANDREW PETER LITTLEJOHN
University College of Bahrain

This article explores ways in which learners can be brought into a

more central role in making decisions about the organization and
direction of their language courses. As an introduction, a review of
some of the arguments which support increasing learner involvement
is presented. Constraints in introducing such involvement are then
discussed, concentrating on learners’ prior experiences and expecta-
tions, and it is argued that what is required is a gradual approach
toward relinquishing the teacher’s dominant role. This argument is
taken up in a third section, where some materials and tasks are
presented which are designed to bring about such a relinquishment.

In recent years, there has been considerable debate over the need for
more learner-centered teaching approaches. For some, such approaches
refer to the design of syllabuses and course materials that more
accurately reflect the interests of learners and the situations in which
those learners are likely to require use of the target language. In terms
of this article, however, such approaches are not fully learner-centered
since they still involve a person other than the learner determining
what is to be learned and how. For that reason, the issue that is dealt
with here is how we may encourage learners to take more control over
the management of their own study both inside and outside the
classroom. The role of the teacher would therefore be that of a
learning adviser (i.e., someone who is experienced in the teaching/
learning process) or a knower (i.e., someone who can provide a ready
source of the language and, if necessary, can correct errors).

THE CASE FOR INCREASED LEARNER CONTROL

Among the many arguments in favor of allowing learners greater
control in the management of language courses, the following are
offered as an overview.

595
The “Risks” of Teacher Dominance
Teaching a language course involves making a large number of
decisions concerning a wide variety of topics. These include determin-
ing which samples of the target language to present, how much
guidance to offer, what the long term and short term teaching and
learning goals should be, how evaluation should be handled, which
methods and task types to implement, and what the general standards
in both target language attainment and classroom behavior should be.
According to Allwright (1978, 1981), the complexities involved in
managing these areas and making these decisions necessarily entail a
number of “risks” that can threaten to destroy the value of the
classroom experience for the learner. For example, there is the danger
that learners may feel “spoon-fed” if the language is broken down into
too many minute parts; they may be demoralized by standards that are
set too high or too low; they may be frustrated by an inappropriate
pace or teaching direction; they may be made to feel dependent on the
teacher for help or as a source of intelligible target language input; and
they may be confused by inadequate, improvised explanations or by
an inconsistent treatment of errors. These risks are so significant that
if one person tries to cope with the very considerable complexities of
managing everything that needs to happen in the classroom . . . [then] a
serious weakening of the value of the classroom experience for the learners
is virtually inevitable (Allwright 1978:105).
A teacher who assumes “direct and exclusive responsibility” for course
management is, according to Allwright, “professionally irresponsible.”
Similarly, Stevick (1976), using terms from Berne’s (1964) theory of
transactional analysis, argues that classroom activities often involve a
Parent-Child relationship between the teacher and the learners, where
the latter have abdicated their rights and responsibilities as Adults in
the face of the teacher, who is always right. In this situation, any
learning that takes place is more likely to be “defensive,” as learners
seek to protect themselves from the possibility of being exposed or
embarrassed. But this learning has, for the most part, no depth; it is like
a suit of armor and “is a burden, to be worn as little as possible and cast
off entirely (i. e., forgotten) at the first safe opportunity” (Stevick
1976:110).
Involving learners more in the management of their courses might
thus conceivably lead to a reduction of risks involved in conducting
exclusively teacher-directed classes and, at the same time, could
contribute to the development of a classroom atmosphere more
conducive to deeper or, as Stevick terms it, “receptive” learning.

596 TESOL QUARTERLY

The Nature of Language Learning
Our understanding of the process of language learning is still far
from complete. Some teachers and course designers have, however,
tended to assume that there is a set route through the learning task,
both in terms of linguistic content and teaching/learning methods. Yet,
it seems reasonable to suggest that we should not expect every student
to learn in the same way, at the same rate, or to have the same interests
and abilities as everyone else. Rather, there may in fact be as many
approaches to language learning as there are language learners. Seen in
this light, the traditional teacher-led classroom can only be a partially
successful arrangement. Since the content and organization of a lesson
may not necessarily be appropriate for each individual learner, there is
a possibility that such teacher-led classes may actually do more to
hinder language learning than to facilitate it (see, for example, Krashen
[1982:68-70] on how a grammatically sequenced course may obstruct
language acquisition). For a more efficient and effective use of
resources, therefore, learners need to be encouraged to share in
managing the learning task. We need to move away from the teacher’s
“I think you need this” and more toward the learner’s “I know I need
this.” Such a shift implies some kind of learner training, the issue
discussed in the second half of this article.

Communication as a Goal and a Method

One of the most significant changes in English language teaching
recently has been the movement toward so-called “communicative”
approaches. In almost all cases this simply refers to the teaching of
items of language use (functions/notions) rather than of language form
(grammar) and to an increased amount of oral work. Breen and
Candlin (1979, in press), however, argue that if our goal is to develop
communicative skills, then our method should itself be communica-
tive—that is, it should involve the exchange and negotiation of ideas
and feelings about the learning process, with the teacher as co-
participant, not dominant, in the group. The classroom, in this case, is
no longer “ a pale representation of some outside communicative
reality” (1979:98) where learners are engaged in rehearsing for a
performance at some later time and place. It offers instead an
opportunity for “realistically motivated communication” as learners
share their views about the learning process.

Motivation
Experiments conducted by Beach (1974) with tutorless groups of
college students in psychology, and by Littlejohn (1982a; discussed

INCREASING LEARNER INVOLVEMENT 597

further in 1982b) with tutorless groups studying beginning Spanish,
have found that small-group independent study can lead to increased
motivation to learn. The evidence presented by Beach (based on
observer reports) and by Littlejohn (based on participants’ responses
to a questionnaire) identify similar factors leading to this increased
motivation. Participants felt free to speak, to make mistakes, and to
contribute their own experiences, all of which gave them a feeling of
being supported in their difficulties with learning. In contrast, the
participants had often felt inhibited or intimidated in teacher-led
classes, either by the presence of the teacher-expert or by the presence
of other students with whom they were working in competition, rather
than cooperation.
An increase in motivation was also reported by Fitz-Gibbon and
Reay (1982) after conducting a slightly different, although related,
experiment in an inner-city school in England. Prior to the experiment,
in which 14-year-olds were involved in tutoring 1l-year-olds in French,
three quarters of all of the pupils reported hating the language and
considered it “a useless subject” (1982:40). The pupils were asked to
rank school subjects in terms of how much they liked them and, after
the experiment, the researchers found “a statistically significant positive
shift in the ranks assigned to French” (1982:42).

Quality and Quantity of Subject Matter Learned

According to Allwright, encouraging learners to become more
involved in course management should bring about “a direct improve-
ment in their language learning” since they would “take much more
responsibility for identifying and repairing their errors” (1981: 11).
There appear to be few, if any, experiments that specifically test this
claim in relation to language learning. Evidence available from other
areas, however, is supportive of the belief that increased learner
involvement leads to increased subject matter mastery. Beach, in the
experiment noted above, reported “an increased ability to apply
principles studied” (1974: 198) and found that tutorless groups scored
higher in a final achievement test than did tutor-led control groups.
Similar results have been reported by Faw (described in Rogers 1969),
Hovey (1973), and Webb and Grib (1967).

Other Desirable Effects

In addition to the gains described above, students who are more
deeply involved in controlling their own learning characteristically
develop in other ways as well. Beach found that tutorless groups
showed “increased interpersonal skills, sense of responsibility for one’s

598 TESOL QUARTERLY

growth and learning, improvements in critical thinking and lasting
curiosity aroused by the learning” (1974:198). Similarly, Gruber and
Weitman concluded that placing a major responsibility on the students
for their own education could lead to “developing attitudes which
result in the students’ continuing search for knowledge after the formal
experience is over” (1962, reported in Beach 1974:192).
It is interesting to note that some significant gains in this respect can
be made in what would generally be termed educationally “difficult”
circumstances. Williams (1930), in one of the earliest experiments with
Self-Directed Learning, reported on a 6-month project with delinquent
children in the United States. After administering pre- and post-tests,
he concluded that
a group of delinquent boys of varying ages and capacities will, if given the
opportunity and supervision, improve more in educational age when left
alone than they will under ordinary schoolroom conditions with formal
instruction (1930:718).
While it may be the case that formal instruction today is quite different
from what it was in 1930, it is worth recalling that Fitz-Gibbon and
Reay’s work in an inner-city school in England in 1982 (described
above) also found gains among learners as a result of increasing learner
involvement.

The case for involving learners more in the management of their

courses thus seems quite compelling. It is, however, clear that we
cannot simply abandon our learners—especially when they have taken
a deliberate step in enrolling for a language class. Probably the greatest
constraint in applying notions of learner control is the learners them-
selves, an issue to which we now turn.

CONSTRAINTS IN IMPLEMENTATION
There is a widespread belief that in order to learn one has to be
taught. Learners normally place considerable expectations on the
teacher to organize their exposure to the language and show them how
to study. Such expectations reveal the existence of dominant assump-
tions about the most effective modes of learning, so we should not be
surprised if learners view any attempt to involve them more in course
management as either very threatening or irresponsible.
Part of such a reaction is, of course, quite understandable. Learners,
not normally being called upon to think about the planning and
implementation of a course, often have rather naive views about the
nature of language and language learning. Our demanding that they
take more control over course management might thus leave them
INCREASING LEARNER INVOLVEMENT 599
feeling exposed and uncertain. In setting up the teacherless Spanish
groups noted above, typical initial comments of the students were “But
we don’t know how Spanish should be taught” and “How will we
know if we’re making mistakes?” (Littlejohn 1982a:5). Perhaps it is in
situations such as these that the full force of Stevick’s Parent-Child
analysis can be seen.
However, in desiring that our learners assume more control, we are
not demanding that they possess a specific body of knowledge, but
rather some definite personal qualities. These may include the ability
to tolerate ambiguity, to take risks, to study alone, and to suspend
doubts. Interestingly, it is just these qualities that are said to be found
in “good language learners” (see, for example, Naiman, Frohlich,
Stern, and Todesco 1977, Rubin 1975), which may partly explain why
experiments with students who volunteer for small-group independent
learning often prove so successful. Introducing such learner-centered
approaches as a general course requirement would almost certainly
bring different results. We need, therefore, to move very cautiously.
Given the difficulties involved and the general, if understandable,
naiveté of learners in regard to issues of course management, we need
to view any attempts at increasing learner involvement as a process
involving the gradual and continual refinement of the learners’ ability
to perceive and manage the learning task. We should not, therefore, be
so much interested in what learners say about the content and form of
their course as in the process by which they arrive at their opinions. In
terms of practical implementation, this seems to suggest the devising
of open-ended tasks that stimulate learners to think more deeply about
how their language course is being conducted and gradually to take a
more meaningful role in directing its scope and method. It is the design
of such tasks that now concerns us.

IDEAS FOR COURSE AND MATERIALS DESIGN

The ideas that are presented here stem from experiments carried out
at the University College of Bahrain with two groups of Arab students
with lower intermediate ability in English who, having failed the
preparatory year, were required to repeat a semester in General
English, six hours per week for 14 weeks. These students (24 in all)
were generally considered to be lacking in motivation and had had
little or no experience with communicative approaches or methods
involving group work or pair work. They saw language learning as the
study of grammar and vocabulary and the roles of teacher and learner
as clearly separated. They were in no way specially selected for the
purpose of the experiment.

600 TESOL QUARTERLY

 Since the desire was to involve the students more in decisions con-
cerning course conduct, it would have been inappropriate to draw up a
linguistic syllabus (e.g., a list of structures/functions to be covered)
prior to the commencement of the course. Clearly, however, some
direction or focus was needed, particularly in the light of the learners’
previous experience. The approach taken, therefore, was to devise a
set of principles which classroom activities were to work toward fulfil-
ling. From the points set out in support of more learner control, the
following principles seemed to suggest themselves:
1. Language would be presented and experienced as “communicative
behavior,” not as an abstract system of formal rules.
2. The course would not only attend to the end-of-course needs of the
students but also to their wants as they arose during the course (i. e.,
learning would proceed in a direction and at a pace appropriate for
the learners).
3. The course would take as its starting point the prior experience of
the students as language learners and as “communicators,” and this
experience would be mobilized and exploited in the classroom.
4. The course would seek to involve and interest the students and to
maximize motivation.
5. The course would seek to develop self-sufficiency in the students
(i.e., they would be encouraged to make their own decisions over
what and how to learn and to identify and correct their errors).
6. The teacher would be “co-participant” and “co-communicator” in
the group, seeking not to determine how to learn but to stimulate
and advise.
In terms of practical implementation, it was decided that the course
would consist of three components: Language Learning Workshops,
which would be concerned with developing the students’ awareness of
the “what” and “how” of language learning; Formal Linguistic Input,
concerned with the presentation and practice of linguistic knowledge,
such as grammar, functions/notions, and vocabulary; and Activities,
which would give the students greater experience in the range of pos-
sible classroom methods. Obviously, these components were not dis-
crete categories, since any attempt to develop an awareness of the
“what” and “how” of language learning would have to be carried out
through some kind of “activity.” These components, rather, reflected
the concern that the students’ progress toward exercising greater control
should not be constrained by their lack of experience with possible ways
of approaching language learning. The ideas that follow, therefore,

INCREASING LEARNER INVOLVEMENT 601

represent some of the tasks that were given to the students to widen
their experience and gradually bring them into a more central role.1

MATERIALS AND TASKS

The Questionnaire

This questionnaire was given to the students in the first session of the
course. After briefly discussing the type of answers one could give, the
teacher asked the students to complete it privately in English. Re-
sponses to each question were then compiled on the board and served
as the basis for a general discussion. The purpose of the questionnaire
was to demonstrate from the beginning that the students’ experiences
and opinions were to be drawn upon, and to encourage them to start
considering the relevant issues.

Review of Previous Textbook

In this task the students were split into small groups, each being
allotted sections of grammar work from their last textbook. They were
then asked to examine each section in terms of what it required them to
1 Itshould be noted that the purpose of these tasks was not to provide opportunities for
practicing/communicating in the foreign language itself, although this, of course, may have
been an added bonus.

602 TESOL QUARTERLY

do and how difficult or easy they found it. This activity encouraged a
considerable amount of discussion but, since the class was composed
entirely of Arab students, the discussion was mainly in Arabic. This
was not felt to be a problem, however, since demanding that the task
be done in English would have prevented effective communication
and defeated the purpose of the activity. The results of the group
discussions were collected and a list of areas of grammar was drawn
up in descending order of difficulty. An additional purpose of the
activity was to give the students experience in working cooperatively
without ongoing teacher direction.

Students as Teachers
Working from the list of grammar topics which was produced, the
teacher asked for volunteers to research an area of grammar, present
their findings to the group as a whole, and provide exercises, tasks,
games, and other activities for practice. For this activity, the research-
ers were given advice and guidance and were provided with relevant
reference texts (grammars, dictionaries, and other textbooks). Once in
the class, however, the teacher sat among the students and only gave
assistance when called upon to do so. The purpose of these activities
was to encourage the students to listen to each other and to become
involved in thinking more deeply about organizing their learning.
Sessions with a “student as teacher” had a characteristically more
relaxed atmosphere than teacher-led sessions, and the students felt
much freer to make mistakes, correct each other, and ask questions.
Initially, the students showed a considerable range of abilities in
leading such sessions, but, as the course progressed and they developed
a clearer idea of what was expected, they became more expert in
formulating their research findings and devising interesting and unusual
practice activities. It was significant that in those sessions where the
researchers clearly had not prepared sufficiently, the others in the class
were, nevertheless, eager to contribute ideas.

INCREASING LEARNER INVOLVEMENT 603

 After presenting the students with two different ways of making a
request in Arabic, a discussion was started to encourage the students to
think about factors that might influence the form of an utterance—for
example, the roles of the speakers, the topic, and the situation. The
purpose of this activity was to demonstrate that knowledge of a
language not only consists of rules of grammar and related formal
features but also of “rules of use’’—illustrated by the plus symbol (+) in
the above diagram. The conclusions of this discussion were referred to
periodically as various functional items of English were introduced in
the course (e.g., how to agree/disagree, ask for permission, and so
forth).

Group Error Correction

The students were divided into small groups, each group being
given a tape recorder in order to record their version of a roleplay.
During the recording, students frequently stopped the tape and sought
help from each other. As a follow-up to this activity, the groups were
asked to listen to their recording, stop the tape where they thought
they heard a mistake, and then discuss the correct form. The task sheet
(above) was supplied to give them a focus. The purpose of this task
was, once again, to encourage the students to make use of each other,
drawing on the teacher only when necessary, and to think more deeply
about the type of errors they typically made.

General Error Correction

In line with the purpose of the above task, the errors which students
made in their homework were not corrected by the teacher. Instead, a
mark was made only to show that there was a mistake, sometimes
indicating the type (e.g., spelling, tense). Additionally, students were
encouraged to exchange their homework and discuss it with each
other.

604 TESOL QUARTERLY

Student-Directed Lessons
The introduction of student-directed lessons marked the final step
toward learner control of course management. After approximately
the eighth week of the course, when it was felt by the teacher that the
students could profitably begin to organize themselves and draw upon
their experiences with the tasks set out above, two of their six hours in
English a week were designated as “student-directed.” For this, the
class was divided into groups of five or six, each group planning and
carrying out its own learning activities together, with the teacher
giving advice or correction only when called upon to do so. The
remaining four teacher-led hours were used as an opportunity to
continue to introduce students to other possible activities or approaches
or to remind them of ones they had already experienced.
As specific preparation for this last step, the class had previously
been divided into smaller groups and assigned the task of compiling a
list of 1) all the activities they could remember having done in a
language class (e.g., dictations, roleplays, listening comprehension
activities), 2) all the activities they had found useful or enjoyable, and
3) their ideas about what they felt they wanted or needed to learn in
English. These lists thus formed a ready source of ideas for their
student-directed lessons. Once the groups had experienced a few
sessions by themselves, a general discussion was initiated to consider
the problems of learning without teacher direction. From this discus-
sion, groups were encouraged to draw up their own set of rules or code
of conduct for their student-directed lessons. Typically, the following
rules were agreed upon:
1. Only speak English. Only speak another language if it is very
necessary.
2. Help each other and correct each other’s mistakes.
3. Only ask the teacher after you have asked the others in the group.
4. At each session, make a different person responsible for preparing
something to bring to the next meeting.
In their groups, students carried out a full range of the methods and
activities commonly used by a teacher (dictations, grammar, explana-
tions, pair work, dialogue building, communication games, and so
forth). The atmosphere in these lessons was, as noted before, very
relaxed and open, and the students freely helped each other and
explained points to each other. Whereas it had always been difficult to
persuade the students to speak in English when the teacher was in full
control, it was particularly noticeable that in these sessions English was
spoken more frequently than Arabic. The students were also much
more prepared to use reference books than they had previously been.

INCREASING LEARNER INVOLVEMENT 605

FINAL COMMENTS
From the remarks made throughout the description of the above
tasks, it should be clear that the students responded very positively to a
movement toward placing more control in their hands. For students
who had been described as “very heavy going,” they began to display
considerable energy and enthusiasm for their student-directed lessons,
the fruits of which became readily apparent. Three other traditional
teacher-led groups were run simultaneously with students of the same
type and ability who had similarly failed the preparatory year. At the
end of the semester all students were required to re-take the examina-
tion they had failed the previous semester. On the average, the
students in the experimental groups showed an improvement in their
scores equal to or above that of the other students, confirming a point
made by Beach that self-directed small group study “does not result in
any decrement in subject matter mastery” (1974:197). Something,
however, that the test did not (and could not) reveal is that these
students had begun to develop skills and attitudes that went far
beyond just the learning of English. The value of the approach lay
particularly in the sense of responsibility that the students developed
and in their subsequent change from a passive to an active role in the
classroom. The requirements of the student-directed lessons brought
the students into greater involvement with the course texts and
stimulated them to take the initiative to look beyond those texts on
their own,
It would, however, be incorrect to suggest that there were no
difficulties in implementing the ideas presented in this article. The
students, coming from a very traditional background in almost all
respects, initially showed considerable resistance to or lack of compre-
hension of the purpose behind the tasks, uppermost in their minds
being the examination which they knew they were to re-take. Students
in the teacher-led classes could comfort themselves in the belief that
the teacher was aware of the contents of the final examination and
would therefore teach accordingly. Such comfort, however, gradually
became unavailable to the students in the experimental groups as they
were required to take more control over the form and content of the
course. These students were, therefore, not only forced to work harder
to discover facts about the language, but they were also required to
tolerate a high degree of uncertainty about the relevance of those facts.
Thus, although there was no noticeable decline in morale among these
particular students, one can speculate that the conflict between a
learner-centered approach, as described in this article, and a formal
examination-based system could lead to student demoralization.

606 TESOL QUARTERLY

 The argument put forward in this article has been that increased
learner involvement in course management can offer benefits in terms
of depth of learning, motivation, and attitude toward studying. It was
noted, however, that learners’ prior experience and expectations often
make it difficult to introduce such a learner-centered approach. For
this reason, one might expect that the ideas outlined here would prove
more effective in cultures that place less emphasis on the authority of
the teacher/leader and more on contributions by individuals. Similar-
ly, one might also expect that the approach would be suitable for
students who are already in tertiary education and thus, to some extent,
experienced in self-directed study. Yet, the relative success of this
experiment, given the background of the students involved, points to
an interesting conclusion: that if adopted in a careful and gradual way,
learner-centered approaches can offer significant gains among other-
wise passive, teacher-dependent students.
■

THE AUTHOR
Andrew Littlejohn teaches at the University College of Bahrain and is Coordinator of
Student Self-Access Facilities. He holds an M.A. in Linguistics for English Language
Teaching from the University of Lancaster, England.

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Quarterly 9 (1):41-51.
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Newbury House.
Webb, N. J., and T. G. Grib. 1967. Teaching process as a learning experience:
the experimental use of student-led discussion groups. W e s t D e P e r e ,
Wisconsin: St. Norbert College.
Williams, H. P. 1930. Experiments in self-directed education. School and
Society 31:715-718.

608 TESOL QUARTERLY

 TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 17, No 4, December 1983

The Least You Should Know About Arabic:

Implications for the ESL
Writing Instructor
KARYN THOMPSON-PANOS
University of Colorado
MARIA THOMAS-RUZIC
Fulbright Foundation

A concern for the particular needs of university-bound Arabic-

speaking students has been shared by many in ESL. Out of this
concern, and especially out of concern for the characteristic English
writing deficiencies of many Arab ESL students, various aspects of
written Arabic—from orthographical conventions to rhetorical de-
vices—are discussed. These contrasting features have been identified
as potential contributors to observed error production and weaknesses
in some reading skills, but most particularly in writing skills. Ideally, a
better understanding of the language background of Arab students
can aid the ESL specialist in better addressing the special needs of
these students through supplemental curricular objectives and ap-
propriate exercises.
Although contrastive analysis is no longer seen as a foundation for
instructional programs (Schachter 1974), it can be a useful tool in
understanding characteristic language-learning weaknesses demon-
strated by a particular language group. Implicit in this article is the
assumption that a familiarity with some salient contrasting features of
written Arabic and English may prove valuable to those in ESL
concerned with addressing noted weaknesses in Arab students’ English
writing skills.

DIGLOSSIA IN THE ARAB WORLD

Altoma (1969) and others have described the phenomenon of
diglossia, which exists throughout the Arab world. There are at least
two distinct languages in every Arab country: Classical Arabic, also
known in slightly modernized forms as Literary or Modern Standard
Arabic, and colloquial Arabic. It is colloquial Arabic in its many
regional varieties that is the first language for all Arabs. It is learned
without formal instruction and, until very recently, was virtually never

609
written or read (there is now some drama written in the colloquial).
Modern Standard Arabic, on the other hand, is the language of written
communication and the form used for speeches, lectures, and on radio
and television. It is, in a sense, a second language learned only through
formal education. Large differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and
grammar exist between Modern Standard and the various colloquial.
These differences, coupled with the basic phenomenon of diglossia
itself, pose obvious problems in trying to address the notion of
contrastive features and native-language sources of error. One hypoth-
esis which has been proposed for further research, for example, is that
errors in writing result from interference from Classical Arabic, while
speech interference comes from the colloquial (Scott and Tucker
1974).

WRITING SYSTEM
Because poor handwriting can detract from the writer’s ideas,
organization, and style, supplemental instruction in handwriting for
students whose native alphabet is not Roman can result in improved
legibility and the elimination of a major distraction to the reader.
Middle Eastern students in particular have been found to have more
difficulty in handwriting in English than students from other language
backgrounds (Nevarez, Berk, and Hayes 1979). Simple recognition of
certain basic mechanical features of written Arabic can assist the ESL
teacher in addressing this problem.
First of all, the Arabic alphabet, which is also used in a number of
non-Arab countries, differs significantly from the Roman alphabet.
There is little distinction between printing and script, and there are no
capital letters. The Arabic alphabet contains twenty-eight letters, some
of which have as many as four different shapes depending on their
position in a word. In addition, Arabs write through the lines on their
paper, rather than on top of them. However, perhaps the most notable
contrast between the Arabic and Roman writing systems is that Arabic
moves from right to left. This feature of Arabic, in addition to the very
different appearance of its letters, which are formed by a series of
strokes rather than a continuous flow, can pose problems for Arab
learners when they form letters in English writing tasks. In reading,
moreover, recognition of letters and words, handwritten as well as
printed, can be a very deliberate and time-consuming process for the
Arabic speaker decoding an unfamiliar alphabet.
Not only the special difficulties of working in a foreign alphabet, but
also the purely physical problem of adapting to an opposite direction
of movement in reading and writing should be considered when the
Arab learner is compared to faster, more proficient readers and writers

610 TESOL QUARTERLY

in the mixed ESL classroom. Speed, then, becomes a major obstacle in
many reading and writing tasks, such as skimming, scanning, dictation,
and note-taking.

SPELLING
Foreign learners of English, as well as many native English speakers,
are plagued by difficulties in spelling. Although the morphophonemics
qualities of the English spelling system may be recognized by some
linguists (C. Chomsky 1970, N. Chomsky and Halle 1968, Schane
1970), its regularities are certainly not appreciated by most second
language learners. While it may be reassuring to learn that nearly
eighty-five percent of all English words have a regular spelling (Miller
1973), the number of rules and exceptions is considerable and the
nature of the rules relatively complex. These aspects of English
spelling, when combined with the fact that the Arabic writing con-
ventions and vowel system are vastly different, contribute to particular
spelling difficulties for Arab learners. Spelling errors constituted the
single most common error found in a study of freshman compositions
at the University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia (Beck
1979). In fact, errors in spelling were so pervasive that ninety-eight
percent of all paragraphs examined contained at least one spelling
error, with the majority containing many more. Ibrahim (1978) ex-
amined spelling errors in the written work of undergraduates at the
University of Jordan and found that the majority of errors fell into the
following (sometimes overlapping) categories:
1. Errors caused by the non-phonetic nature of English spelling, such
as the inconsistency in spelling the weak vowels (*husbund, *bigin-
ner)
2. Errors caused by differences between the sound systems of English
and Arabic, such as the substitution of the letter b for p as in
*beoble (Arabic does not have two distinctive bilabial plosives,
only the voiced /b/) and hypercorrected spelling that represents
both b and p as p (*hapit, *compination)
3. Errors attributed to analogy, such as *languidge (compare knowl-
edge), *maney (compare money), and *toled (compare liked)
4. Errors attributed to the somewhat inconsistent spelling in English
word derivation, such as high/ *hight and speak/ *speach
5. Transitional errors resulting from ignorance or overgeneralization
of a spelling rule.
From our personal experience with Arabic speakers in the classroom,
we would suggest an additional category of errors caused by differences

THE LEAST YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT ARABIC 611

in the orthographic representation of the common vowel sounds in the
two languages. We have observed a notable inconsistency in the way
many Arabic speakers represent vowels in written English. For ex-
ample, we discovered that one student spelled his name M–u–h-a–
m-a-d on some occasions and M-o-h–a–m–e-d on others. His records
revealed still another spelling— M-o-h-a-–m–m-a–d. These variations
point to an obvious conclusion: the systems for representing vowels in
the two languages lack close correspondence. In written Arabic the

are articulated, they are not represented orthographically. An examina-

tion of the vowel system in Arabic can help to clarify this fact.
Modern Standard Arabic makes use of a six-vowel system; there are
three pairs of vowels, the vowels in each pair distinguished by length.

first members of these pairs, the long variants, are the only ones always
represented in writing. The shorter variants are not; rather, they are
indicated only in children’s books, the Qur’an, and special texts (e. g.,
texts for foreigners) by diacritical markings placed above the conso-
nant that precedes the vowel sound. The triangular system of Arabic
vowels has broken down in the spoken colloquial, the short vowel
variants having taken on a more centralized, shwa– like quality. None-
theless, in terms of writing, the conventions for vowel representation
have important implications for spelling in English. First, it is not
uncommon for syllables and even whole words in Arabic to be spelled

therefore, that vowels in English words are often omitted altogether by

Arab students. Second, the English vowel system is relatively complex.
Spoken English distinguishes eleven or more (depending on dialect)
distinctive vowel phones, but in writing makes use of only six vowel
graphs (including y). The meaningful vowel variations found, for
example, in beat, bit, bait, bet, pot, bat, bought, boat, put, but, boot,
and bout can be difficult for the Arab to discriminate in listening,
speaking, and reading, as well as in writing. Take, for example, the

boot, boat, and bought. All of these distinct sounds in English would
be allophonic variants for the Arab, that is, not meaningfully distinct.
In written Arabic these sounds would all be represented by the same
vowel graph. Many transliterated Arabic words and names illustrate
the lack of a one-to-one correspondence with English: Muslim a n d
Moslem, Qur’an and Koran, Muhamad and M o h a m e d .
The instructor should be sensitive, then, to the difficulties all stu-
dents face in the task of English spelling, especially in the matter of
vowels. Furthermore, in the case of the Arab learner, the instructor
who is aware of the very different writing and spelling convention

612 TESOL QUARTERLY

which characterize written Arabic will be better able to provide useful
assistance. A systematic presentation of the meaningful vowel variations
found in spoken English and their most common representations in
writing is perhaps the best way to approach such spelling problems. In
addition, the relationship of spelling to word families, roots, and
derivations should be pointed out in order to help students to recognize
the regularities that do exist in English orthography.

VOCABULARY
Insofar as we are concerned here with writing and word-level
problems, certain remarks can be made with reference to English
vocabulary and the Arab learner.
Arab and Asian students in the mixed ESL class are often at a
disadvantage in terms of vocabulary when they are compared with
students from Romance and Germanic language backgrounds, which
feature many cognates. Limitations of vocabulary can be an obstacle in
all language skill areas. ESL instructors might observe that their Arab
students characteristically make relatively little use of a dictionary.
Although there are cultural and educational reasons for the observed
lack of good dictionary skills among Arab students, it is also the case
that using a dictionary in Arabic is a difficult task because words in an
Arabic dictionary are arranged according to their word root.
The three-consonant word-root system, which is the basis of most of
the lexicon, is one of the most outstanding features of Arabic and other
Semitic languages. For example, the verb to study has the root d–r-s in
Arabic. Related nouns, verbs, and adjectives such as to teach, teacher,
studious, studies, school are formed by adding different prefixes,
infixes, and suffixes to the root. Early Arab lexicographers began the
practice of entering all words in the dictionary under the root, and this
has remained as the basis of organization for Arabic dictionaries. Using
the dictionary in Arabic can be understandably difficult (somewhat
comparable to looking up the English word misconceived under cept).
Many of our Arab students, for these and other reasons, have not
acquired good dictionary habits for reading and writing.
For the writing instructor trying to aid students in making greater
use of varied vocabulary, two implications can be seen from the
Arabic word-root-based lexicon: 1) additional instruction and practice
in developing English dictionary skills should be provided, and 2) the
concept of word derivation should be exploited. By this we mean that
analyzing a word and using its different forms (e. g., to criticize,
critic, criticism, critical) is a familiar concept for Arabic speakers,
who can learn to express themselves better in writing by applying
high-frequency derivational forms in English. Once again, systematic

THE LEAST YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT ARABIC 613

presentation and practice of selected affixes enables the students to
learn an entire system of vocabulary rather than individual words. It
should be noted, however, that knowing the various word forms of a
given lexical item does not necessarily mean that students will be able
to use these correctly. Beck (1979) found that word-form errors were
the sixth most common written error in his study of Arab students’
writing, occurring in approximately fifty percent of all paragraphs
studied. Arabic and English have differing distributions of nouns,
verbs, and adjectives, and often errors in word use are related to
semantic and distributional differences in use rather than to structural
dissimilarities.

SYNTACTIC FEATURES
Basic familiarity with some of the structural and syntactic differ-
ences between Arabic and English can be quite useful to the typical
ESL teacher faced with a heterogeneous, multi-cultural group of
foreign students, each with his or her own special needs and weaknesses.
An error analysis by Scott and Tucker (1974) found the four most
problematic grammatical features of English for Arabic-speaking
students to be verbs, prepositions, articles, and relative clauses, Studies
done by Mukattash (1981) and Beck (1979) support this observation.
Preposition misuse is largely a lexical problem, involving significant
Arabic interference and infrequent miscommunication (Scott and
Tucker 1974), and therefore will not be treated in this article. First
language (Ll) interference also accounts for at least half of the errors
with articles, a significant portion of which result from omission of the
indefinite article (Scott and Tucker 1974). Although there is an
indefinite morphological marker in Arabic, it is usually unspoken and
unwritten, so indefiniteness is indicated by the absence of a definite
article. Extension of this principle in learning a second language
frequently results in the Arab student’s overlooking the indefinite
article in English. It must be realized, however, that the use of articles
in English is problematic for students from many language groups and
should be addressed as difficulties arise. Because verb usage and
relative clause formation are more complex problems and are par-
ticularly pervasive in Arabic students’ written English, they merit fuller
discussion here.

Verbs
To begin with, one of the most frequent verb errors among Arab
students is the omission of the copula. Even advanced students on
occasion make such errors as *he absent or *my teacher very angry.

614 TESOL QUARTERLY

These sentences, although ungrammatical in English, would be well
formed in Arabic. They are examples of equational sentences, which
correspond to English sentences with be in the present tense affirma-
tive. The major difference here is that there is no surface-structure
copula or verb present in Arabic sentences of this type. If transferred
to English, errors such as those above result, with the copula omitted.
This structure persists in being problematic for many Arab students, as
Beck (1979) and Scott and Tucker (1974) have demonstrated. In
addition, Arabic tends to use verbs to describe states more frequently
than English. Bateson (1967) cites the example of Arabic preferring h e
grieves or he rages to he is unhappy or he is angry.
Perhaps a more complex problem to analyze and address in the
writing classroom is the actual misuse of verb forms in English.
Because the rules governing the use of verbs in Arabic sentences are
quite distinct from those in English, an examination of the Arabic verb
system is essential if the students’ difficulties are to be understood.
First of all, Arabic is a highly aspectual language. While English can
combine a number of tenses with simple, perfective, and progressive
aspects, Arabic makes two basic distinctions: the perfect and imperfect
aspects. The perfect is used to describe a completed action (frequently
in the past), while the imperfect describes a situation not yet completed
(often in the present or future). However, since these aspects derive
their meaning from the point of view of the completion or incomple-
tion of an activity rather than the time of completion or incompletion,
both aspects may be used to describe an action in the past, present, and
future. For example, Abboud et al. (1975) indicate in their textbook on
Modern Standard Arabic that the imperfect is used to describe a past
habitual, past progressive, or past future activity, while the perfect is
used to denote a completed event or to describe actions that would
require the present perfect or past perfect in English.
Since the forms of the Arabic verb have little actual time reference
(in the English sense), certain invariable particles and conjugated
auxiliary verbs can be employed to lend various modal and temporal
meanings which might not be clear from context. These particles,
which in form resemble English modals or other auxiliary verbs, are
used with fully conjugated perfect or imperfect verbs. Problems in
English can result if AUX + participle or MODAL + base-form verb
are confused with the PARTICLE + perfect or imperfect verb con-
struction in Arabic. For example, the following errors produced by
Arab students are not uncommon: *I didn’t went to school, *She might
didn’t understand.
In addition, progressive aspect in Arabic is frequently indicated by
adjectives derived from the roots of verbs, in which case the sentence
becomes equational rather than verbal. The question Where are you

THE LEAST YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT ARABIC 615

going? in English uses the present progressive form of the verb go. The
same question in Arabic, however, would employ a dynamic adjective
derived from the verb, as in Where you going?, in which g o i n g
functions as an adjective.
Another serious problem for Arab learners of English is the misuse of
verb tenses (Mukattash 1981). Although the task of correctly forming
the various verb tenses is in itself manageable, control over the distri-
bution rules for the usage of the English tenses seems to be a late ac-
quisition in the learning of the verb system (Scott and Tucker 1974).
One frequently observed source of inconsistency and difficulty for
Arab students is the sequence of tenses across clauses.
In Arabic, temporal clauses are frequently in the imperfect (present)
tense. The meaning and time reference of the verb in a subordinate
clause are derived from the time of the verb in the main clause.
Therefore, an imperfect verb in a subordinate clause following a
perfect verb in the main clause refers to past time (Abboud et al. 1975).
For example, the following sentence, translated directly from Arabic,
shows how the imperfect tense in a subordinate clause refers to the
same time as the verb in the main clause:
The minister arrived (perfect) while he carries (imperfect) an important
letter from the president (Abboud et al. 1975:435).
Here, the imperfect tense denotes an action taking place at the same
time as the main verb. In English, the same idea would be expressed
by the following sentence:
The minister arrived carrying an important letter from the president.
The following sentence from Arabic is an example of the use of the
perfect tense with a particle in the subordinate clause:
The reporter returned (perfect) to his country while he (particle) talked
(perfect) with the president (Abboud et al. 1975:437).
The use of the perfect aspect in subordinate clauses indicates a
completed action, and the particle clarifies the sequence of events. The
most unambiguous translation in English would be:
The reporter returned to his country after having talked with the president.
It is this type of construction that indicates maturity of style to native
English speakers. The differing rules governing tense distribution in
subordinate clauses of Arabic and English can result in ambiguous or
poorly formed complex sentences if Arabic speakers do not recognize
them. To deal with problems of English tense usage, meaningful
exercises illustrating both tense and aspect discrimination should be
provided. Particular emphasis should be given to temporal clauses and

616 TESOL QUARTERLY

the progressive and perfective aspects, which are expressed in signifi-
cantly different ways in Arabic. It is noteworthy that the English
perfect tenses were found to be especially problematic for the
Jordanian students in Mukattash’s study of question formation (1980).
The ESL teacher and materials developer should focus on the instruc-
tion and practice not only of the formation of the various verb tenses
but, just as importantly, on their distribution rules and usage as well.

Relative Clause Formation

Another sentence-level feature of Arabic that differs in a number of
important respects from English is relative clause formation. Because
relative clauses are such a frequent and important construction in
English, and because Arabic-speaking students have so much difficulty
with their formation (Scott and Tucker 1974), although not with their
use, an examination of their counterpart in Arabic should prove
insightful.
Superficially, relative clause formation in Arabic is very similar to
that of English. For this reason, in a study conducted by Schachter
(1974) on the use, misuse, and avoidance of relative clauses by Arab,
Persian, Japanese, and Chinese students, Arabic speakers were pre-
dicted to have less difficulty than Japanese and Chinese students,
whose native languages have a significantly different syntax for
relative clauses. The results of the study indicated that Arab and
Persian learners, seeing similarities between their L1 and English,
transferred their L1 strategy to English, thereby producing errors.
Japanese and Chinese students, on the other hand, seeing radical
differences between L1 and English, approached relative clauses with
extreme caution or avoided their use altogether.
There are three major differences between English and Arabic
relative clause formation. First, there is no relative pronoun in Arabic.
Rather, a relative particle, part of neither clause, links two complete
clauses. This particle is present only when the antecedent is definite, as
in the sentence (translated literally from Arabic) I saw the boy who he
has red hair. When the antecedent is indefinite, however, no relative
particle occurs, as in I saw a boy he has red hair. Omission of the
relative pronoun in English in sentences where it is the subject of the
clause is directly attributable to Arabic interference, according to Scott
and Tucker (1974).
Another important difference is that the antecedent clause and
relative clause in Arabic are both complete sentences; neither is
subordinate, at least not in the surface structure. In fact, if there is a
pause in reading, or if there is written punctuation, the result is two

THE LEAST YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT ARABIC 617

independent sentences (Abboud et al. 1975). We can therefore see that
the relative clause construction in Arabic is coordinate, rather than
subordinate as in English.
The most serious source of error production for Arabic speakers
learning English relative clauses is the presence in Arabic of a relator in
the relative clause. This is a second word or affix that serves as the
subject or object of the clause and refers to the antecedent. When
transferred to English, the repetition of referents results in aberrations
described by some as “Middle Eastern clauses” (e.g., *The girl who
she was pretty came and *This is the record which I bought it). S c o t t
and Tucker (1974) note that the object-deletion rule is acquired later
than the rule for subject deletion, indicating that object deletion will
require more attention and practice in the ESL classroom. Repetition
of the object was the most frequent of all relative clause errors
analyzed in the Scott and Tucker study, again attributable to L1
interference.
Yorkey (1977) proposes a sequence of exercises that will prepare
students for relative clause formation. For example, three initial ac-
tivities in teaching the formation of object clauses include 1) simple
pronoun substitution for nominals in dependent clauses, 2) insertion of
which, that, or w h o ( m ) and deletion of object pronouns, and 3)
deletion of the object relative pronoun and object pronoun, as seen in
the exercises below:
1.My father smokes cigars. My father gets the cigars from Havana.
He them
2. My father smokes cigars WHICH he gets ( ) from Havana.
3. My father smokes cigars ( ) he gets ( ) from Havana.
In addition, sentence-combining exercises which give practice in
forming relative clauses are useful here. For example:
Nearly all the teachers (the teachers taught there) were experienced.
The first school (I went to that school) is situated on the main road.
Children (the children’s fees were overdue) were given letters to
their parents.
(Tadros 1979:327)
Eventually, students should perform less controlled sentence-combin-
ing exercises where the clause to be embedded occurs in a variety of
positions and the students must determine its proper placement, such
as:
The first school is situated on the main road. I went to that school.
The teachers brought sandwiches with them. Their homes were far
from the school.
(Tadros 1979:328)

618 TESOL QUARTERLY

STYLE
Other possible obstacles to good English writing are certain stylistic
devices for assertion and exaggeration in Arabic which may be
transferred into written English. Much of the literature on Arabs and
their language points out that it is part of Arabic linguistic tradition that
main points are overasserted and exaggerated (Patai 1976, Hamady
1960, Shouby 1951). For example, Arabic uses special word endings,
ways to double consonants, and rules for redundant pronouns ( M y
professor he is funny), as well as other stylistic and rhetorical devices,
to achieve exaggeration. Literary studies of Arabic poetry, investiga-
tions of Arab and American judgments of written messages (Prothro
1955), and analyses of political speeches (Suleiman 1973) indicate that
the Arab’s greater use of exaggeration and assertion, relative to
English, extends to all language communication. In both spoken and
written Arabic, repetition, increased use of the superlative, and fre-
quent rewording and restatement are devices used to communicate
ideas clearly. Shouby (1951) writes that Arabs stand a good chance of
being misunderstood, in Arabic, unless they overassert and exaggerate;
he goes further in noting that if Arabs say exactly what they mean
without the expected exaggeration, other Arabs may not only miss the
point but may interpret the message to mean just the opposite. The
ESL instructor may find it useful to be aware of these stylistic
differences, especially in writing tasks involving personal opinion and
argumentation.

PARAGRAPH AND COMPOSITION

Advanced students who have adequately mastered intermediate-
level grammar and have little difficulty with sentence-level grammar
are often frustrated and perplexed to find comments such as “awk-
ward,” “ lacks organization,” and “out of focus” on their papers. As
Kaplan (1966) points out, sentence-level mastery is not the ultimate
goal for ESL students; sentences occur in a larger context. Foreign
students who have mastered English syntax must learn its logic and
rhetoric in order to relate syntactic elements within a paragraph and to
relate paragraphs within a total context. Kaplan suggests that contras-
tive rhetoric be researched and applied to the teaching of writing.
It is important to keep in mind here that Arabic and English use
different organizational styles and that Arabic speakers benefit from
having these differences pointed out to them. It is incumbent upon the
ESL specialist both to be familiar with the differences in organization
between the students’ native language and English and to make the
students aware of these differences so that they are better prepared to
meet the expectations of their readers.

THE LEAST YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT ARABIC 619

 While paragraph development in Arabic and other Semitic languages
can be seen as a series of parallel constructions, with parts of sentences
connected by coordinating conjunctions, maturity of style in English is
measured by the degree of subordination rather than coordination
(Kaplan 1966). As Cowan notes, “Linguistically speaking, Arabic as a
language compounds and is associative. College English skills require
analysis and subordination of thought, Arabic requires synthesis and
coordination” (1978: 11). In fact, infrequent use of subordination and
overuse of coordination, particularly coordinating conjunctions at the
beginning of sentences, comprise the chief characteristic of Arabic
speakers’ written English (Yorkey 1977). This is largely because Arabic
sentences emphasize sequences of events and balance of thought,
which favor coordination. When transferred to English, they also
frequently lack the types of structures (such as participial phrases and
adverbial clauses) that ESL teachers look for in writing classes and
university professors expect on campus. For example, Kaplan’s exami-
nation of an Arab student’s English composition considered the
following sentence, which was built largely on parallelism:
I was very astonished and a little bit frightened, and when I saw my father
and mother a little bit confused, I tried to be courageous, and I went out to
see what was happening (1967:14).
Kaplan suggests that this sentence, which was revised from an earlier
draft, could have been rewritten in, for example, one of the following
ways:
I was very astonished and frightened, and when I saw my father and
mother a little bit confused, trying to be courageous, I went out to see what
was happening.
I was very astonished and frightened when I saw my father and mother a
bit confused. Trying to be courageous, I went out to see what was
happening.
Kaplan continues with the following suggestion for ESL teachers:
If it is desirable in English to relate certain ideas in terms of main and
subordinate structures, then the foreign student needs to be taught how to
determine which structure he should make subordinate and why. In the same
way that this must be accomplished at the syntactic level through the teach-
ing of structures of modification, it needs to be accomplished at the rhe-
torical level by teaching the larger structures of modification; that is, the
kinds of paragraphs which are intended to advance the thought of the whole
essay as well as the kinds of paragraphs which are intended to go back over
ground already covered and supply the necessary support, analogy,
metaphor, illustration, etc. (1967:15).
Areas needing particular emphasis in ESL instruction are adverbial

620 TESOL QUARTERLY

clauses of time, place, result, concession, cause, and purpose as well as
distinctions between cause and effect, real and unreal conditions, and
main ideas and supporting ideas (Yorkey 1977). Activities that address
the teaching of organization include completion of paragraphs with
sentences omitted, rearrangement of sentences presented in a scram-
bled order into the correct order, outlining, and providing students
with topic sentences to be developed into a composition.

SUMMARY
Familiarity with students’ typical errors and problem areas is a
responsibility of all ESL instructors. This article has addressed salient
features of written Arabic—orthography, spelling, vocabulary, sen-
tence grammar, style, and rhetorical organization—and how these
features contribute to weaknesses which have been observed in the
reading and writing skills of Arabic-speaking students engaged in
university-level tasks. Greater sensitivity to these issues can help the
ESL specialist to assess and address the needs of Arab students whose
writing must meet university standards. By alerting the students to
specific areas deserving attention, the writing instructor can be instru-
mental in promoting effective self-monitoring and the development of
individualized objectives on the part of each student who is struggling
with the task of learning to write well in English.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This article is a revised version of a workshop given at the, 1981 TESOL Convention in
Detroit. We wish to thank Jean Engler, the Director of the International English Center
at the University of Colorado, for her support and editorial comments.

THE AUTHORS
Karyn Thompson-Panos is an instructor and curriculum coordinator at the International
English Center, University of Colorado. She received her M.A. in TEFL from the
University of Michigan and has taught in Barcelona, Spain. She has presented
workshops on the Arabic language with Maria Thomas-Ruzic at TESOL conventions
and at NAFSA and SIETAR conferences.

Maria Thomas-Ruzic has just completed two years as a Fulbright lecturer in

Yugoslavia. She received her M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Colorado,
where she was an instructor at the International English Center. She has also taught
ESL in Italy and as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon.

THE LEAST YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT ARABIC 621

REFERENCES
Abboud, Peter F., Najm A. Bezirgan, Wallace M. Erwin, Mounah A. Khouri,
Ernest N. McCarus, Raji M. Rammuny, Zaki N. Abdel-Malek, and George
N. Saad. 1975. Elementary modern standard Arabic: part one. R e v i s e d
Edition. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan.
Altoma, Salih J. 1969. The problem of diglossia in Arabic. C a m b r i d g e ,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Bateson, Mary Catherine. 1967. Arabic language handbook. W a s h i n g t o n ,
D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Beck, Robert Daniel. 1979. An error analysis of free composition. Teachers of
English: Arabian Monthly 30:20-26.
Chomsky, Carol, 1970. Reading, writing, and phonology. Harvard Educational
Review 40(2) :287-309.
Chomsky, Noam, and Morris Halle. 1968. The sound pattern of English. N e w
York: Harper and Row.
Cowan, James W. 1978. Factors influencing Arab and Iranian students in-
country and in the United States. In Students from the Arab world and Iran,
Gary L. Althen (Ed.), 1-13. Washington, D. C.: NAFSA.
Hamady, Sania. 1960, Temperament and character of the Arabs. New York:
Twayne Publishers.
Ibrahim, Muhammid H. 1978. Patterns in spelling errors. English Language
Teaching Journal 32(3):207-212.
Kaplan, Robert B. 1966. Cultural thought patterns and inter-cultural education.
Language Learning 16(1-2):1-20.
Kaplan, Robert B. 1967. Contrastive rhetoric and the teaching of composition.
TESOL Quarterly 1(4):10-16.
Miller, Wilma H. 1973, Diagnosis and correction of reading difficulties in
secondary school students. New York: Center for Applied Research in
Education, Inc.
Mukattash, Lewis. 1980. Yes/no questions and the contrastive analysis hypoth-
esis. English Language Teaching Journal 34(2): 133-145.
Mukattash, Lewis. 1981. Problems in error analysis. In Papers and Studies in
Contrastive Linguistics 13, Jacek Fisiak (Ed.), 261-274. Washington, D. C.:
Center for Applied Linguistics.
Nevarez, Hector, Virginia Berk, and Curtis W. Hayes. 1979. The role of
handwriting in TESOL. TESOL Newsletter XIII(1):25-26.
Patai, Raphael. 1976. The Arab mind. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Prothro, Terry E. 1955. Arab-American differences in the judgment of written
messages. Journal of Social Psychology 42:3-11.
Schachter, Jacquelyn. 1974. An error in error analysis. Language Learning
24(2):205-214.
Schane, Sanford. 1970. Linguistics, spelling, and pronunciation. T E S O L
Quarterly 4(2):137-141.
Scott, Margaret Sue, and G. Richard Tucker. 1974. Error analysis and English-
language strategies of Arab students. Language Learning 24(1)59-97.
Shouby, E. 1951. The influence of the Arabic language on the psychology of
the Arabs. Middle East Journal 5:284-302.

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Suleiman, Michael W. 1973. The Arabs and the West: communication gap. In
Intercommunication among nations and peoples, Michael H. Presser (Ed.),
287-303. New York: Harper and Row.
Tadros, A.A. 1979. Arabic interference in the written English of Sudanese
students —relativisation. English Language Teaching Journal 33(3):234-238.
Yorkey, Richard. 1977. Practical EFL techniques for teaching Arabic-speaking
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(Eds.), 57-85. Washington, D, C.: TESOL.

THE LEAST YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT ARABIC 623

 TESOL QUARTERLY, Vol. 17, No. 4, December 1983

Recent Language Research and Some

Language Teaching Principles
KARL J. KRAHNKE
Colorado State University
MARY ANN CHRISTISON
Snow College

The underlying assumption of this article is that linguistic and com-

munication research can support principles on which to base revisions
in the content and method of language teaching. The article first
reviews the results of research in language acquisition, interfactional
analysis, pragmatic, repair, error, and social and affective factors.
Four general principles are then extracted from this research, princi-
ples relating to acquisition activities in the classroom, the importance
of affective factors, the communicative capacity of learners, and the
nature and treatment of error.

INTRODUCTION
Over the last ten to fifteen years, the language teaching profession
has been provided with a wealth of new information on language and
language use from several areas of linguistic and language-related
research. As is usual, the problem for designers and providers of
language instruction has been to determine how to assimilate, evaluate,
and apply this new knowledge. The process of application really
involves two questions: the effect of research on what aspects of
language behavior we choose to teach and the effect of research on
how we teach. Much recent work has focused on the former question,
especially the work done for the European Unit/Credit system (van
Ek 1975) and much of the work done in Britain on communicative
language teaching. Methodological questions have been addressed in
the work of Curran (1968, 1972, 1976, 1978), Gattegno (1972, 1976),
Lozanov (1979), Asher (1977), Winitz and Reeds (1973), and Terrell
(1977, 1982). None of these, however, has attempted to draw systemat-
ically on the results of broad-based research in developing their
methodologies. Stevick (1976, 1980, 1982) has done so in a personal and
practical way, but his recommendations are often more eclectic than
systematic. Krashen (1981, 1982) has begun to address questions of
625
methodology and approach, but his view is tied quite closely to the
model of second language acquisition which he has developed.
All of this work is instructive and useful. The pedagogical recommen-
dations of Krashen (1982) and Krashen and Terrell (1983), in particular,
come closest to bridging the gap between theories of language and
language acquisition and actual classroom techniques. This article does
not attempt to address that same issue but rather focuses on how an
examination of recent language-related research can suggest principles
on which effective language teaching can be based, principles which
relate to approach, design, and procedure in language teaching (Rich-
ards and Rodgers 1982). What this article consists of, therefore, is a
review of research that relates to questions of instructional methodol-
ogy and the suggestion of four principles which can be used to guide
specific methodological decisions.

ACQUISITION AND LEARNING

A useful theoretical construct in language acquisition research is the
now widely accepted distinction between learning and acquisition
(Krashen 1978). Krashen’s hypothesis is that adult language learners
have two different means available to them to gain knowledge of a
second language—learning and acquisition. In brief, learning results
from deliberate, structured, and conscious attempts to learn the
language, such as through drills and rule memorization. Acquisition, on
the other hand, results from natural and meaningful interaction with
other speakers in the target language. According to this hypothesis,
learning is very different from acquisition in that it only functions to
correct or “monitor” (Krashen 1978) the language being produced.
These corrections or changes can take place before or after a sentence
is actually spoken or written, but in order to make the correction the
learner must recognize the error, know how to correct it, and have
sufficient time to do so (see Krashen 1978 and 1982 for a more detailed
consideration of this point). In immediate, face-to-face or pen-to-
paper, communicative encounters, these conditions can rarely be met,
so it is argued that learning may not be as important in developing the
ability to communicate fluently, verbally or in writing, as we previous-
ly believed. Rather, according to the hypothesis, fluency develops
gradually as a result of communicative experience in the target
language, with progress occurring when the learner is able to under-
stand most of what is contained in the communication but when that
communication also contains language material the learner needs and
is ready to acquire. Krashen (1982:9) refers to this understandable
language as comprehensible input and defines it as language that is
comprehended by the learner but which still contains and, therefore,

626 TESOL QUARTERLY

 provides new structures or other language material that the learner has
not yet acquired. That is, it is hypothesized that learners can acquire
language when they have to use it to communicate their wants and
needs, when the focus is on what they need to say rather than on how
they should say it.
More research is being done to clarify the relationship between
learning and acquisition, but our present understanding of the distinc-
tion seems sufficient to suggest an explanation for the evident lack of
positive transfer to actual performance in communicative situations in
the target language of much language instruction in which the emphasis
is on drills and rule memorization. What the learning/acquisition
hypothesis suggests is that activities which result in learning may have
a limited role in an overall language instruction program, a role of
assisting learners in developing learning- and monitoring-sensitive
abilities in such areas as spelling, punctuating, and test taking, for
example. But, the hypothesis suggests, if effective use of the language
in realistic settings is the goal of the program, then learning-fostering
activities should not dominate the language classroom to the exclusion
of acquisition-fostering activities which help students develop spoken
and written fluency in the target language.

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
.
Research in language acquisition has focused on three different
types of acquisition: 1) first language acquisition in children, 2) second
language acquisition in children, and 3) second language acquisition in
adults. Data have been collected in formal and in informal environ-
ments from all three types of subjects. From theories and research in
first language acquisition we can draw conclusions for second language
teaching and learning. There are, undoubtedly, important cognitive,
affective, neurological, and physical differences between the acquisi-
tion of a first and a second language and between children and adults.
At the same time, however, there are important similarities; essentially,
both children and adults acquire languages from similar types of
experiences and at essentially similar rates when conditions are opti-
mal. Although it has been suggested that children are more likely to be
able to take advantage of these experiences than adults (Asher and
Garcia 1969), or at least have the advantage of receiving real intake
while adults may not (Wagner-Gough and Hatch 1975), the question
for language pedagogy is not the degree of similarity or difference
between first and second language acquisition but rather the recogni-
tion of the similarities so that those similarities, and not just the
differences, may be taken advantage of to increase effectiveness in
second language instruction.

LANGUAGE RESEARCH AND TEACHING PRINCIPLES 627

 There are three basic ways in which first and second language
acquisition are similar. They are summarized as follows:
1. Natural order. One area of research which has received considerable
attention in the past few years is the study of the order of acquisition
of various morphemes. Brown (1973) first demonstrated that there
was a natural order in which children acquired some of the
morphemes of their first language. Brown’s longitudinal findings
were confirmed by de Villiers and de Villiers (1973). Studies of the
sequence in which adults acquire grammatical morphemes in a
second language began with the work of Bailey, Madden, and
Krashen (1974), who confirmed that adults also showed a regular
order in acquiring the eight morphemes studied. Dulay and Burt
(1974), using the Bilingual Syntax Measure (Burt, Dulay, and
Hernandez 1975), established a similar order for children learning a
second language. Andersen (1976) and Krashen, Butler, Birnbaum,
and Robertson (1978) reported natural orders in the written produc-
tion of adults. Although there are some problems with these studies,
specifically concerning the statistical procedures used, whether the
natural ordering is an artifact of the Bilingual Syntax Measure, a n d
whether or not morphemes in obligatory contexts reveal enough
about the language acquisition process (Larsen-Freeman 1975,
Porter 1977, Hakuta and Cancino 1977, and Rosansky 1976), there is
no counter-evidence to the hypothesis that the existence of a natural
order is part of the creative construction process in both adult and
child language acquisition.
2. Comprehension. Children acquiring first languages learn to com-
prehend before they learn to speak. Winitz and Reeds (1973) claim
that in first language acquisition, comprehension outpaces produc-
tion by about a year. They claim that this sequence of development
is a functional property of the brain and cannot be reversed or
greatly modified. Recent studies support the hypothesis that delay-
ing speech in second language instruction, while at the same time
providing active listening, causes no delay in attaining proficiency
in a second language (Gary 1975, Postovsky 1977). In fact, accord-
ing to Gary (1974), early oral performance may not be profitable for
children and adults studying second languages in formal settings.
Terrell (1982) has also found strong evidence to support a pre-
production phase for classroom instruction.
3. Linguistic input. Language acquirers in natural situations receive
what we call comprehensible input (see above). In first language
acquisition this type of input is called caretaker speech, and in
second language acquisition it is sometimes called foreigner talk.
Hatch (1979) summarizes some of the important characteristics of
simplified input: reduced rate of speech (words and phrases are not
628 TESOL QUARTERLY
 stretched, but more frequent pauses are inserted at possible bound-
ary points), shorter utterance length, greater use of redundancy
(repetition and gesture), simplification of syntax, and more frequent
use of specific discourse phenomena (e. g., yes/no questions and tag
questions). All of these modifications to normal adult speech assist
learners in making useful guesses about the language and in
developing an internalized working grammar of it. Snow (1979)
reports that children figure out underlying structures with the aid of
simplified input. Rubin (1975), Terrell (1982), and others have
suggested that the same processes operate for adults.
From the point of view of research, the role of conscious learning in
the language acquisition process remains unclear. Much of present
language pedagogy is based on the assumption that language acquisi-
tion can be quantitatively and qualitatively improved through formal
instruction in the language, especially instruction in the grammatical
regularities of the language. Lee, McCune, and Patton (1970), how-
ever, have provided evidence that strongly suggests that students do
not pay much attention to repetitive drills after a few repetitions, and
Hendrickson (1976) has noted the lack of effect on student writing of
explicit correction of formal errors. But, at the same time, it is obvious
that many language learners have somehow benefited from being
exposed to explicit grammatical instruction.
Krashen (1982) argues that the role of conscious learning in language
acquisition is limited almost entirely to being a source of input for
those learners who are open to it, and that there is little or no transfer
from formal, conscious learning to communicative performance.
Others (Bialystok 1978, Stevick 1982) have posited a greater role for
conscious learning but with little evidence to support their views.
Given the strength of the acquisition hypothesis, it is difficult to
support a view that calls for a central role for conscious learning in
language instruction. Since the input which leads to language acquisi-
tion is ultimately not defined by the type of language available to the
learner but rather by how the learner is able to utilize it, the acquisition
hypothesis presents the stronger case that acquisition is an incidental
outcome of instruction. Instruction may certainly serve as input for
some learners, but it is an additional empirical question whether
instruction intended to lead to conscious learning is the most direct
route to a useful competence in a new language. Conscious learning
may positively affect the learning of some routines and patterns
(Krashen 1981:96-99) and limited aspects of language behavior, such as
editing written work, but there is strong evidence that extensive com-
municative experience with a new language is necessary for communi-
cative competence to develop (Carroll 1967, Saegert, Scott, Perkins,
and Tucker 1974). What remains to be better determined is the nature

LANGUAGE RESEARCH AND TEACHING PRINCIPLES 629

of the relationship between learning and acquisition and the nature of
classroom experiences that can foster communication and acquisition.

INTERACTIONAL ANALYSIS
Since acquisition is hypothesized to be a product of meaningful
interaction, it would be useful at this point to review what has been
discovered about the form and content of conversation and verbal
interaction. The sociological perspective on which much of this work is
based was set by Goffman (1967, 1971), but the formal or structural
analysis of conversation is a relatively new topic of interest. Most of the
work has been done by the late Harvey Sacks and his colleagues,
Schegloff and Jefferson. Their work (especially Sacks, Schegloff, and
Jefferson 1974) has established the turn as the basic unit of verbal
interaction and has characterized conversations as being governed by a
turn-taking system. Their analyses are purposely focused on the
structural properties of this system, on what behavioral devices are
used to establish and hold turns and to open and close conversations.
They are less concerned with which linguistic forms are used to
accomplish these ends. Their work has established that competent
speakers of a language use a system for structuring verbal interaction
which is somewhat independent of the form and meaning of the
language used in the interaction. There are, in short, expectations and
regularities that typically operate in conversation even when, through
error, misunderstanding, or perversity, a speaker produces an utter-
ance which does not seem to perform an appropriate function.
Coulthard cites an extreme example of a doctor and schizophrenic
patient maintaining the turn-taking system even though the patient
does not fill his turn appropriately:
A: What is your name?
B: Well, let’s say you might have thought you might have had something
from before, but you haven’t got it anymore.
A: I’m going to call you Dean. (Coulthard 1977:63)
While this example is bizarre, the careful observation of turn-taking
formalities in it demonstrates that conversation can be governed by
structural constraints, at least at a basic level. Some details regarding
how turn selection is done seem to differ from culture to culture, but
the system of taking turns and the expectancy on the part of speakers
to do so is universal enough that it constitutes a basis for verbal
interaction by language learners in the new language well before they
are competent enough to participate skillfully in that interaction
(Conrad 1982), The learners come to the new language with the
expectation that it will be organized into turns and that filling turns is a
minimally adequate way of sustaining conversation. They also assume
630 TESOL QUARTERLY
a system of openings and closings, the details of which must be learned
or acquired.
The concept of turn taking has been elaborated with the notion of
adjacency pairs (Sacks, cited by Coulthard 1977:70), a frequently
occurring but specialized pair of turns that are related in that the
nature of the second turn is predicted by the first, Question-answer is
one obvious pair; greeting-greeting is another. A small list is given by
Richards (1980:421), with the suggestion that language instruction
address this phenomenon more directly. But the phenomenon is a
discourse universal and, as such, constitutes pre-existing knowledge of
the structure of discourse. Language instruction can use this pre-
existing competence as a basis for instruction in the specific forms that
are used in adjacency pairs in the language being learned.
Gordon and Lakoff (1975) and Grice (1975) have identified several
principles or postulates that, they claim, govern the conduct of
conversation. These principles are the sincerity condition, the reason-
ableness condition, and the cooperative principle. Taken together,
these principles assert that participants in a conversation assume,
unless there is evidence to the contrary, that their conversational
partners will be sincere and reasonable in the conduct of their
conversational behavior and that they will be clear and orderly in what
they say. These are basic notions, to be sure, but their suspension
predictably requires participants in interaction to use more complex
interpretation strategies to process utterances in which the principles
are violated. We may offer the following example:
A: How was your date last night?
B: I got a good night’s sleep.

By not relating the answer directly to the question, A forces B to do

more complex work to interpret the answer.
In most normal conversations, however, conversational principles
are strictly observed, giving second language learners another set of
tools to use in deciphering the language that is directed to them. If they
assume that the interaction they are involved in is governed by
universal principles of conversation, then they have a structured
predisposition and set of expectations as to how to interpret the speech
presented to them.

PRAGMATIC
T O the familiar division of language analysis into phonology, syntax,
and semantics, pragmatic has been added to account for the pheno-
mena that relate a given utterance to its functions or meaning in a given
instance of conversational interaction. It’s cold in here may be used to
LANGUAGE RESEARCH AND TEACIIING PRINCIPLES 631
inform, but it may also be used to get someone to close a door or
window.
Pragmatic encompasses a wide range of contextual factors includ-
ing, among others, social and physical circumstances, identities, atti-
tudes and beliefs of participants, and the relations that exist among
participants. Pragmatic competence gives speakers the ability to
correctly interpret sentences such as It’s cold in here in the way they
are intended, to choose the appropriate form of address for another
person in a given situation, and to fulfill many other interfactional
functions in between. When there are problems with the pragmatic
system, misunderstandings can be quite serious, as in the case of the
Japanese student who almost abandoned a new friendship because the
new friend had remarked, in haste, “I’m in a hurry now—I’ll call you
sometime.” The Japanese girl interpreted this as a permanent dismis-
sal.
There has been considerable research into the pragmatics of English
from the point of view of how the pragmatic system is used by
competent speakers. In addition, Fraser, Rintell, and Walters (1980)
have carried out some initial work into the acquisition of pragmatic
by second language speakers and have presented a suggestion for how
research should proceed. Their work is based on three assumptions
(1980:78):
1. There is a basic set of speech acts common to all languages.
2. The same set of strategies for performing speech is available in all
languages.
3. Between languages there is a significant difference between when a
speech act is performed and what strategy is used to perform it.
Borkin and Reinhart (1978), Fraser (1981), Fraser and Nolen (1980),
Manes and Wolfson (1981), and Schmidt and Richards (1980) are other
examples of specific studies concerned with the acquisition of prag-
matic in second languages. This area of research is still too new for
well-founded conclusions to be drawn, but what is clear is that
pragmatic is such an integral and universal part of language behavior
that it must be addressed by language teachers from the beginning
stages of classroom teaching and should not be left until later or for
outside the classroom. The conventions of pragmatic vary greatly
from one language to another and are of great subtlety and complexity,
but since much of message design is pragmatically determined, and
since setting and interaction provide much of the contextual basis for
pragmatic interpretation, the need for specific interfactional activities
in language teaching programs is clear. Kramsch’s handbook (1981) is
useful and practical and provides an overview of pragmatic and other

632 TESOL QUARTERLY

discourse phenomena as well as some excellent suggestions for class-
room activities to aid learners in acquiring them.
Given the complexity and abstractness of pragmatic rules and the
dialect and individual variation that accompany their use, it is doubtful
that the recommendation of Taylor and Wolfson (1978) that pragmatic
rules should simply be taught to students is of any value other than for
Krashen’s Monitor over-users (Krashen 1981:4). Of more value is the
position taken by Coulthard that “the language teacher cannot hope to
explain discoursal meaning in the traditionally regarded ‘cut-and-
dried’ way of teaching grammatical rules” (1977:xii) and that “ways of
teaching should shift from teacher-telling to learner interpreting . . .
Learners need to become analysts of discourse themselves” (Coulthard
1977: xiii).

REPAIR
Some of the most interesting work on verbal interaction has been
conducted to determine how speakers repair problems that arise in
conversation. The early work on repair by native speakers was done
by Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks (1977), who defined repair as any
conversational move which occurs because there is some real or
perceived difficulty in the conversation. Repair is a more general
phenomenon than correction, but errors in form or meaning are one
kind of trouble, and correction is one type of repair. Schegloff,
Jefferson, and Sacks refer to repair as a “self-righting mechanism for
the organization of language use in social interaction” (1977:381).
Repair in conversation between native or competent speakers is over-
whelmingly self-repair, where it is the speaker who attempts to repair
the conversational trouble, whether the trouble was self-perceived or
perceived by another participant in the interaction (Schegloff, Jeffer-
son, and Sacks 1977:376).
Gaskill (1980) has studied correction between native speakers and
non-native speakers of English, and Schwartz (1980) has considered
repair between pairs of non-native speakers of English. Both have
concluded that self-repair and self-correction are far more frequent
than other-repair (repair done by a participant other than the speaker),
although in Schwartz’s non-quantified analysis other-repair was also
frequent. Conrad’s still unpublished thesis (1982) is a detailed study of
many of the factors involved in the interaction of native speakers of
English with non-natives who are at different levels of language
proficiency. Conrad demonstrated that initiation of repair, or calling
attention to the need for repair, was done more frequently by the
non-native member of a conversational dyad who was at a low level of

LANGUAGE RESEARCH AND TEACHING PRINCIPLES 633

language proficiency. The imbalance was reversed at higher levels of
proficiency, where it was the native-speaker member who more
frequently initiated repair. As for the accomplishment of the repair
itself, however, self-repair was carried out by non-native speakers at all
levels of ability and increased as ability increased. These facts, plus a
number of other observations on context, the relationship of inter-
actants, and the types of moves used in repair, paint a rich and detailed
picture of the conversational interaction of native and non-native
speakers. If there is a conclusion beyond the instructive ones reached by
Conrad himself, it is that language learners have a demonstrated ability
to utilize non-language-specific techniques of interaction maintenance
which also facilitate their comprehension and, we can assume, their
acquisition of the new language. Even relatively non-proficient learners
have this ability, and it is most productively used in the context of
extended and sincere personal relationships with native speakers.

ERROR
Probably no aspect of language pedagogy has been the subject of
more interest and misunderstanding than that of learner error. Although
a great deal of research has been done on the matter of error, basic
questions remain as to:
1. the source of learner error
2. the characterization and classification of error
3. the effects or gravity of learner error
4. the treatment of error in the classroom

Source
Early work on error asserted that error in second languages resulted
largely from differences between the learner’s first language and the
language being learned (i.e., from transfer or interference), or from
inadequate or unmastered instruction. Recent studies (summarized in
Dulay, Burt, and Krashen 1982, on which this review is based) have
established that interference from the learner’s first language accounts
for much less of learner error than had previously been supposed.
Until now, studies of the sources of learner error have focused on
syntactic error. Phonological error is probably much more the result of
first language influence (Dulay, Burt, and Krashen 1982:97-98) as,
possibly, are the relatively unstudied areas of semantic, pragmatic, and
interfactional error.
Studies of the sources of second language error (as summarized in
Dulay, Burt, and Krashen 1982:163-172) have identified four types of
error. The first of these are developmental errors, errors which are

634 TESOL QUARTERLY

similar to the errors made by children learning the language as their
first language. Developmental errors are assumed to be a natural
product of gradually developing ability in the new language and, in the
studies so far carried out, developmental errors make up the majority
of errors exhibited by second language learners. Interlingual errors, or
errors clearly attributable to first language influence, make up a
maximum of 25% of learner error, with the percentage being higher for
adults than for children. The third and fourth types of error are, first,
errors that could be either developmental or interlingual (i.e., ambig-
uous errors) and, last, other errors, which are neither developmental
nor interlingual.
While researchers have made some progress in identifying the
source of learner error, the processes by which these errors are
produced are still poorly understood. Transfer and interference a r e
terms that are more metaphoric than empirical since very little is
known about what actual linguistic or psychological processes learners
are employing when errors are produced.

Classification
Classifying syntactic error according to linguistic type is a more
familiar way of categorizing error and is possibly of more immediate
use to classroom teachers. In this approach to error, the sources or
effects of errors are ignored in favor of classifying the errors according
to the part of the linguistic system which is ill-formed (e.g., the
phoneme /o/, third person singular verb endings, article omission,
inappropriate use of excuse me, and so on). There are several such
classifications which have been done, the most useful being that of
Burt and Kiparsky (1972). Classification by linguistic type can be a
useful analytic procedure and can provide a useful basis for instruc-
tional intervention as long as the classification is not mistaken for a
psychologically real analysis of the process by which the errors are
produced or for a hierarchy of the communicative effect of errors.

Effect
It has long been recognized that not all errors have the same
communicative effect, significance, weight, or gravity, but few studies
have been done to measure that significance or to determine the
factors affecting it. One study of error significance was done by Burt
and Kiparsky (1972) in conjunction with their linguistic classification of
syntactic errors. Although their methodology was not rigorous, they
established the distinction between global and local error, the former
interfering with communication more than the latter. Global errors,

LANGUAGE RESEARCH AND TEACHING PRINCIPLES 635

which affect overall sentence organization and “confuse the relations
among the constituent clauses” (1972:6), include disordering of sen-
tence elements, using connectors inappropriately, and regularizing
exceptions to syntactic rules. Local errors include errors in noun and
verb inflection, articles, and auxiliaries. For example, the globally
erroneous sentence Why like we each other? was judged less compre-
hensible than the locally erroneous Why we like each other? ( D u l a y ,
Burt, and Krashen 1982:192).
Johansson (1978) has produced the most comprehensive study on
error gravity, in which he points out that it is not possible to assign
specific weights or values to specific errors because factors such as
receiver (or listener) characteristics (age, experience, education, and so
on), the context of the communication, and the social roles or status of
the speakers all play a role in the success or failure of particular
communicative acts. In the research reviewed and carried out by
Johansson, several clear conclusions emerge, which are summarized in
Figure 1.

Johansson makes two other important observations. One is that a

learner’s status as a non-native speaker contributes both to success and
to failure in communication. The failure is accentuated by the faultier

636 TESOL QUARTERLY

form of the message produced by the non-native, but because native-
speaker interlocutors work harder to understand such faultier mes-
sages, the overall success of the communicative effort may be facili-
tated (1978:8). The second observation is that topic or content ade-
quacy can override errors in form, and for most native-speaker
interlocutors, comprehension of content is the overwhelming consider-
ation (Johansson 1978:17).
This last consideration is strongly echoed by Ludwig in her review
of research on error significance (1982), in which she examines
research on irritation as well as on comprehensibility. The distinction is
sometimes confusing, since the two are said to be covariant, but
Ludwig says that irritation is “the result of the form of the message
intruding on the interlocutor’s perception of the communication”
(275). In irritation studies, vocabulary errors or errors combining
problems in vocabulary and syntax have been found to result in the
most irritation (Ludwig 1982:276), but there is a wide range of
difference in the results obtained by the studies Ludwig cites. She
concludes her review with some implications for teaching, recom-
mending, in general, a pedagogy which calls for a greater use of
realistic language-use activities in the classroom.

Treatment
There have been few controlled studies of the treatment of learner
errors in or out of the classroom. Allwright (1975) has demonstrated
the inconsistency with which errors are generally treated in the
classroom. Methodological recommendations have ranged from cor-
rection of all discernible errors to a relatively tolerant attitude toward
learner errors. Learners themselves tend to state a preference for a
great deal of overt correction (Cathcart and Olsen 1976, Conrad 1982).
Hendrickson has done some research into the effectiveness of specific
intervention techniques (1976, 1977) and has summarized his work and
that of others (1978). He points out that communicatively interfering,
stigmatizing, and high frequency errors are the most likely candidates
for treatment (1978:342). Most direct methods of intervention, in
which a teacher points out and explains or corrects the error, have been
shown to have little or no effect on the production of error by learners
(1978:393). At present, no methods of intervention have been demon-
strated to have a significant effect in decreasing learner error, although
both Hendrickson (1978:396) and Ludwig (1982:281-2) have made rec-
ommendations. Conrad’s work, referred to earlier, demonstrates that
even low-level learners are capable of using interactionally embedded
repair techniques to correct both form and content.

LANGUAGE RESEARCH AND TEACHING PRINCIPLES 637

 In summary, error is inevitable in the process of language acquisi-
tion. Most of the errors that learners produce result from incomplete
but gradually increasing control over a new linguistic system. Other
errors probably result from some kind of interference from the
learner’s first language through processes not yet well understood.
There are marked differences in the amount of interference that
different errors and error types contribute to communication. Phono-
logical errors are probably the most serious and syntactic the least
(Johansson 1978:47 and 68), but context and the compounding of error
play important roles in the communicative effect of error. While
learners often request overt correction of most or all errors, there is
evidence that such direct intervention is not very effective. Some
feedback on formal adequacy is almost certainly required for acquisi-
tion to continue, and there is some evidence to suggest that learners are
able to utilize meaning-based, interactionally modulated repair tech-
niques, which acquisition theory suggests are the most useful form of
feedback. Affective factors also play a significant role in the persis-
tence of error (i.e., fossilization) and in the effectiveness of various
intervention techniques.

SOCIAL AND AFFECTIVE FACTORS

Following the fundamental work of Gardner and Lambert (1972 and
1973) and Larsen and Smalley (1972), a good deal of speculation, and
some research, has focused on the role of attitudes, motivation, and
affective factors in language acquisition and learning. Gardner and
Lambert established that learners’ attitudes toward the society or
culture connected with the language being learned can strongly affect
success in learning the language. Motivation, which is difficult both to
define and to measure, may play a role in the success of formal
learning more than in informal acquisition (Krashen 1981:28). Gardner
and Lambert’s claim that integrative motivation (learning so as to
become similar or closer to the new culture and society) would be a
greater contributor to success in learning a second language than
instrumental motivation (learning so as to achieve some goal through a
possibly limited use of the new language) has been brought into
question by Lukmani’s (1972) research.
The work on social and affective factors in the last ten years can be
viewed through the taxonomy developed by Schumann to categorize
the many factors he has identified as playing a role in the success or
failure of learners he has studied (J. Schumann 1976 and elsewhere).
The categories relevant here are:
1. social factors, such as the relative size of language groups, and social
attitudes between groups

638 TESOL QUARTERLY

2. affective factors, such as language and culture shock, and motivation
3. personality factors, such as self-esteem, and sensitivity to rejection.
While there are many other factors that affect language acquisition,
it is generally agreed that the above three are the major ones. The
problem has been to evaluate these factors quantitatively. Oller (1981)
attempted to do this for one factor, motivation, and demonstrated
that adequate measuring instruments are lacking. J. Schumann (1978)
suggests a number of experimental studies, none of which, to our
knowledge, has been undertaken.
Guiora and his colleagues (Guiora, Brannon, and Dull 1972, Guiora,
Paluzny, Beit-Hallahmi, Catford, Cooley, and Dull 1975) have done
work on empathy and what they call ego boundaries. They suggest
that language teaching make a greater effort to reduce these bounda-
ries to facilitate language learning, and Clarke (1976) provides a useful
theoretical perspective on the relationship of language learning to
culture shock.
There is general agreement within the field that social and affective
factors have a major effect on who learns languages and how well they
learn them. While the present authors have heard an anecdotal
argument that educated learners can overcome attitudinal and affec-
tive barriers through the force of intellect, recent diary studies (F.
Schumann 1980, F. Schumann and J. Schumann 1977) and the work of
Stevick (1976, 1980, 1982) suggest that attitudinal and affective factors
play a lesser role in formal learning than in informal acquisition but
that, for all language learners, affective factors influence the ability to
use new languages spontaneously and effectively.
Many recent developments in approach and methodology have
been motivated by a recognition of the need to reduce affective
barriers to language acquisition, what Krashen (1978) calls the “affec-
tive filter” after Dulay and Burt’s “affective delimiter” (1977:99). These
developments range from methods such as Suggestopedia (Lozanov
1979) and Counseling-Learning (Curran 1968, 1972, 1976, 1978) to
many of the valuable techniques and materials produced by humanistic
language teachers (Moskowitz 1978, for example), and to more general
suggestions offered by Stevick (1976, 1980, 1982).

CONCLUSIONS
Historically, fashions in language teaching have often been based on
the prevailing perspectives of linguistics and psychology. It is only
recently that research in second language acquisition has developed as
an independent field. Just as the oft-repeated mistake of the past was
to rush into the classroom with the latest results of linguistic research,

LANGUAGE RESEARCH AND TEACHING PRINCIPLES 639

so it would be a mistake now to assume that all recent language-related
research has a direct application in the classroom. However, evidence
from empirical research and from informal observation strongly
suggests that language instruction can be made more effective in the
sense that learners can be led to an improved ability to use or apply
knowledge of the new language and to an improved ability to continue
learning on their own.
Rather than go directly to the classroom, we offer here a set of
principles, based on the research reviewed above, that can help guide
decisions regarding classroom practice.

Principle 1. Language instruction which has as its goal functional ability

in the new language should give greater emphasis to activities which
lead to language acquisition than to activities which lead to formal
learning.

It is undeniable that instruction in the forms of a new language can

result in language learning and, to some extent, language acquisition.
But the shortcoming of formal instruction is its relative inefficiency in
helping students become effective users of the language outside of
instructional settings. If recent research is correctly interpreted, instruc-
tional activities and experiences that foster language acquisition can
overcome much of this shortcoming. When complemented with formal
learning activities, classroom activities leading to language acquisition,
we are suggesting, can help learners become more competent users of
a new language and more open to acquiring more of the language
independently.
Traditional classroom learning activities have tended to have correct
production and even conscious ability to describe particular language
forms or structures as goals. Acquisition activities concentrate on input
and interaction. Instructors who are attempting to foster language
acquisition must concentrate on providing experiences for the students
in which there is a great deal of language input, language which is both
comprehensible and meaningful and which is presented in an activity
context which encourages attention and involvement. Meaningfulness
is facilitated by the reality of the subject matter (Taylor 1982) and by
having “life” rather than “language learning” as its content (Fanselow
1977). Interaction allows students to modulate the input they receive to
increase its comprehensibility and to test the hypotheses they are
forming about the new language.
It is the opinion of the authors that the reason why more acquisition
activities are not being used in instructional programs is that few well-
structured activities have yet been developed. While there are many
collections of activities that attempt to make instruction more active

640 TESOL QUARTERLY

and student-centered, or that attempt to increase the quantity of
learner production, few instructional materials have been produced
which meet the criteria of providing comprehensible input and sup-
porting it with meaningful interaction. Recent work by Krashen and
Terrell (1983), Taylor (1983), and the collection of work edited by
Johnson and Morrow (1981) is beginning to shape our understanding
of what such materials should look like, but there remains a dearth of
actual instructional material.

Principle 2. Because negative affect, in the form of the affective filter,

seems to be a major impediment to success in language acquisition and
learning, instruction should make the minimizing of such affective
interference one of its primary goals.

Along with the goals of providing input and interaction, language

instruction must attempt to lower students’ affective resistance to
acquiring the new language. There are two aspects to this problem—
the methodology of instruction and the content of instruction. Stevick
has addressed the methodological issue at length (1976, 1980, 1982),
and a valuable review of the role that methodology can play in
lowering affective resistance has been provided by Taylor (1983).
Specific instructional activities have been developed by Moskowitz
(1978), Christison and Bassano (1981), and others.
In general, an affectively positive or supportive classroom is one in
which students are encouraged to initiate and sustain real communica-
tion and to take risks in using the new language in that communication.
The encouragement is provided by carefully defining the instructional
task or activity, preparing the students for it, and assisting and
supporting the students in carrying out the activity by providing
resources and feedback as they need them.

Principle 3. Language instruction must make greater use of the learners’

own abilities to acquire language from natural interaction.

Language instructors have tended to mistrust or undervalue the role

that natural, non-instructional interaction plays in the language acquisi-
tion process. Instructors may mistrust natural interaction because they
feel it does not provide enough feedback on the accuracy of student
production. Instructors may also believe that meaningful interaction is
not possible in a second language until a sound basis in the forms of the
language has been achieved. But meaningful interaction is crucial if
students are to develop functional ability in the new language (Carroll

LANGUAGE RESEARCH AND TEACHING PRINCIPLES 641

1967, Saegert, Scott, Perkins, and Tucker 1974), and there is consider-
able evidence that such experience is possible and beneficial, even at
very low levels of second language ability.
What research into the structure of interaction, the turn-taking
mechanism, and the techniques of repair supports is the view that
learners have a predisposition to interact under the proper circum-
stances (usually not a traditional language classroom), that they are
well aware of the general structure of interaction, and that they can
make use of the repair mechanisms available to competent speakers to
increase the comprehensibility of the input being provided to them
and to improve the accuracy of their own production. By structuring
interaction so that the settings, the purpose, and the participants’ roles
are as natural as possible, so that the informational content is the focus
of the interaction, and so that the interactants are willing and able to
provide feedback in the form of repair, natural interaction can be
made a beneficial part of a language instruction program.

Principle 4. Error produced in the process of acquiring a second

language should be viewed as a natural product of the acquisition
process, as a source of information on learner strategies, and as a
problem best addressed through more input and interaction rather
than through correction and drill. T O concentrate on developing
students’ abilities to monitor their production, or to enforce correction
while students are engaged in interaction or production, should be
regarded as counter-productive.

In any behavior, there is a balance between how much is done and

how or how well it is done. Traditional language teaching has
emphasized the latter at the expense of the former by equating success
with accuracy or mastery of form. In language or in communication,
success is determined just as much by how rich and flexible one’s
linguistic resources are. In language learning, there is increasing
evidence that accuracy develops more efficiently when it is viewed as
one element in a communicative effort, an overall effort which
includes meaningfulness, appropriateness, creativity, and reality. To
treat accuracy as usage, the socially approved choice of language
forms, is less valuable to learners than teaching accuracy as instrumen-
tal to the successful accomplishment of a larger communicative task.
Some specific recommendations which we believe are called for in
the treatment of error are:
1. Teachers should attempt to analyze students’ behavior to determine
which errors are signs of incorrect learning, which errors seriously
interfere with comprehensibility, and which errors are inappropri-
ate at the learners’ stage of development. These errors should be
642 TESOL QUARTERLY
 distinguished from those errors which are simply signs of incom-
plete learning, those which do not interfere with communication, or
those which are persistent for all learners. The first types are
candidates for treatment, the second probably not.
2. Because language users’ ability to monitor for formal accuracy is
limited in scope and effect, teachers should expect conscious
control only over those few features of the language that are subject
to monitoring (i.e., a few salient surface features, generally only in
the written mode).
3. Because direct methods of error correction (identification, explana-
tion, correction) have not been shown to be effective, teachers
should encourage more indirect methods of error improvement,
possibly employing peers, and generally assisting and encouraging
students to use communicatively and interactionally modulated
repair and clarification techniques to improve accuracy.
4. Teachers should be aware that many aspects of error are affectively
determined. Pronunciation errors especially, but many other errors
as well, serve to mark the learner’s identity as a non-native speaker,
a status that is often psychologically reassuring and interactionally
advantageous. Teachers must also realize that they are often unrea-
listically harsh judges of accuracy (Ludwig 1982:280) and that naive
listeners tend to focus on content more than on form. One mistake
should be avoided. In Ludwig’s words, “Too often students and
teachers mistakenly relate linguistic accuracy with increased social
acceptance, thinking that if they could speak and write with fewer
mistakes, then people would like them more . . . However, the data
indicate that cultural stereotypes aside, each L2 user is regarded as
an individual with his or her own personality and opinion, neither of
which is judged on linguistic criteria in the mind of the native
speaker” (1982:282).
5. Teachers can identify for learners those modes of language use in
which formal accuracy is more important (e.g., academic writing,
possibly) and teach editing skills and the use of reference works and
feedback resources to assist the learners in achieving accuracy in
those contexts.
The conclusion to be drawn from this consideration of error is that
formal correctness should be accorded a place somewhat lower on the
instructional scale than it has traditionally had—not abandoned, but
viewed as secondary to instructional experiences which call for inde-
pendence and risk taking on the part of students, and greater openness
on their part to feedback from others.

LANGUAGE RESEARCH AND TEACHING PRINCIPLES 643

 In conclusion, practice in language teaching has characteristically
developed from theory or from accumulated classroom experience.
Both are excellent sources of direction. What we have attempted to do
in this article is to emphasize a third basis for direction and evaluation
in language teaching—empirical research into language acquisition
and language use. In concluding, we return to the comment made
earlier that not all of what is discovered about language and language
learning is directly applicable to the classroom. By suggesting four
general principles to guide language teaching, we hope that evolving
practice will help determine and refine empirically sound and coherent
teaching practice aimed at developing functional ability in second
language learners.

THE AUTHORS
Karl J. Krahnke is Assistant Professor of English and Director of ESL Teacher Training
at Colorado State University. He has taught and directed ESL programs in Afghanistan,
Iran, Utah, and Washington. He is presently coordinating an annotated bibliography
of ESL tests and is working on both a reading and a methodology text.

Mary Ann Christison, Assistant Professor and Director of the English Training Center
at Snow College in Utah, is the author of several reference resource books for ESL
teachers. She is also on the TESOL Newsletter editorial staff and edits the Affiliate/
Interest Section page.

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LANGUAGE RESEARCH AND TEACHING PRINCIPLES 649

 TESOL QUARTERLY, VoI. 17, No.4, December 1983

On the Use of Composition Scoring

Techniques, Objective Measures,
and Objective Tests to Evaluate
ESL Writing Ability
KYLE PERKINS
Southern Illinois University

The evaluation of writing ability among both L1 and L2 students has

become increasingly important in recent years because the results of
such evaluation are used for a variety of administrative, instructional,
and research purposes. Classroom teachers, in particular, because
they want to use these results to help improve, influence, refine, and
shape their students’ attained writing ability, have specific concerns
regarding the various methods of writing assessment available. Addi-
tional concerns, especially of teachers, include the issue of whether
the results of any one evaluation procedure are helpful to students
and how they affect students’ writing performance and attitudes.
This article does not address the question of how best to use the
results of a writing evaluation to improve student writing, but it does
present a discussion of the efficacy of various direct and indirect
methods of assessing writing ability. The purpose of this article is to
outline the assumptions, procedures, and consequences for use of the
principal direct scoring schemes and objective measures presently
available for evaluating compositions, and of the objective tests
currently utilized to determine (indirectly) students’ ability to write.
It is hoped that ESL professionals (whether they are teachers,
administrators, or researchers) can make use of this discussion as they
try to decide how best to handle questions related to writing ability.
Although some readers may question the appropriateness of using
indirect measures, such as standardized tests, since those only measure
recognition of surface-level syntactic phenomena, the more widely
used standardized tests have been included in this survey because
they are used by a number of institutions as criterion measures as well
as for placement and prediction.

INTRODUCTION
There are several scoring schemes in use today for evaluating

651
compositions. In addition to these direct measures of writing pro-
ficiency, there are many different objective measures and objective
tests which are currently being used to assess indirectly students’
ability to write. When we consider the various composition scoring
schemes, objective measures, and objective tests that are available,
several questions immediately come to mind: What do they imply?
What specific procedures do they suggest? Are these procedures and
tests practical? Are they reliable and valid? Will they work for the
different kinds of writing evaluation called for in administrative,
instructional, and research decision-making processes? This article
presents a discussion of the principal scoring schemes, objective
measures, and objective tests currently used to evaluate students’
ability to write. For each technique and measure four issues are
addressed in order to provide answers to the questions listed above.
These issues include: 1) what the technique or measure is and how it
can be used, 2) what its strengths are, 3) what its limitations are, and 4)
an overall evaluation/recommendation and why.

COMPOSITION SCORING TECHNIQUES

Three composition scoring techniques will be discussed in this
section of the article: holistic scoring, analytical scoring, and primary
trait scoring. As an introduction, the following definitions were offered
by Stiggins and Bridgeford:
Holistic scoring calls for the reader to rate overall writing proficiency on a
single rating scale. Analytical scoring breaks performance down into
component parts (e. g., organization, wording, ideas) for rating on multiple
scales. And primary trait scoring requires rating of attributes of performance
unique to a particular audience and writing purpose (e. g., persuasiveness,
awareness of audience) (1983:26).

Holistic Scoring
Of all of the composition evaluation schemes available today,
holistic scoring has the highest construct validity when overall attained
writing proficiency is the construct to be assessed. Holistic scoring
involves one or more readers awarding a single grade based on the
total impression of a composition as a whole text or discourse. Because
holistic scoring evaluates a whole text rather than simply parts of a
text, the grader can take any or all of the following into account: 1)
whether a thesis has been clearly stated, developed, and supported,
and whether an issue has been clearly raised and sufficiently resolved,
2) whether sufficient support and development (i.e., redundancy, i n

652 TESOL QUARTERLY

the communication science sense) have been provided for the reader,
3) whether the writer has tried to accommodate the reader in terms of
how much (or how little) the writer thinks the reader knows about the
subject (i. e., has the writer tried to accommodate the intended
audience?), 4) whether there is grammatical and lexical cohesion and
overall coherence, 5) whether one paragraph is “hinged” smoothly to
preceding and succeeding paragraphs through the accomplished use
of transitional words, phrases, and structure vocabulary, 6) whether
new information has been converted into given information that forms
the base for predicating additional new information, and 7) whether
the piece “makes sense.”
Although holistic scoring has much to recommend it as a tool for
certification, placement, proficiency, and research testing, the proce-
dure nevertheless has many drawbacks, potential and realized weak-
nesses—referred to collectively as threats to reliability. As previously
mentioned, in scoring holistically, the grader reads the composition,
forms a general impression, and assigns a mark to that composition
based on some standard. That standard may either be a model compo-
sition (or series of them) to which the reader has reference, or general
impressions the reader has, based on experience in reading student
compositions. Such evaluation can, therefore, be highly subjective due
to bias, fatigue, internal lack of consistency, previous knowledge of the
student, and/or shifting standards from one paper to the next.
Published research on holistic scoring in terms of reliability and
concurrent validity has yielded contradictory findings. Braddock,
Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer (1963) and Follman and Anderson (1967)
have reported interrater reliability coefficients as high as 0.90. Simi-
larly, Kaczmarek (1980) found that subjective teacher judgments had
substantial reliability estimates in her study and strongly correlated
with independent readers and with objective scores.
Yet, other research has shown that professional persons, including
English teachers, vary in their assessment of attained writing profi-
ciency. The research of Remondino (1959), Diederich et al. (1961), and
Diederich (1974) is most noteworthy. Diederich et al. (1961) have
reported a study in which sixty professionals were asked to grade 300
papers written by college freshmen from three different schools. The
readers, who represented six occupational fields and included college
English teachers, social science teachers, natural science teachers,
writers and educators, lawyers, and business executives, were asked to
sort the 300 papers into nine groups. Diederich noted that
out of the 300 essays graded, 101 received every grade from 1 to 9, 94
percent received either seven, eight, or nine different grades; and no essay
received less than five different grades from fifty-three readers (1974:5).

EVALUATION OF ESL WRITING ABILITY 653

 Diederich analyzed the reasons for the diversity of judgment and
isolated the following predominant criteria: 1) flavor and personality
(“style as the revelation of a personality, individuality, originality,
interest, and sincerity”), 2) organization and analysis, 3) quality of
ideas, 4) usage, sentence structure, punctuation, and 5) wording and
spelling.
An explanatory inference which explicates Diederich’s finding has
been offered by Hirsch (1977). Searching for reasons to explain the
lack of agreement among readers, Hirsch has suggested that different
weights are attached to a few traits of writing and has further noted
that reliable, independent agreement in the scoring of writing samples
is out of the question until widespread agreement is obtained about the
qualities of good writing.
Fortunately, there are techniques available to reduce the aforemen-
tioned threats to reliability (i.e., reduce the subjectivity) in scoring
compositions. For example, Henning (in press) has recommended 1) a
behavior-specific rating schedule for use in composition evaluation
(for an excellent example of a rating schedule, see Appendix), 2) an
insistence on rater competence and expertise, 3) the use of multiple
independent raters, and 4) the elicitation of multiple writing samples to
control for the fact that attained writing ability may vary with topic
and time of day (see Arthur 1979). In a similar fashion, Jacobs et al.
(1981) have suggested seven steps for more reliable composition
evaluation: 1) adopt a holistic evaluation approach, 2) establish criteria
to focus readers’ attention on significant aspects of the compositions, 3)
set a common standard for judging the quality of the writing, 4) select
readers from the same backgrounds, 5) train readers until they can
achieve close agreement in their assessments of the same papers, 6)
obtain at least two independent readings of each composition, and 7)
monitor the readers periodically during the evaluation to check their
consistency in applying the standards and criteria of evaluation.
The previously cited techniques to reduce subjectivity in holistic
scoring are necessary for the following reasons cited in Jacobs et al.
(1981): 1) graders may have different standards of severity; in fact,
some graders may try to use an absolute standard of quality, such as
published writing, 2) graders may be inconsistent in applying the
standards of the evaluation, 3) graders may react to certain elements in
the evaluation or in the papers; for example, Daiker, Kerek, and
Morenberg (1978) have found that graders tend to evaluate a composi-
tion by the quality of its sentence structure, and Williams (1980) has
reported that a composition written in a “nominal” style tends to be
graded higher and to be perceived as better organized, supported, and
argued than a corresponding composition written in a “verbal” style,
and 4) graders may value different aspects of a composition.

654 TESOL QUARTERLY

 Cooper provides a concise summary statement about holistic evalua-
tion:

Holistic evaluation of writing is a guided procedure for sorting or ranking

written pieces. The rater takes a piece of writing and either (1) matches it
with another piece in a graded series of pieces or (2) scores it for the
prominence of certain features important to that kind of writing or (3)
assigns it a letter or number grade. The placing, scoring, or grading occurs
quickly, impressionistically, after the rater has practiced the procedure
with other raters. The rater does not make corrections or revisions in the
paper. Holistic evaluation is usually guided by a holistic scoring guide
which describes each feature and identifies high, middle, and low quality
levels for each feature.

Where there is commitment and time to do the work required to achieve

reliability of judgment, holistic evaluation of writing remains the most valid
and direct means of rank-ordering students by writing ability. Spending no
more than two minutes on each paper, raters, guided by . . . holistic scoring
guides . . ., can achieve a scoring reliability as high as .90 for individual
writers. The scores provide a reliable rank-ordering of writers, an ordering
which can then be used to make decisions about placement, special
instruction, graduation, or grading (1977:3).

The results of such a rank ordering can also provide students with
examples of a range of quality for a particular task from previously
graded papers as well as with a basis for class discussion.

Analytical Scoring

An analytical scoring scheme involves the separation of the various

features of a composition into components for scoring purposes.
Heaton has described the analytical scoring scheme as follows:
Since most teachers have little opportunity to enlist the services of two or
more colleagues in marking class compositions, the analytic method is
recommended for such purposes. This method depends on a marking
scheme which has been carefully drawn up by the examiner or body of
examiners. It consists of an attempt to separate the various features of a
composition for scoring purposes. Such a procedure is ideally suited to the
classroom situation: because certain features have been graded separately,
each student is able to see how his particular grade has been obtained. The
following is reproduced simply as one example of such an analytical
scheme: in this particular case, duplicate (blank) copies of this scheme were
stenciled by the teacher and attached to the end of each composition.

EVALUATION OF ESL WRITING ABILITY 655

 5 4 3 2 1

I Vocabulary I I I I x I I TOTAL = 14

Mechanics x

Fluency x

Relevance x

(Heaton 1975:136-137)

In addition to showing students how their particular grades were

determined, analytical scoring has a further advantage: because an
analytical scale focuses graders’ scoring, the procedure is supposed to
ensure sufficient agreement among graders to permit a reliable score
to be derived from summed multiple ratings. Analytical scores can be
used for correlational research, exemption, growth measurement,
prediction, placement, and program evaluation uses. And furthermore,
analytical scores can serve as helpful guides to feedback on each piece
of writing submitted and to formative evaluation which is used “to
determine the degree of mastery of a given learning task and to
pinpoint the part of the task not mastered . . . The purpose is not to
grade or certify the learner; it is to help the learner and the teacher
focus upon the particular learning necessary for movement toward
mastery” (Bloom et al. 1971:61).
Cooper has commented on the use of analytical scores for two types
of writing evaluation:
For program evaluation or for research on methods of teaching writing, an
analytical scale can serve as a guide to raters choosing the better of each
student’s paired pre- and post-essays on matched topics of the same kind of
discourse (O’Hare 1973; Odell 1976). Where a criterion measure is required
in a research study, raters can use an analytical scale to score each student’s
writing (1977:17).
Although analytical scales can be used for various purposes in
writing evaluation, they are not cost-free. Developing an analytical
scale is a time-consuming procedure which, according to Cooper
(1977), entails a minimum of six steps. First, a large corpus of
published professional and original student writing must be amassed;
the features that make up the scale are derived from this corpus.

656 TESOL QUARTERLY

Second, the scale must be field-tested, after which the features may be
modified. Next, descriptors must be written to describe the high, mid,
and low quality levels for each feature. Fourth, the points must be
“anchored” on a scoring line. Fifth, the graders practice using the scale
on a fresh set of compositions. And finally, intra- and interrater
reliability estimates are computed.
Analytical scales have more serious disadvantages than simply the
time and commitment required to do a good job. First, there is the
problem of an immoderate standard. As with holistic scoring, some
graders may try to use an absolute standard of quality, such as
published professional writing. Second, the features to be analyzed are
isolated from context and are scored separately. Discourse analysis and
good sense tell us that a written or spoken text is more than the sum of
its parts. Third, the choice of categories can be vague and certainly
arbitrary because the categories themselves are determined by the
graders, who base their choices on a corpus of professional and student
writing. It has already been pointed out that different readers may
value different aspects of a composition.
The most serious drawback to analytical scales is that the scoring
weight of a particular category must be adjusted for different kinds of
discourse, as Cooper explains:
The main problem is that they are not sensitive to the variations in purpose,
speaker role, and conception of audience which can occur in pieces written
in the same mode. Current discourse theory persuades us that a piece of
autobiographical incident, viewed as to its function or purpose, could be
either expressive, persuasive, referential, or literary, that is, concerned
primarily with self, other, subject, or language, While we must acknow-
ledge, then, that analytical scales lack certain kinds of precision, we can still
demonstrate their usefulness as general or global guides for responding to a
piece of writing (1977 :14).1
In sum, analytical scoring entails a list of the prominent characteris-
tics of written discourse in a particular mode. The number of features
to be evaluated is determined by the grader depending on the nature
of the evaluation; in essence, graders can “tailor” the analytical
evaluation to fit their particular needs. Each feature is then described
in detail, and the high, mid, and low points are anchored and described
along a scoring line. Graders learn to use the scale by studying the
values and descriptors for each feature. The scale is employed on a
1 Heaton (1975) has tried to compensate for the lack of precision with regard to proficiency
levels. He has recommended that flexibility be maintained in the use of analytical scoring
because the grader may need to change either the components or the weighings assigned to
them depending on the proficiency level involved. For example, Heaton has suggested that the
evaluation might focus on grammar and vocabulary at the elementary level, whereas at the
intermediate level the focus might shift to relevance. At the advanced level, the evaluation
might focus on organization and subsume mechanics and fluency into one category.

EVALUATION OF ESL WRITING ABILITY 657

batch of student papers, and reliability estimates are calculated for the
raters. The results may indicate the necessity for further refinement
and practice using the scale.
Analytical scores are useful for a variety of evaluation purposes.
With enough time and commitment on the part of the graders, reliable
scores can be obtained. However, the procedure itself is time-consum-
ing, is vulnerable to the same threats to reliability as holistic scoring,
and is of questionable validity—it isolates features from context and
lacks sensitivity to variations in purpose, speaker role, and conception
of audience.

Primary Trait Scoring

In primary trait scoring, a holistic score is assigned to a particular
feature of writing, such as structure, tone, or vocabulary. This proce-
dure requires that graders ascertain whether a piece of writing exhibits
certain characteristics—termed primary traits—which are crucial to
the specific rhetorical task a writer is trying to perform. Lloyd-Jones
explains:
The goal of Primary Trait Scoring is to define precisely what segment of
discourse will be evaluated (e.g., presenting rational persuasion between
social equals in a formal situation), and to train readers to render holistic
judgments accordingly.
The chief steps in using the Primary Trait Scoring System are to define the
universe of discourse, to define exercises which sample that universe
precisely, to ensure cooperation of the writers, to devise workable scoring
guides, and to use the guides (1977:37).
It is evident from Lloyd-Jones’ article that primary trait scoring must
be based on a carefully prepared theory of discourse which focuses on
aims “which relate to the functions of language” and features “which
are the separate elements, devices, and mechanisms of language. ” The
dependence on discourse theory is crucial because, as Lloyd-Jones has
stated, “judgments about the quality of writing are—or should be—pri-
marily related to aims (i. e., does the piece of writing fulfill its
purpose?)” (1977:33).
The decision to use primary trait scoring requires that a grader first
choose a model of discourse which identifies the finite types of dis-
course used in different modes of writing, and then create exercises
which students can use to generate writing samples for evaluation.
Lloyd-Jones has used a three-part model of discourse, which is repro-
duced in Figure 1. But other models are available, such as Britton’s
(1970) two-part model, which focuses on “spectator” and “partici-
pant” writing, and Kinneavy’s (1971) four-part model, which focuses
on four purposes of discourse: 1) audience-directed, 2) manipulation

658 TESOL QUARTERLY

of language for its own sake, as in literature, 3) self-centered, and 4)
subject-controlled.
Before exercises are developed, the grader must isolate the kind of
discourse to be elicited in the writing sample. The exercises are
supposed to stimulate the students to write as well as they can within
the narrowly defined type of discourse to be examined. As Lloyd-
Jones has pointed out, any exercise must be couched within the writer’s
range of knowledge; for example, a writing teacher would not ask a
Caracas medical student to write about the Gezira Scheme for raising
cotton in the Sudan. The writing exercises must be field-tested to
ensure that the students understand what is required of them so that
they can generate discourse in the appropriate mode.
A scoring guide must then be prepared which, according to Lloyd-
Jones, contains the following components:
A scoring guide consists of (1) the exercise itself, (2) a statement of the
primary rhetorical trait of the writing which should be elicited by the
exercise (a kind of statement of the limited test objective), (3) an interpreta-
tion of the exercise indicating how each element of the stimulus is
presumed to affect the respondent (a kind of hypothesis about perfor-
mance), (4) an interpretation of how the situation of the exercise is related
to the posited primary trait (a synthesis of #2 and #3), (5) a system for
defining the shorthand which is to be used in reporting descriptions of the
writing (the actual scoring guide), (6) samples of papers which have been
scored (definition of the score points), and (7) discussions of why each
sample paper was scored as it was (extensions of the definitions).
EVALUATION OF ESL WRITING ABILITY 659
 Most of the guides of persuasive or referential writing use numbers (scores)
which indicate a value placed on the observed performances. Usually 4 or 5
is a highly competent performance, 1 is a serious but quite inadequate
response; other symbols are used to indicate a failure to engage the exercise
(1977:45).
Lloyd-Jones (1977:60-66) offers a sample of a final primary trait
scoring guide.
It is not clear from the previous discussion exactly what traits can be
evaluated and precisely what kinds of support a grader looks for while
conducting primary trait scoring. Odell (1981) has offered the follow-
ing insights. If graders were scoring a set of persuasive essays, for
example, they would determine 1) the number of reasons the student
writers gave in support of their arguments, 2) whether or not the
students elaborated on these reasons, and 3) what kind(s) of authorities
the students referred to. If graders were scoring a set of expressive
essays, on the other hand, they would ascertain 1) whether the student
successfully entered into an imaginary role specified in the writing
task, and 2) whether they elaborated on that role by giving details.
The principal advantage of primary trait scoring is that it provides a
precise, detailed description of a student’s writing ability for a specific
rhetorical task. Lloyd-Jones has noted that primary trait data can be
used for curriculum evaluation projects, diagnosis, formative evalua-
tion, research and correlational studies, and summative evaluation of
student writing; summative evaluation “is directed toward a . . . more
general assessment of the degree to which the outcomes have been
attained over the entire course or some substantial part of it” (Bloom et
al. 1971:61).
Anderson (1981), demonstrating how primary trait scoring can be
used to evaluate ESL compositions, has claimed that
its advantages for instructors are that it easily enables them to grade
specifically on one writing task, it is less time consuming than other
methods, and it can be adapted to meet the specific needs of any group of
students. Its advantages for the students are that it allows them to focus in
on a specific task and to apply structures to a rhetorical context (1981
TESOL Convention Program: 146).
Although primary trait scoring has been highly praised by Lloyd-
Jones, Cooper, and Anderson, there are some serious reservations
which must be addressed. Specifically, most writing teachers have
become accustomed to evaluating writing samples according to a
single set of criteria, but primary trait scoring is a radical departure
from that practice. With primary trait scoring a grader may have to use
a variety of evaluation procedures to evaluate writing samples in a
given mode, and few of these procedures have been developed
because discourse theory has not yet provided a complete set of

660 TESOL QUARTERLY

features which are necessary in different writing situations. Further-
more, primary trait scoring is more difficult and more time consuming
than other methods: Lloyd-Jones has estimated that 60 to 80 hours of
graders’ time is required for the preparation of each exercise, in
addition to the time required to gather samples and conduct trial runs.
Perhaps the most efficient use of primary trait scoring has been
suggested in the last sentence of the following quote by Cooper:
Primary Trait Scoring guides focus the rater’s attention on just those
features of a piece which are relevant to the kind of discourse it is: to the
special blend of audience, speaker role, purpose, and subject required by
that kind of discourse and by the particular writing task. Furthermore, a
unique quality of Primary Trait Scoring is that the scoring guides are
constructed for a particular writing task set in a full rhetorical context. This
close correspondence of rhetorically explicit task and holistic scoring guide
is a new development in holistic evaluation of writing, a development
almost certain to have great impact on the evaluation of writing. The
correspondence permits a new precision in stating writing research hypoth-
eses and in devising criterion measures for research and curriculum
development (1977:11).

THE USE OF OBJECTIVE MEASURES AND STANDARDIZED

TESTS FOR ASSESSING ESL WRITING ABILITY
This section of the article will discuss the use of objective measures
of writing which have become quite popular in ESL research and the
ubiquitous standardized tests and their application in the evaluation of
ESL writing ability.

Objective Measures
Objective measures such as words per T-unit, clauses per T-unit, and
so on, are said to be both objective and reliable because independent
evaluators will exhibit high correlations with each other when quanti-
fying objective measures of samples of written work. The T-unit was
one of the first objective measures to be employed as an instrument for
assessing writing. The T-unit is an index of syntactic complexity that
was developed by Hunt (1965), who has defined it as “a single main
clause (or independent clause) plus whatever other subordinate clauses
or nonclauses are attached to, or embedded within, that one main
clause” (Hunt 1977:93). Objective measures, including the T-unit and
its derivations, have become very popular in ESL research (see, for
example, Arthur 1979; Evola, Mamer, and Lentz 1980; Flahive and
Snow 1980; Gaies 1976, 1980; Homburg 1980; Kaczmarek 1980; Kameen
1979; Larsen-Freeman 1978; Mullen 1980; Nas 1975; Perkins 1980; and
Perkins and Homburg 1980).

EVALUATION OF ESL WRITING ABILITY 661

 While these objective measures may yield impressive estimates of
reliability and may function as robust discriminators among profi-
ciency levels, they are not without their critics because the validity of
these objective measures for assessing attained writing proficiency
remains questionable. First, by universal consent, writing quality has a
necessary connection with the communication of meaning; however,
objective measures, such as the mean length of T-unit, have no
necessary connection with the effective communication of the writer’s
meaning (see Hirsch 1977:179-180). Second, currently used objective
measures do not quantify cohesion, coherence, organization (present-
ing, developing, and supporting a thesis), idiom, diction, tone, rele-
vance, or focus—all factors which contribute to good writing. For
further criticism, see Ney (1966).
Results from studies of objective measures vary from researcher to
researcher. For example, Arthur (1979), in a study of short-term
changes in EFL composition skills, found that the most significant
changes in writing over the duration of a writing course were in speed
and vocabulary size. No significant differences were noted in words
per T-unit or error-free T-units. However, Kameen (1979), published
in the same volume as Arthur, reported that 25 “good” and 25 “poor”
writers differed in T-unit length, clause length, and incidence of
dynamic passive constructions. And Perkins (1980), in a study of ten
objective measures of writing proficiency, found that only those
measures which took the absence of errors into account discriminated
among holistic evaluations by experienced ESL teachers. In a previous
study of objective measures, Perkins and Homburg (1980), using
conservative statistical procedures, reported that total errors and errors
per T-unit discriminated among three different holistic evaluations.
Flahive and Snow (1980) employed discriminant analyses to determine
which of a set of objective measures had significant robustness in terms
of differentiating among different proficiency levels of writing; length
of T-unit and clause per T-unit ratio were the only two variables found
to be significant. Objective measures have been employed in at least
one battery of instruments to measure growth in student writing.
Metzger (1978) suggested pre- and post-analyses of writing by using
words per T-unit, a count of deviances from standard English, and a
measure of writing anxiety. In sum, the use of objective measures is
impractical, tedious, and time consuming for classroom use; while
objective measures may be of interest to researchers, they, seemingly,
are of little value in assessing the underlying constructs of writing
because the intent to communicate is neither assessed nor measured by
them.

662 TESOL QUARTERLY

Standardized Tests
Multiple-choice, objective standardized tests of writing skills are
indirect measures, at best, because they do not require the examinee to
perform the composing process. Opinions of standardized tests vary
from one researcher to another. Michael and Shaeffer, who favor
objective tests, have stated the following:
A short multiple choice examination requiring knowledge of principles
about grammar, usage, choice of words and phrases, and syntax such as the
TSWE (Test of Standard Written English) or a subtest of the CSUC-EPT
(California State University and Colleges English Placement Test) reflect-
ing similar competencies provides a more accurate prediction of success in
a basic English composition course emphasizing writing skills than does an
essay examination requiring the actual demonstration of writing skills
(1979:132).
Diederich also favors objective tests:
My final word of advice on such tests [objective tests] is not to despise
them. Objective test items can easily, quickly and reliably test a student’s
knowledge of the rules and conventions of English. In writing, if a student
is not sure that he knows how to use a certain construction, he can change
his sentence to avoid using it, but in an objective test, you can give him a
sentence with that construction in it, and he has to decide whether it is
correct or incorrect. Arguments over whether answering objective items “is
the same thing as” actual writing or speaking are futile. For that matter,
writing one essay is not “the same thing as” writing another essay, even on
the same day; we have seen that even the most carefully determined grades
on such essays rarely correlate higher than 0.70. Then the astonishing thing
is that scores on a good objective test of English usage often correlate about
0.70 with averages of the two essay grades. It does not matter that they do
not “really” measure “the same thing. ” If students who are good at one tend
to be good at the other, and vice versa, then it is a good indicator of
proficiency in written English. Call it an editing test if you, like, but I can
promise you that students who do well on it tend to be good writers
(1974:79-80).
For further discussion of the correlation between direct and indirect
test scores in L1 composition, see Davis, Scriven, and Thomas (1981);
Hogan and Mishler (1980); Moss, Cole, and Khampalikit (1982); and
Stiggins (1982).
But other researchers, such as Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer
(1963) and Breland and Gaynor (1979), have criticized objective tests
for their lack of validity and the impressions about the low valuation of
writing which they convey.
The most serious charge against multiple choice tests is their lack of
validity. Not only do they not require the examinee to perform the behavior
being measured—he does not do actual writing—but these tests

EVALUATION OF ESL WRITING ABILITY 663

 also make no attempt to measure the “larger elements” of composition even
indirectly (Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer 1963:42).
Indirect measures lack face validity and credibility among members of the
English profession and educators generally, and they tend to deliver a
message to students that writing is not important (Breland and Gaynor
1979:127).
The above criticisms notwithstanding, standardized tests are used for
a variety of purposes in ESL writing programs. Examples are Sequen-
tial Tests of Educational Progress (STEP) English Expression subtest
(Educational Testing Service 1956-63); California Achievement Test
(CAT) (Tiegs and Clark 1933-72); Stanford Test of Academic Skills
(Gardner et al. 1972-74); Cooperative English Test (CET) Effective-
ness and Mechanics subtests (Derrick, Harris, and Walker 1940-60);
Test of Ability to Subordinate (TAS) (Davidson 1978); Test of Stan-
dard Written English (TWSE) (Educational Testing Service 1974);
Michigan Test of English Language Proficiency (MTELP) ( U p s h u r
et al. 1961-66).
Gray and Slaughter (1980) have reported the successful use of some
of these tests to place students into three levels of a Basic Writing
program, using the following cutoff points for placement purposes:

Kunz (1980) has found that TAS and cloze scores correlate signifi-
cantly with the MTELP and placement scores. The TAS is a 50-item
sentence-combining test which is said to measure specific grammatical
points and is recommended for diagnosis and placement purposes.
Kunz has reported that at the City University of New York the MTELP
and holistic scores are used to place ESL students into different
proficiency levels, using the following cutoff points:

664 TESOL QUARTERLY

 There has been considerable research conducted with both the TAS
and TSWE at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Perkins and
Konneker (1981) have reported the results of a project which employed
five sections of expository writing for foreign students. Two experi-
mental sections received systematic practice in sentence combining;
the control sections received none. The two experimental sections and
one control section showed significant gain in pre- and post- T A S
scores, but no overall improvement in attained writing proficiency. In
a validity study, Perkins (1982) found that the TAS had predictive
validity for eventual (15 weeks) attained writing proficiency, using a
holistic marking scheme as the criterion measure; however, the T A S
did not seem to exhibit any concurrent validity, using holistic and
analytical schemes as criterion measures. In this case, predictive
validity refers to a test’s ability to predict learners’ future writing
ability. More specifically, the subjects who received the highest scores
on the TAS at the beginning of a 15-week semester tended to receive
the highest holistic evaluations on compositions written at the end of
the term. Concurrent validity refers to a test’s ability to tap the same
constructs which other similar tests purport to measure. In this
particular study, the TAS which was given at the end of the term did
not account for a significant amount of variance in the holistic and
analytical scores from compositions which were written during the
same testing period.
The TSWE is a thirty-minute 50-item multiple-choice test which
evaluates a student’s ability to recognize standard written English. The
purpose of TSWE scores is to help place native English speakers into
appropriate freshman composition courses. It has been administered
to native speaker populations as a part of the Educational Testing
Service’s Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Two types of questions are
included in the test—those on usage and those on sentence correction.
Students scoring 60 (converted score) are usually exempt from fresh-
man composition; those scoring from 35 to 59, mainstream composi-
tion; those scoring below 35, remedial composition. Perkins (1980)
found that the TSWE would not discriminate between three different
holistic evaluations (e.g., pass, low pass, and fail) of ESL compositions.
An apparent implication of that study was that tests designed for
native speakers should be used cautiously with L2 populations.
Can standardized, objective tests be used for placement purposes in
large-scale settings? The answer is yes, if such tests exhibit high
magnitudes of concurrent validity with set criteria of placement essay
productive writing samples (i.e., students who get high marks on the
objective tests also get high marks on the composition placement
examination and vice versa). These conditions have apparently been
met in the Basic Writing and Intensive ESL programs at the City

EVALUATION OF ESL WRITING ABILITY 665

University of New York (see Gray and Slaughter 1980 and Kunz 1980).
But it must be remembered that objective tests lack face validity (i.e.,
the extent to which a test looks like a test) and construct validity (i.e.,
the extent to which a test measures specific traits in accordance with
language learning and behavior theory), at minimum, because no
performance of the composing process is elicited from the examinees.
Even the TAS does not entail extensive text construction.

CONCLUSION
ESL composition evaluation consists of two tasks: commenting on
student papers and assigning grades. I have not addressed the issue of
commentary here because a thorough treatment of a rationale and
methodology for commentary would go well beyond the scope of this
article. However, this article has been devoted to a discussion of the
principal scoring schemes, objective measures, and objective tests
currently used in assessing writing ability. In addition to the previous
discussion of each technique or measure’s strengths, weaknesses, and
recommended uses, I want to make two additional points: 1 ) no test or
scoring procedure is suitable for all purposes, and 2) even with
guidelines and set criteria, the analytical and holistic scoring schemes
can produce unreliable and invalid test information; for further
discussion on this second point, see Jacobs et al. (1981:24-28). In sum,
no test or composition scoring procedure is perfect.
Perhaps a fitting coda to this article is the following quote from
Irmscher:
Evaluation obviously implies values, but many teachers evaluate without
defining them or just feel frustrated because they can’t quantify the value
they hold. Without clearly defined values, it is impossible to make
consistent judgments and discriminations. And it is better yet if we can
verbalize them so that commenting and grading do not seem personal
without reference to objective criteria . . . Lacking a set of values [teachers]
tend to deal only with particular flaws . . , Not knowing what else to do,
teachers proofread instead of reading critically. Thus, error-free writing
becomes synonymous in the minds of students with good writing, but of
course it isn’t necessarily (1979:142-143).

666 TESOL QUARTERLY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is an expanded version of a paper presented at the 1982 TESOL Convention in
Honolulu. Special thanks are due to Barry Taylor for helpful comments and sugges-
tions which, hopefully, were properly incorporated into the final draft.

THE AUTHOR
Kyle Perkins is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Southern Illinois University at
Carbondale.

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Anderson, Karen. 1981. Primary trait scoring: new approach to evaluating
ESL compositions. Demonstration presented at the 15th Annual TESOL
Convention, Detroit, Michigan, March 3-8, 1981.
Arthur, Bradford. 1979. Short-term changes in ESL composition. In O n
TESOL ’79, Carlos Yorio, Kyle Perkins, and Jacquelyn Schachter (Eds.),
330-342. Washington, D. C.: TESOL.
Bloom, Benjamin S., J. Thomas Hastings, and George F. Madaus. 1971.
Handbook on formative and summative evaluation of student learning.
New York: McGraw-Hill.
Braddock, Richard, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer. 1963. Research
in written composition. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of
English.
Breland, Hunter M., and Judith L. Gaynor. 1979. A comparison of direct and
indirect assessments of writing skill. Journal of Educational Measurement
16 (2):119-128.
Britton, James. 1970. Language and learning. Coral Gables, Florida: Univer-
sity of Miami Press.
Cooper, Charles R. 1977. Holistic evaluation of writing. In Evaluating writing:
describing, measuring, judging, Charles R. Cooper and Lee Odell (Eds.),
3-31. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English.
Daiker, Donald, Andrew Kerek, and Max Morenberg. 1978. Sentence com-
bining and syntactic maturity in freshman English. College Composition
and Communication 19 (1):36-41.
Davidson, David M. 1978. Test of ability to subordinate. New York: Language
Innovations, Inc.
Davis, Barbara, Michael Scriven, and Susan Thomas. 1981. The evaluation of
composition in instruction. Pt. Reyes, California: Edgepress.
Derrick, Clarence, David P. Harris, and Biron Walker (Revisors). 1940-60.
Cooperative English tests. Princeton, New Jersey: Cooperative Tests and
Services, Educational Testing Service.
Diederich, Paul. 1974. Measuring growth in English. Urbana, Illinois: National
Council of Teachers of English.

EVALUATION OF ESL WRITING ABILITY 667

Diederich, Paul, John French, and Sydell Carlton. 1961. Factors in judgments
of writing ability. Educational Testing Service Research Bulletin R B - 6 1 - 1 5 .
Princeton, New Jersey: Educational Testing Service.
Educational Testing Service. 1956-63. Sequential tests of educational progress.
Princeton, New Jersey: Cooperative Test Division, Educational Testing
Service.
Educational Testing Service. 1974. Test of standard written English. Prince-
ton, New Jersey: Educational Testing Service.
Evola, Jill, Ellen Mamer, and Becky Lentz. 1980. Discrete point versus global
scoring for cohesive devices. In Research in language testing, John W.
Oller, Jr. and Kyle Perkins (Eds.), 177-181. Rowley, Massachusetts: New-
bury House.
Flahive, Douglas, and Becky Snow. 1980. Measures of syntactic complexity in
evaluating ESL compositions. In Research in language testing, John W.
Oller, Jr. and Kyle Perkins (Eds.), 171-176. Rowley, Massachusetts: New-
bury House.
Follman, John C., and James A. Anderson. 1967. An investigation of the
reliability of five procedures for grading English themes. Research in the
Teaching of English 1 (2):190-200.
Gaies, Stephen. 1976. Sentence-combining: a technique for assessing profi-
ciency in a second language. Paper presented at the Conference on
Perspectives in Language, University of Louisville, May 6-8, 1976.
Gaies, Stephen. 1980. T-unit analysis in second language research: applica-
tions, problems, and limitations. TESOL Quarterly 14 (2):85-98.
Gardner, Eric F., Robert Callis, Jack C. Merwin, and Richard Madden. 1972-
74. Stanford test of academic skills. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Gray, Barbara Quint, and Virginia B. Slaughter. 1980. Writing. In Teaching
basic skills in college, Alice Stewart Trillin and Associates (Eds.), 12-90. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Heaton, J. B. 1975. Writing English language tests. London: Longman Group,
Ltd.
Henning, Grant H. In press. Language test development. Rowley, Massachu-
setts: Newbury House.
Hirsch, E. D., Jr. 1977. T h e p h i l o s o p h y o f c o m p o s i t i o n . C h i c a g o : T h e
University of Chicago Press.
Hogan, Thomas P., and Carol Mishler. 1980. Relationships between essay tests
and objective tests of language skills for elementary school students.
Journal of Educational Measurement 17:219-227.
Homburg, Taco J. 1980. A syntactic complexity measure of attained ESL
writing proficiency. M.A. thesis, Southern Illinois University.
Hunt, Kellogg W. 1965. Grammatical structures written at three grade-levels.
Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English.
Hunt, Kellogg W. 1977. Early blooming and late blooming syntactic struc-
tures. In Evaluating writing: describing, measuring, judging, Charles R.
Cooper and Lee Odell (Eds.), 91-104. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of
Teachers of English.
Irmscher, William F. 1979. Teaching expository writing. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston.

668 TESOL QUARTERLY

Jacobs, Holly L., Stephen A. Zingraf, Deanna R. Wormuth, V. Faye Hartfiel,
and Jane B. Hughey. 1981. Testing ESL composition: a practical approach.
Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House Publishers, Inc.
Kaczmarek, Celeste M. 1980. Scoring and rating essay talks. In Research in
language testing, John W. Oller, Jr. and Kyle Perkins (Eds.), 151-159.
Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House Publishers, Inc.
Kameen, Patrick. 1979. Syntactic skill and ESL writing quality. In On TESOL
’79, Carlos Yorio, Kyle Perkins, and Jacquelyn Schachter (Eds.), 343-350.
Washington, D. C.: TESOL.
Kinneavy, James. 1971. A theory of discourse. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:
Prentice-Hall.
Kunz, Linda Ann. 1980. English as a second language. In Teaching basic skills
in college, Alice Stewart Trillin and Associates (Eds.), 145-207. San Francis-
co: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Larsen-Freeman, Diane. 1978. An ESL index of development. Paper pre-
sented at the 12th Annual TESOL Convention, Mexico City, April 4-9, 1978.
Lloyd-Jones, Richard. 1977. Primary trait scoring. In Evaluating writing:
describing, measuring, judging, Charles R. Cooper and Lee Odell (Eds.),
33-66. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English.
Metzger, Elizabeth. 1978. A scheme for measuring growth in college writing.
Journal of Basic Writing 1 (4):71-81.
Michael, William B., and Phyllis Shaeffer. 1979. A comparison of the validity
of the Test of Standard Written English (TSWE) and of the California State
U n i v e r s i t y a n d C o l l e g e s E n g l i s h P l a c e m e n t T e s t ( C S U C - E P T ) in the
prediction of grades in a basic English Composition course and of overall
freshman-year grade point average. Educational and Psychological Mea-
surement 39 (1):131-145.
Moss, Pamela A., Nancy S. Cole, and Choosak Khampalikit. 1982. A compari-
son of procedures to assess written language skills in grades 4, 7, and 10.
Journal of Educational Measurement 19 (1):37-48.
Mullen, Karen. 1980. Evaluating writing proficiency in ESL. In Research in
language testing, John W. Oller, Jr: and Kyle Perkins (Eds.), 160-170.
Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House.
Nas, G. 1975. Determining the communicative value of written discourse
produced by L2 learners. Utrecht, The Netherlands: Institute of Applied
Linguistics,
Ney, James W. 1966. Review of Grammatical structures written at three grade
levels, Kellogg Hunt. Language Learning 16 (3 and 4):230-235.
Odell, Lee. 1976. The classroom teacher as researcher. English Journal 6 5
(1):106-111.
Odell, Lee. 1981. Teachers of composition and needed research in discourse
theory. In The writing teacher’s sourcebook, Gary Tate and Edward P. J.
Corbett (Eds.), 53-61. New York: Oxford University Press.
O’Hare, Frank. 1973. Sentence-combining: improving student writing without
formal grammar instruction. NCTE Research Report No. 15. U r b a n a ,
Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English.
Perkins, Kyle. 1980. Using objective methods of attained writing proficiency
to discriminate among holistic evaluations. TESOL Quarterly 14 (1):61-69.

EVALUATION OF ESL WRITING ABILITY 669

Perkins, Kyle, and Taco Homburg. 1980. Three different statistical analyses of
objective measures of attained writing proficiency. In Occasional Papers on
Linguistics No. 6, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on
Frontiers in Language Proficiency and Dominance Testing, R a y m o n d
Silverstein (Ed.), 306-317. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University,
Department of Linguistics.
Perkins, Kyle, and Beverly H. Konneker. 1981. Testing the effectiveness of
sentence-combining in ESL composition. Paper presented at the 15th
Annual TESOL Convention, Detroit, Michigan, March 3-8, 1981.
Perkins, Kyle. 1982. The test of ability to subordinate: predictive and
concurrent validity for attained ESL composition. In Proceedings of the
Fourth International Language Testing Symposium of the Interuniversitare
Sprachtestgruppe held at the University of Essex, 14-17 September, 1981.
Occasional Papers 26, Terry Culhane, Christine Klein Braley, and Douglas
K. Stevenson (Eds.), 104-112. Colchester: University of Essex, Department
of Language and Linguistics.
Remondino, C. 1959. A factorial analysis of the evaluation of scholastic
compositions in the mother tongue. British Journal of Educational Psychol-
ogy 29 (1):242-251.
Stiggins, Richard J. 1982. A comparison of direct and indirect writing
assessment methods. Research in the Teaching of English 16 (2):101-114.
Stiggins, Richard J., and Nancy J. Bridgeford. 1983. An analysis of published
tests of writing proficiency. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practices
2 (1):6-19, 26.
Tiegs, Ernest W., and Willis W. Clark. 1933-72. California achievement tests:
language. Del Monte Research Park, Monterey, California: CTB/
McGraw-Hill.
Upshur, John A., et al. 1961-66. Michigan test of English language proficiency
(Forms A-E). Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan, Testing and
Certification Division, English Language Institute.
Williams, Joseph M. 1980. Non-linguistic linguistics and the teaching of style.
Language and Style XIII (3):24-40.

APPENDIX
HOLISTIC CRITERIA
City University of New York Freshman Wills Assessment Program
Evaluation Scale for Writing Assessment Test
6: The essay is completely organized and the ideas are expressed in
appropriate language. A sense of pattern or development is present from
beginning to end. The writer supports assertions with explanation or
illustrations.
Sentences reflect a command of syntax within the ordinary range of
standard written English. Grammar, punctuation, and spelling are gener-
ally correct.

670 TESOL QUARTERLY

4-5: The writer introduces some point or idea and demonstrates an awareness
that development or illustration is called for.
The essay presents a discernible pattern or organization, even if there are
occasional digressions.
The essay demonstrates sufficient command of vocabulary to convey,
without serious distortion or excessive simplification, the range of the
writer’s ideas.
Sentences reflect a sufficient command of syntax to ensure reasonable
clarity of expression. The writer generally avoids both the monotony of
rudimentary syntax and the incoherence created by tangled syntax.
The writer demonstrates through punctuation an understanding of the
boundaries of the sentence.
The writer spells the common words of the language with a reasonable
degree of accuracy. Exceptions can be made for the so-called spelling
demons which frequently trouble even an advanced writer.
The writer shows the ability to use regularly, but not necessarily
faultlessly, the common forms of agreement and of grammatical inflec-
tion in standard written English.
2-3: An idea or point is suggested, but is underdeveloped or presented in a
purely repetitious way.
The pattern of the essay is somewhat random and relationships between
sentences and paragraphs are rarely signaled.
The essay is restricted to a very narrow range of language, so that the
vocabulary chosen frequently does not serve the needs of the writer.
The syntax of the essay is not sufficiently stable to ensure reasonable
clarity of expression. The syntax is rudimentary or tangled.
The writer frequently commits errors of punctuation which obscure
sentence boundaries.
The writer spells the common words of the language with only intermit-
tent accuracy.
The essay reveals recurrent grammatical problems; if there are only
occasional problems, this may be due to the extremely narrow range of
syntactical choices the writer has used.
1: The essay suffers from general incoherence and has no discernible
pattern of organization. It displays a high frequency of error in the
regular features of standard written English. Lapses in punctuation,
spelling and grammar often frustrate the reader.
Or: The essay is so brief that any reasonably accurate judgment of the
writer’s competence is impossible.
(Gray and Slaughter 1980:25-26)

EVALUATION OF ESL WRITING ABILITY 671

REVIEWS
The TESOL Quarterly welcomes evaluative reviews of publications of relevance
to TESOL professionals. In addition to textbooks and reference materials, these
include computer and video software, testing instruments, and other
forms of non-print materials.

Edited by CHARLENE J. SATO

University of Hawaii at Manoa

Language and Culture in Conflict: Problem-Posing

in the ESL Classroom
Nina Wallerstein. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing
Company, 1983. Pp. 209.

This resource book for teachers of adult ESL classes is an outgrowth

of author Nina Wallerstein’s experience in community education. As
such, it offers a class-tested model for those who wish to adapt Paulo
Freire’s problem-posing education (Freire 1973) to their own class-
rooms. Part One of Wallerstein’s two-part book defines problem-
posing education and describes appropriate problem-posing teaching
techniques. Part Two compiles eight teaching units applying the
techniques introduced in Part One.
While Freire’s writings (e.g., 1970a, 1970b) have been criticized
(Boston 1972, Donohue 1972, Elias 1974, Friedenberg 1971, Gleeson
1974, Jerez and Hernández-Pico, undated) for being stylistically obtuse
and clouded by specialized vocabulary, Wallerstein’s presentation in
Part One is remarkably clear, direct, and simple. By providing specific
and concrete suggestions throughout this section, she clarifies the
sometimes elusive transition from problem-posing theory to practice.
Freire’s problem-posing education proposes that true education
must be rooted in issues of direct relevance to learners. The teacher
identifies these issues by listening to the students. Through a method of
interaction called “dialogue,” this approach involves learners first in
reflection on those critical issues and then leads them to “action,” with
the resulting effect of improving their lives. Wallerstein has explored
and added to the “dialogue” stage (Freire 1970b) of problem-posing
education by identifying a five-step teaching process which is intended
to promote the development of critical thinking through dialogue
extending into action. The teacher’s questions described in Part One
(20-24) guide the learning group to 1) describe the content and feelings
contained in a “code” (a representation; e.g., a dialogue, story, picture,

673
or song relating to an issue in the lives of the students); 2) define the
problem represented by the code; 3) determine the presence of the
problem in the students’ own lives; 4) relate the problem to the larger
historical, cultural, social, and political context; and 5) identify actions
the students themselves can take to resolve the problem.
Part Two of the book contains eight units, of eight or nine lessons
each, on the following themes: autobiography, family, culture and
conflict, neighborhood, immigration, health, work, and money. Each
lesson includes an initial code in the form of a dialogue, story, or
picture, and some combination of the following instructional ap-
proaches: 1) a list of suggested questions for moving through the five
steps of dialogue, 2) grammar exercises, 3) a vocabulary list, 4) group
conversation exercises, 5) writing exercises, and 6) suggestions for
additional activities.
The questions Wallerstein proposes for the teacher’s use in stimulating
dialogue may seem overly simple. A transcript of an actual class
participating in one lesson of a unit, however, could have demonstrated
the excitement, energy, and communicative fluidity that these questions
can generate in a classroom. As it is, the reader is left to imagine this
interaction. This reviewer anticipates that, in practice, the most
powerful questions at the fifth step of dialogue, the stage of action, will
be those that arise from the discussion of neighborhood concerns.
Since the stage of action is the one in which North American educators
are least practiced, teachers might want to concentrate on the neighbor-
hood unit for some concrete examples of how to move into that stage.
A problem-posing approach to language learning necessitates teach-
ing the vocabulary of emotions and actions as well as natural conver-
sation patterns. Situational curricula, according to Wallerstein, teach
survival coping skills but do not deal with feelings, conflicts, and
possibilities for changing situations (39-42). Wallerstein attempts to
fulfill these requirements by identifying the language functions to be
addressed in each unit. Similar applications of the notional-functional
syllabus have already appeared in many North American ESL texts.
Wallerstein’s particular contribution lies in her integration of problem-
posing education with this current development in language teaching.
However, this reviewer does question Wallerstein’s inclusion of the
notional-functional concept in a chart (26) that compares problem-
posing with other curricular approaches. Problem-posing is a compre-
hensive approach to curriculum design. The notional-functional syl-
labus, on the other hand, is only a method of content definition which
can be integrated into any number of curriculum designs, including
problem-posing. Therefore, a comparison of problem-posing and a
notional-functional syllabus is not entirely appropriate and is less

674 TESOL QUARTERLY

useful than would be a discussion of the utilization of the notional-
functional syllabus within a problem-posing curriculum design.
Wallerstein’s experiential basis for this book lends it a strong
measure of realism. She is realistic about her students as language
learners, evidenced by her assertion that the use of problem-posing
does not obviate concurrent uses of more systematic language learning
methodologies. She is also sensitive to her students and highlights areas
where special consideration may be warranted (e. g., immigration
status). Her generous provision of examples to illustrate concepts
demonstrates the feasibility of conducting problem-posing ESL, as
well as Adult Basic Education and General Education Diploma,
classes.
Although this book is a powerful model, it is only one model of how
problem-posing can be implemented; other problem-posing designs
are also possible. For example, another model might provide only
pictorial codes and have the students produce accompanying dialogues
or stories which, in turn, would determine the linguistic content to be
learned. Furthermore, it should be noted that Wallerstein has not
intended to supply a complete, fully developed text that is transferable
to any given ESL classroom. The unit themes are sufficiently universal
to furnish a basis for initial dialogue. The codes, though, may well have
to be reconstructed to fit the needs and cultures of particular classes. In
any case, in a problem-posing classroom, the students would soon be
suggesting their own themes for study,
In order to expand and adapt Wallerstein’s model effectively, while
at the same time maintaining the problem-posing posture, teachers
should provide themselves with a broad theoretical foundation in
problem-posing education. At a minimum, they should read Freire’s
(1973) essay, “Education as the Practice of Freedom.” With this
background, the model which Wallerstein introduces can be helpful
not only to teachers of adult ESL classes but also to the secondary
school ESL and foreign language teacher. Teachers at this level have,
in the past, been deterred from implementing problem-posing because
of the heterogeneity of their classes and the difficulty of moving into
the action stage. To address these problems, Wallerstein proposes
using the classroom situation as the common experience from which to
generate dialogue and using the school setting as the initial setting for
action. With this core of common experience and setting for action,
and with Wallerstein’s model as a guide, progress in adapting problem-
posing to a variety of levels and subject areas can be anticipated.

REVIEWS 675
REFERENCES
Boston, Bruce O. 1972. Paulo Freire: notes of a loving critic. In Paulo Freire: a
revolutionary dilemma for the adult educator, Stanley M. Grabowski (Ed.),
83-92. Occasional Papers Number 32. Syracuse: Syracuse University Publi-
cations in Continuing Education and ERIC Clearinghouse on Adult Educa-
tion.
Donohue, John W. 1972. Paulo Freire: philosopher of adult education.
America 127(6): 167-170.
Elias, John L. 1974. A comparison and critical evaluation of the social and
educational thought of Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich: with a particular
emphasis upon the religious inspiration of their thought. Ed. D. dissertation,
Temple University.
Freire, Paulo. 1970a. Cultural action for freedom. Monograph Series Number
1. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Educational Review and Center for
the Study of Development and Social Change.
Freire, Paulo. 1970b. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and
Herder.
Freire, Paulo. 1973. Education as the practice of freedom. In Education for
critical consciousness, Paulo Freire, 1-84. New York: The Seabury Press.
Friedenberg, Edgar A. 1971. Review of Pedagogy of the oppressed, P a o l o
(sic) Freire. Comparative Education Review 15(3):378-380.
Gleeson, Denis. 1974. “Theory and practice” in the sociology of Paulo Freire.
Universities Quarterly 28(3):362-371.
Jerez, Cézar, and Juan Hernández-Pico. Undated. Cultural action for freedom.
In Paulo Freire, 29-51. The LADOC ‘Keyhole’ Series Number 1. Washington,
D. C.: Division for Latin America-USCC.

LINDA M. CRAWFORD-LANGE
Jackson .lunior High School
Champlin, Minnesota

Essential Idioms in English—A New Revised Edition

Robert J. Dixon. New York: Regents Publishing Company, 1983. Pp.
xii + 196.

True to its title, Essential Idioms in English is a collection of very

useful idiomatic expressions. As stated in the Foreword, “the idioms
for study should have practical value and be well within the student’s
grasp. Such expressions as to carry coals to Newcastle . . . . w h i l e v e r y
colorful, do not help the student achieve the goal of gaining fluency.”
An unusual aspect of the text is a listing of Spanish, French, and
German equivalents of the idioms covered.
Unfortunately, there is little else positive about Essential Idioms in

676 TESOL QUARTERLY

English. When the new 1983 edition is compared with the revised 1971
edition (the original was published in 1951), it is readily apparent that
very little has been changed aside from the layout. The new cover is
attractive, and the print is large. Old-fashioned illustrations (a school
bus, a flat tire, a dress shop) have been replaced with New Yorker
magazine cartoons, which are attractive, but which appear to have a
purely cosmetic purpose.
Each chapter begins with a list of twelve basically unrelated idioms,
each followed by a short definition. Two or three sentences containing
the idioms follow. There is one cartoon per lesson, with the caption
containing only one of the twelve idioms. Nowhere in the text is there
any structured exploitation of these cartoons, nor is there any discussion
of the cultural aspects of the situations depicted.
Since 1951 there has been considerable research in the areas of
second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, and communicative lan-
guage teaching, and the notion of contextualization in language
teaching has almost become a rule. Nevertheless, the presentation of
idioms in this text is completely uncontextualized. This is, of course,
not surprising, considering that the material was essentially written
over thirty years ago. As the Preface of the 1971 edition states, “Finally,
it should be borne in mind that this is a drill book designed to teach
students how to use idioms. ” The Foreword of the 1983 edition at least
omits this reference to drills, a word with more negative than positive
connotations in modern language teaching. The fact remains, however,
that the “new” version, like its predecessors, is essentially a drill book.
In each lesson students are given two exercises: the first is a multiple-
choice or substitution exercise, and the second is a list of questions
containing the twelve idioms. There is no attempt to have the students
use the idioms to communicate; in fact, an exercise in writing dialogues
or role playing would’ be quite difficult because of the lack of a
relationship among the idioms in each list.
The sentences following each idiom leave it to the student (and the
teacher) to determine how each expression is used grammatically. We
can induce from “Hal goes in for tennis while his wife goes in for
painting” (90) that to go in for is followed by either a common noun or
a gerund. But from the examples “We are looking forward to Christmas”
and “. . . she has nothing to look forward to except . . .” (53), we may
not realize that to here is a preposition (not the infinitive to) which is
always followed by a gerund or other nominal form. We are shown
how the two-word verb bring up is separable (bring him up, bring the
matter up, bring her children up), but we are not shown any sentences
containing, for example, bring up the matter. Granted that an idiom
text is not a grammar text, but for students to use (and not merely
recognize) the idioms, their knowledge of the grammatical usage of

REVIEWS 677
each expression must exceed simply knowing whether or not an idiom
is separable.
It might appear unfair to judge an old text by new standards, but
Regents Publishing Company has opened itself to criticism by releasing
this text. The Foreword states that Essential Idioms in English is “. . .
the first comprehensive text to attempt to teach idioms by means of
extensive practice exercises.” The 1983 edition is by no means the first
comprehensive idioms text. And more importantly, the practice exer-
cises are less than extensive. The addition of wonderful (but unutilized)
cartoons and the replacement of out-dated expressions with a few new
ones (e. g., to be into something) do not make this a “new” idioms
textbook. This review of Essential Idioms in English is a criticism not
solely of the author, but also of a publishing company which has
chosen to publish old and questionable material and present it as new
in 1983.

HELEN K. FRAGIADAKIS
University of California Extension, Berkeley

678 TESOL QUARTERLY

BRIEF REPORTS AND SUMMARIES
The TESOL Quarterly invites readers to submit short reports and updates on their
work. These summaries may address any areas of interest to Quarterly readers.
Authors’ addresses are printed with these reports to enable interested readers to
cent act the authors for more details.

Edited by ANN FATHMAN

Cañada College

New Methodologies for Studying the Relationsbip of

Bilingualism and Cognitive Fexibility
KENJI HAKUTA
Yale University
The turn of the century saw the introduction of psychometric tests of
intelligence to the United States, mostly due to the efforts of H. Goddard and
L. Terman. Both of these psychologists were hereditarians, who believed that
the genetic composition of individuals was the primary determinant of
performance on these tests. A major thrust of work in those dark days was
directed toward showing that individuals from certain racial groups (primarily
Southern and Eastern Europeans) were of inferior intelligence; together with
the assumption that this was due to their genes, certain social policies such as
the restriction of immigration were effected (see Gould 1981).
There was, however, a major stumbling block in reaching these conclusions
from the data that existed (mostly results of massive IQ testing of World War I
recruits): many of the testees were not native speakers of English, yet they
were tested in English. Thus, whether these individuals were suffering from a
“language handicap” in testing became a major issue. Hereditarians, such as
Terman’s student Kimball Young, argued that there was no language handi-
cap. Those in favor of environmental determinants of IQ stressed the
language handicap.
The social context in which this early research on bilingualism and
intelligence was conducted is radically different from the context of the more
recent studies of the matter, basically modeled after Peal and Lambert’s
(1962) well-known study. These different contexts are primarily responsible
for the differences in the focus of the research and the methodologies
adopted. From our current perspective, the methodology of the earlier
research was wildly deficient, failing to control for a variety of obvious
variables such as socio-economic status (SES). But the earlier researchers
assumed that low SES was the result, not the cause, of inferior performance
on IQ tests, so this questionable methodology passed the inspection lines of
science (a review of this history will appear in Hakuta, forthcoming).
We contemporary researchers are not, however, so objective either. I think

679
it would not be too far from the truth to say that most researchers engaged in
the problems of bilingualism today have a favorable attitude toward it. Thus,
the Peal and Lambert findings that bilingualism seems to have a positive
effect on performance on intelligence tests (we will hereafter call it cognitioe
ability) are consonant with our beliefs. But there are actually some profound
methodological difficulties in the standard design, some of which were
pointed out quite early by John Macnamara (1966). More recently, MacNab
(1979) has forcefully criticized the inferences drawn from the studies, given
their methodology (also Hakuta and Diaz [in press] develop an independent
but similar line of argument). The difficulties need to be addressed, even if
the results agree with our biases.
So what is this methodology that is so questionable, and what are the
problems? The methodology is simple. Like the early line of research, a group
of bilingual and a group of monolingual are compared. However, the
bilingual group is defined according to various criteria as those who are
equally proficient in both languages. To obtain the results, the two groups are
simply equated on SES and a few other relevant variables. Usually, the
bilingual outperform the monolingual (for recent reviews, see Cummins
1976, Diaz 1983).
What are the difficulties? For one thing, these studies are between-group
comparisons, and one should always be concerned about whether the
differences that are found are indeed because of the supposed treatment
variable, which is bilingualism, or whether they are due to some other
unsuspected factor that had not been controlled for. And since there are in
fact a potentially infinite number of dimensions along which two groups can
differ, if indeed a difference is found, it is not always possible to know exactly
how to interpret it. If our work could be performed in the ideal experimental
laboratory, we would randomly assign subjects to either a “bilingual” group
or a “monolingual” group, but that is not the way bilingualism distributes itself
in the real world.
A second concern is the problem of cause and effect. With a few
exceptions, these studies observed children at only one point in time, rather
than longitudinally. So, the inference on the direction of causality that was
being drawn (i.e., that “bilingualism causes cognitive flexibility”) was unsup-
ported. It could just as easily be the other way around, that children who are
more “cognitively flexible” become bilingual. Indeed, the results from the
longitudinal studies that are available are ambiguous (see review by MacNab
1979) .
A third concern is one of experimenter bias, a well-documented problem in
behavioral research. Essentially, it is not too difficult for subjects in research
studies to perceive the intentions and biases of the experimenter, and to act
accordingly. Thus the experimenter, even unknowingly, can influence the
results in his or her desired direction. This problem can be attenuated to a
large degree by the use of a “blind” procedure, where the experimenter is
kept ignorant of the group to which the subject belongs. Such has not been the
case, apparently, in previous research.
These problems can all be overcome, or at least minimized. For one thing,
the problem of comparability can be solved by looking within a group of

680 TESOL QUARTERLY

bilingual who vary in their degree of bilingualism. The cause-effect problem
can be illuminated by studying subjects longitudinally. And the experimenter
bias problem is minimized if blind procedures are used in a within-group
comparison.
Our study (funded by the National Institute of Education, in collaboration
with Aida Comulada, New Haven Public Schools) conforms to these three
characteristics. We are studying several cohorts of low SES Puerto Rican
elementary school children, roughly 300 in all, in the bilingual program in
New Haven, over a period of two to three years. We have measures of their
Spanish and English vocabularies (validated against other language measures),
and several indicators of cognitive ability, including the Raven’s Progressive
Matrices Test, and a test of judgment of grammaticality in their dominant
language, Spanish. Children are repeatedly tested.
The results are still best considered preliminary (reported in Hakuta and
Diaz, in press) since we are just completing the final year of data collection.
However, they are encouraging. Using multivariate statistical analyses, we
have shown that degree of bilingualism is positively related to performance
on a variety of cognitive measures. For example, the correlation between our
measure of degree of bilingualism and the Raven’s test, controlling for
extraneous variables, ranges between .20 and .40. Furthermore, there are
preliminary indications (although anyone familiar with the problems of
analyzing data should sense the warranted caution) that the direction of
causality best supported is from bilingualism to cognitive ability.
REFERENCES
Cummins, James. 1976. The influence of bilingualism on cognitive growth: a synthesis
of research findings and explanatory hypotheses. Working Papers on Bilingualism
9:1-43.
Diaz, Rafael. 1983. Thought and two languages: the impact of bilingualism on
cognitive development. Review of Research in Education 10:23-54.
Gould, S. J. 1981. The mismeasure of man. New York: Norton.
Hakuta, Kenji. Forthcoming. Bilingualism in the individual and in society. New York:
Basic Books.
Hakuta, Kenji, and Rafael Diaz. In press. The relationship between degree of
bilingualism and cognitive ability: some longitudinal data. In Children’s language,
Volume 5, K. E. Nelson (Ed.). Hillsdale, N. J.: Erlbaum.
Macnamara, John. 1966. Bilingualism and primary education. Edinburgh: University
Press.
MacNab, G. L. 1979. Cognition and bilingualism: a reanalysis of studies. Linguistics
17:231-255.
Peal, E., and W. Lambert. 1962. The relation of bilingualism to intelligence. Psycholog-
ical Monographs 76 (546):1-23.

Author’s Address: Department of Psychology, Yale University, Box 11A Yale Station
New Haven, CT 06520-7447.

BRIEF REPORTS AND SUMMARIES 681

Unfamiliar Instructional Practice and Its Relationship
to Student Emotional Distress in the ESL Classroom
SHARRON BASSANO
Santa Cruz Adult School
It is generally recognized that students’ feelings about learning affect their
ability to learn. One of the three strongest influencing factors on second
language acquisition is classroom anxiety (Gardner, C1ément, Gliksman 1976).
This study focuses on student emotional distress in the ESL classroom. The
results suggest that this distress is often caused by the unfamiliar instructional
practices which these students encounter in the United States.
To explore student in-class emotional negativity and its relationship to
instructional factors, a survey was conducted of 72 adult learners of ESL and
their 15 instructors. They were asked to respond to 42 items related to 1)
language skill development priorities, 2) learning/teaching activity prefer-
ence, 3) classroom protocol, and 4) classroom environment. The students
were also asked to describe their feelings during their ESL classtime in the
United States and to state whether they preferred their classes in their native
country or here, and why. Instructors were asked to give brief descriptions of
their teaching styles, both in the survey and in follow-up interviews.
Of the 72 learners surveyed, 23 rated their in-class feelings as mostly
negative. The highest percentage of self-reported distress was found in
students who had studied English for more than five years in their native
country and for more than two years in the United States. Negative feelings
were also increasingly more prevalent as the students became older. These
findings corroborate the results of the Gardner et al. study in Canada
(Gardner, C1ément, Gliksman 1976).
Sex seemed to have little significance as a predictor of distress, with 34% of
the men and 30% of the women reporting feelings of distress in their English
classes. There were, however, differences noted among different nationalities;
Asian students, for example, reported more affective problems than did other
groups.
A composite picture of the teachers was drawn from their descriptions and
interviews. The teachers tended to characterize themselves as innovative and
working in non-traditional classroom settings. They reported that they used
an egalitarian, informal approach where students had a say in the choice of
the content and process of the class. Passivity on the part of the students was
generally discouraged. The teachers had rather low, but perhaps realistic,
expectations related to their students’ realization of native-like fluency.
Even though 68% of the students rated themselves in such a way as to appear
to be adapting fairly well to their American teachers’ presentations, 32% did
not. These 23 students appeared to have high personal goals related to all
language skills, including pronunciation and grammar. They seemed to want
a more traditional model of leadership and authority from their instructors in
addition to more order and formality in the class.

682 TESOL QUARTERLY

 The final analysis of the data indicates that the students did, indeed, have
expectations and preferences that differed from those of the instructors in
several ways. The areas of greatest disparity were related to the degree of
formality preferred in the classroom, the necessary degree of perfection of
skills, the importance of composition writing in the language learning process,
and the desirability of independent group work during class hours.
The data from this study have provided valuable information which will
have several implications for pedagogical change within the university and
adult programs where the study was done. This type of survey may also serve
as a valuable prototype for other programs that wish to better accommodate
their teaching programs to their students’ learning styles and goals. (M.A.
Thesis, University of California at Santa Cruz, 1983)
REFERENCES
Gardner, Robert, R, C1ément, and L. Gliksman. 1976. Second-1anguage learning: a
social psychological perspective. Canadian Modern Language Review 32 (3):198-213.
Author’s Address: 436 9th Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA 95062

Agreement and Disagreement: A Study of Speech Acts in

Discourse and ESL/EFL Materials
ELOISE PEARSON
Sophia University, Tokyo
In Notional Syllabuses, Wilkins (1976) attempted to outline a theory of the
communicative content of language which could be used as a basis for
elaborating a language teaching syllabus. Since that time, materials based on
the notional/functional approach have been steadily increasing both in
number and in popularity among teachers and materials writers alike.
Although many of these materials purport to teach English as it is spoken by
native speakers of the language, this approach has frequently been criticized
because of the absence of an empirical data base and the reliance on native
speaker intuition in the implementation of the linguistic realizations of the
language functions presented to the learner (see Brumfit 1980, 1981, Paulston
1981, Widdowson 1979, 1981, Stratton 1977).
A desire to determine the validity of the claims made by the materials
writers in the face of such criticisms prompted the empirical research
reported here. For this purpose, the function agreement/disagreement as it
naturally occurs in native speaker informal conversation was chosen. Data
were collected by surreptitiously recording both face-to-face and non-face-
to-face natural conversational interactions resulting in 950 minutes of recorded
corpus. This was then transcribed and examined for instances of agreement/
disagreement.
The data revealed that this function can optionally occur as a response
move made by a second speaker to an initiation move made by the previous

BRIEF REPORTS AND SUMMARIES 683

speaker. In addition, the initiation move must contain some assessment of a
referent so that a speaker produces agreement/disagreement as a response
move. This move occurs as a second assessment of an initiation assessment
move made by a prior speaker.
The preferred second assessment of a referent is agreement, which occurred
74% of the time in the data; it is considered more polite than disagreement,
which occurred only 26% of the time. Furthermore, it was found that the data
could be classified into three types of agreement and three types of disagree-
ment, ranging from most polite and most frequently occurring to least polite
and least frequently occurring.
A comparison of the results of the study was made with two ESL/EFL
notional/functional textbooks which purport to teach English as it is spoken
by native speakers in conversational encounters. The comparison showed that
the linguistic realizations of this speech act given in the two textbooks did not
concur with the conversational data collected for this study.
The results of this research project indicate 1) that more empirical research
is needed into what native English speakers really say as well as what they do
with the language, and 2) that native speaker intuition alone is inadequate for
the preparation of materials which purport to teach English as it is spoken by
native speakers. (M.A. Thesis, University of Hawaii, 1983)
REFERENCES
Brumfit, Christopher. 1980. Problems and principles in English teaching. Oxford:
Pergamon Press.
Brumfit, Christopher. 1981. Notional syllabuses revisited: a response. Applied Linguis-
tics 2 (1):90-92.
Paulston, Christina B. 1981. Notional syllabuses revisited: some comments. Applied
Linguistics 2 (1):93-95.
Stratton, Florence. 1977. Putting the communicative syllabus in its place. TESOL
Quarterly 2 (2):131-141.
Widdowson, Henry G. 1979. Explorations in applied linguistics. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Widdowson, Henry G. 1981. English for specific purposes: criteria for course design.
In English for academic and technical purposes, Larry Selinker, Elaine Tarone,
Victor Hanzeli (Eds.), 1-11. Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House.
Wilkins, D. A. 1976. Notional syllabuses. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author’s Address: Sugacho 8 banchi, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 160, Japan
.

684 TESOL QUARTERLY

THE FORUM
The TESOL Quarterly invites commentary on current trends or practices in the
TESOL profession. It also welcomes responses or rebuttals to any articles or remarks
published here in The Forum or elsewhere in the Quarterly.

Comments on Patrich Carrell's

“Cohesion Is Not Coherence”
A Reader Reacts. . .
MOHSEN GHADESSY
National University of Singapore

I am writing to respond to Patricia Carrell’s article, “Cohesion Is Not

Coherence,” which appeared in a recent issue of the TESOL Quarterly
(Vol. 16, No. 4, December 1982). I would like to argue that Halliday
and Hasan (H and H), in their book Cohesion in English (1976), have
justifiably established a discourse category and have demonstrated the
significance of text cohesion for the preparation of instructional
materials for EFL/ESL students, especially at the secondary and
tertiary levels. I believe that Ms. Carrell and the other researchers
referred to in support of her claims have misinterpreted the concept of
cohesion as represented by H and H and have added to it attributes
which it never had. I also believe that Ms. Carrell’s claim that H and H
have equated cohesion with coherence is false and is based mainly on a
consideration of discourse coherence, which must be distinguished
from text cohesion. The “schema-theoretical views of text processing”
will no doubt provide answers as to how people understand texts (i. e.,
how discourse coherence is achieved); they do not, however, say
anything about how a string of sentences is joined together (i. e., how
texture, textuality, or cohesion is achieved). If the same text is
interpreted differently by different readers/listeners, then surely cohe-
sion is not at fault. The underlying propositions and the relationships
between them remain the same. The different interpretations are due
to people’s interaction with the text.
The first criticism by Feathers (1981), and supported by Carrell
(482), states that H and H’s notion of cohesion theory “operates on the
superficial surface structure of a text in establishing the cohesive
devices.” This seems to be in direct contradiction to H and H’s
emphasis throughout their book that this notion is a “semantic” one,

685
that “it refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that
define it as a text” (Halliday and Has an 1976:4). Ms. Carrell’s major
criticism (483), however, is based on Morgan and Sellner’s views
(1980) that in the example given by H and H (Wash and core six
cooking apples. Put them into a fireproof dish), them in the second
sentence refers to the linguistic expression six cooking apples, which
they claim is H and H’s view, and not to the six cooking apples
themselves. Nothing can be further from the truth, as indicated by the
following quotation from H and H: “They (them and six cooking
apples) refer to the same thing. The two items are identical in
reference, or COREFERENTIAL” (Halliday and Hasan 1976:3; their
emphasis). Despite this, Ms. Carrell concludes that “coreferentiality” is
not what H and H have in mind (483).
A deliberate omission on Ms. Carrell’s part seems to be the very
important distinction that H and H make between “exophoric and
endophoric” reference. H and H claim that only endophoric reference
is a cohesive device, and therefore they are not concerned with
exophoric reference. “Exophoric reference contributes to CREATION
of text, in that it links the language with the context of situation; but it
does not contribute to the INTEGRATION of one passage with
another so that the two together form part of the SAME text. Hence it
does not contribute directly to cohesion as we have defined it”
(Halliday and Hasan 1976:37; their emphasis). However, Ms. Carrell’s
argument is mainly based on consideration of exophoric reference.
Finally, I do not see any reason why what is called texture, textuality,
or cohesion should be equated with coherence. Nowhere in their book
do H and H indicate that it is to be interpreted in this way, and the
word coherence is not even listed in the index. Widdowson, in his book
Teaching Language as Communication (1978), clearly shows the
difference between the two concepts, implying that H and H have
been justified in establishing cohesion as a discourse category. We
know what H and H mean by cohesion. Can we ask Ms. Carrell to
provide a definition for coherence?

REFERENCES
Feathers, Karen, 1981. Text unity: a semantic perspective on mapping
cohesion and coherence. Manuscript, Indiana University.

686 TESOL QUARTERLY

Halliday, M. A. K., and Ruqaiya Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. London:
Longman.
Morgan, Jerry L., and Manfred B. Sellner. 1980. Discourse and linguistic
theory. In Theoretical issues in reading comprehension, Rand J. Spiro,
Bertram C. Bruce, and William F. Brewer (Eds.). Hillsdale, New Jersey:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Widdowson, Henry G. 1978. Teaching language as communication. Oxford,
England: Oxford University Press.

The Author Responds. . .

PATRICIA L. CARRELL
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

Mr. Ghadessy’s first contention is that “Ms. Carrell and other

researchers referred to in support of her claims have misinterpreted
the concept of cohesion as represented by H and H and have added to
it attributes which it never had. ” If I and the other researchers I
referred to have misinterpreted H and H’s concept of cohesion, we
have done so based on what H and H say about cohesion and about
how it relates to the broader concept of textuality, as I feel I
demonstrated in my original article.
Mr. Ghadessy’s second contention concerns “Ms. Carrell’s claim that
H and H have equated cohesion with coherence.” Nowhere in my
article do I claim that H and H have “equated” cohesion with
coherence. I was careful to explain that H and H consider cohesion to
be only one of two aspects of texture, the other being register.
Cohesion, however, and not register, is H and H’s central focus. I do
criticize H and H’s view of cohesion as “a measure of,” “an index of,”
“a factor in,” “ a linguistic property contributing to,” and “a linguistic
resource used to create” what they term texture. Further, I do claim
that H and H’s concept of texture, based on what they say about it,
seems to be what I and others (Morgan and Sellner 1980:178) mean by
coherence.
The concept of TEXTURE is entirely appropriate to express the property
of “being a text. ” A text has texture, and that is what distinguishes it from
being something that is not a text. It derives the texture from the fact that it
functions as a unity with respect to its environment (Halliday and Hasan
1976:2).
When, at the end of his comments, Mr. Ghadessy asks for my
definition of coherence, I refer him to H and H’s definition of

THE FORUM 687

texture—the property of “being a text” and of functioning as a unity
with respect to its environment. As I tried to make clear in the article, I
took H and H’s definition of texture at face value and equated it with
my (and others’) notion of coherence. If H and H had something less or
something different in mind with their term texture, that is not at all
clear from what they say about it. I, of course, agree with Mr.
Ghadessy that (discourse) “coherence must be distinguished from text
cohesion. ” What I criticize in the article is H and H’s notion that it is the
cohesive devices of a language that create or contribute to coherence,
or as they call it, texture.1
A third criticism of Mr. Ghadessy’s concerns Feathers’ (1981) and my
contention that H and H’s notion of cohesion “operates on the
superficial surface structure of a text” (Carrell 1982:482). While in Mr.
Ghadessy’s view this may seem to be in direct contradiction to H and
H’s emphasis throughout the book that this notion is a “semantic” one
and that “. . . it refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text,
and that define it as a text” (Halliday and Hasan 1976:4), in fact, there
is no contradiction. The semantic notions that are captured and
represented by cohesion theory are, in fact, just those which are
reflected in the superficial surface structure of a text. As the quote
from H and H says, just those semantic propositions which “exist
within the text” (1976:4) are represented via a cohesion analysis. No
underlying proposition which is not reflected in the surface structure of
the text is so represented. Consider again the mini-text I used in the
article: The picnic was ruined. No one remembered to bring a cork-
screw. The underlying semantic relationship of causality which exists
between the second and the first sentence is not reflected in cohesion
theory because it is not expressed in the surface structure of the text. In
1 As is clear from this discussion, as well as from the original article, I am equating the term
coherence with the terms textuality and texture. I explicitly do not add cohesion to that
equation, since I consider cohesion to be an effect of coherence. H and H consider cohesion to
be a cause of coherence or texture/textuality. Unfortunately, Mr. Ghadessy, unintentionally I
hope, contributes to the impression of an equation of cohesion with textuality and texture when
he says things such as “, . . how texture, textuality, or cohesion is achieved,” and “. what is
called texture, textuality, or cohesion. ” It is Mr. Ghadessy, and neither I nor H and H, who is
equating cohesion with textuality and texture.
There is indeed some confusion in the literature about such terms as texture, textuality,
cohesion, and coherence. However, in every case with which I am familiar, cohesion is the
most restrictive term, normally limited to surface linguistic phenomena, Textuality is generally
the most comprehensive term, apparently comparable to H and H’s texture. For example,
Beaugrande and Dressier use textuality as the most general term. “A TEXT will be defined as a
COMMUNICATIVE OCCURRENCE which meets seven standards of TEXTUALITY”
(1981:3). The seven standards of textuality include cohesion and coherence as separate
standards, in addition to intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality,and inter-
textuality. My schema-theoretical use of the term coherence includes many of Beaugrande and
Dresder’s five other, user-centered, interactive standards of textuality (e.g.,, the scripts, plans,
goals, schemata of intentionality and acceptability; exophora of situationality; the interactions
of text-presented knowledge and stored world-knowledge of intertextuality).

688 TESOL QUARTERLY

fact, it is precisely these kinds of relationships among propositions
(e.g., causality), with no overt linguistic expression, that many re-
searchers besides myself consider to be in the domain of coherence
and not cohesion. See, for example, Mr. Ghadessy’s own reference,
Widdowson (1978), as well as Beaugrande (1980), and Beaugrande and
Dressier (1981 ).2
Mr. Ghadessy next comments on the cooking apples example and
the relationship of reference. A careful reading of H and H shows that
Morgan and Sellner (1980) and I have correctly represented what H
and H say about the cohesive relation in this example. H and H are
quite clear in claiming that “the texture is provided by the cohesive
RELATION that exists between them and six cooking apples” (Halli-
day and Hasan 1976:2). The italicization of the linguistic forms, plus
what H and H go on to say about them, shows clearly that the cohesive
relation exists between the word them and the words six cooking
apples. That is, the cohesion relation is a relation between words in a
text. Note H and H’s use of the term item in the continuation of the
above quote:
It is important to make this point, because we shall be constantly focusing
attention on the items, such as them, which typically refer back to
something that has gone before; but the cohesion is effected not by the
presence of the referring item alone but by the presence of both the
referring item and the item that it refers to (Halliday and Hasan 1976:2-3).
Thus, the cohesion relation is clearly claimed by H and H to be one
existing between linguistic forms within the text, and not between a
linguistic form and something outside the text.
Nor can the cohesion relation of reference be one of coreference,
despite the partial quote offered by Mr. Ghadessy. If Mr. Ghadessy
had included the complete quote from H and H, we would see that H
and H use the term coreferential to talk about the meaning of the
cohesion relation, not the relation itself:
What is the MEANING of the cohesive relation between them and six
cooking apples? The meaning is that they refer to the same thing. The two
items are identical in reference, or COREFERENTIAL (Halliday and
Hasan 1976:3).
2 Widdowson speaks of cohesion as the “overt, linguistically-signalled relationship between
propositions” (1978:31) and coherence as the recognition of an underlying “illocutionary value”
(1978:30) linking the propositions, Widdowson’s examples of coherence are very much like my
picnic-corkscrew example.
Beaugrande and Dressier also define cohesion as concerning “the ways in which the
components of the SURFACE TEXT, i.e. the actual words we hear or see, are mutually
connected within a sequence” (1981:3). They define coherence as concerning “ the ways in
which the components of the TEXTUAL WORLD, i.e. the configuration of CONCEPTS and
RELATIONS which underlie surface text, are mutually accessible and relevant” (1981:4).

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A S I originally indicated, H and H give us no reason to believe that such
a secondary, derived notion as the meaning of a cohesive relation, as
opposed to the cohesive relation itself, contributes to texture.3
Mr. Ghadessy’s next comment concerns what he claims is a “deliber-
ate omission” on my part of H and H’s distinction between exophoric
and endophoric reference, and H and H’s claim that only endophoric
reference is a cohesive device. The omission was certainly not deliber-
ate, and, in fact, I am grateful to Mr. Ghadessy for raising this issue
now, for it serves to further support the basic criticisms I made in the
original article. Furthermore, the quote Mr. Ghadessy supplies from H
and H (1976:37) supports the two immediately preceding arguments
(the first about cohesion and surface structure, and the second about
reference and coreference). First, since cohesion can involve only
overt, superficial, surface grammatical relations within a text, exo-
phoric reference must, by definition, be excluded as a cohesive device.
Second, since coreferentiality is a relation which by definition involves
reference to something beyond the linguistic forms within a text (the
linguistic forms refer to the same thing, but that same thing is
exophoric to the text), clearly H and H cannot have intended corefer-
entiality as a cohesive relation. And finally on this issue, as to Mr.
Ghadessy’s claim that my argument is “mainly based on consideration
of exophoric reference,” I would point out that my argument is built on
the very same examples used by H and H or, at least in the case of
lexical cohesion, on examples very much like H and H’s. If my
argument depends on exophoric reference, it is because H and H’s own
examples of reference cannot be explained without appeal to extra-
textual matters.
To reiterate my basic point from the original article, cohesion may
be an interesting linguistic phenomenon to study and to teach to
EFL/ESL students; however, we must be clear on the relationship
between cohesion and coherence. Cohesion does not create coherence,
or texture. Cohesion can be a meaningful concept only if we assume
that coherence is a logically prior concept; we cannot speak sensibly of
linguistic cohesion unless we can assume psychological coherence.
Overt cohesion depends on an assumption of prior psychological
coherence. Indeed, cohesion may be viewed as making overt or
explicit those meanings which are present covertly because of a text’s
coherence (see Widdowson 1978:27-31). “Cohesion supports coher-
ence” (Beaugrande and Dressier 1981:101); cohesion is grafted onto,
makes explicit, is parasitic on, presupposes, is an effect of (not a cause
3 Thisconfusion by H and H between meaning relations (e g., cohesive relations.) and the
meaning of such meaning (cohesive) relations is claimed by Morgan and SelIner to reflect H
and H’s “quite general confusion on matters of meaning” (1980:180). Morgan and Sellner cite
additional examples from H and H for this claim,

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of) coherence. Wash and core six cooking apples. Put them into a
fireproof dish (Halliday and Hasan 1976:2). Although this text is
claimed by H and H to contain an overt cohesive tie, interpreting it as
such depends on a logically prior assumption of coherence. If we
weren’t able to construct a textual world in which a “continuity of
senses” (Beaugrande and Dressier 1981:84) dictated our interpreting
the second sentence as being coherently relatable to the first one, it
would make no sense to speak of a linguistic cohesive relation. As I
pointed out in the original article:
What leads to the conclusion that them, in fact, is intended to refer to the
apples and not, say, to the author’s children, or the pages of the cookbook,
or anything else for that matter? It is not knowledge of language that leads
to this conclusion. It is our background knowledge of cooking and of the
author’s purpose, as well as our ability to reason, and the assumption that
the recipe is coherent. Without this latter assumption, there would be no
way of knowing what them is intended to refer to (Carrell 1982:483).

REFERENCES
Beaugrande, Robert de. 1980. Text, discourse, and process: toward a multi-
disciplinary science of texts. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing
Corporation.
Beaugrande, Robert de, and Wolfgang Dressier. 1981. Introduction to text
linguistics. London: Longman.
Carrell, Patricia L. 1982. Cohesion is not coherence. TESOL Quarterly 1 6
(4):479-488.
Feathers, Karen. 1981. Text unity: a semantic perspective on mapping
cohesion and coherence. Manuscript, Indiana University.
Halliday, M. A. K., and Ruqaiya Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. London:
Longman.
Morgan, Jerry L., and Manfred B. Sellner. 1980. Discourse and linguistic
theory. In Theoretical issues in reading comprehension, Rand J. Spiro,
Bertram C. Bruce, and William F. Brewer (Eds.). Hillsdale, New Jersey:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Widdowson, Henry G. 1978. Teaching language as communication. L o n d o n :
Oxford University Press.

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