Editorial
This research is specific to its own context. However, it might give insightful perspectives for language teachers having similar student groups.

Low Level Writing Skills of ESL Students living in Lindon

Ceren Okutan, Turkey

Ceren Okutan has taught English for four years. She taught English at Çukurova University for 3 years and has taught English at Bahçeşehir University for a year. She wanted to share her research she did with the Turkish asylum seekers and refugees living in London. They were attending Turkish Education Centre. It was an institution helping Turkish community to learn English. Learning English was very important for them as they needed to pass an English examination to get their indefinite living passport.
E-mail:ceren.okutan@bahcesehir.edu.tr

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Introduction
Theoretical background
Findings and discussion
Conclusion
References

Introduction

I undertook this action research study to overcome my students’ (asylum seekers and women having very poor command in English language and in their native tongue living in London.) literacy problems in writing in English language through activities indicating their weaknesses. Through this action research study, I hope to raise understanding of adult ESL students’ incorrect writing. The general work therefore relates to students’ problems in writing. The problems experienced by my students were copying incorrectly from the board, drawing the shapes of letters incorrectly and problems regarding sound letter relations in the English language.

My research question is ‘what effects can my activities about writing make on my students’ literacy problem?

Theoretical background

Low Literacy Skills of ESL Students

Writing the shapes of letters

In this part, I will introduce some discussions, arguments and research on writing the letters of the alphabet by students and its importance. I will also mention some internal factors affecting this skill. According to Harris, Graham & Fink (2000) supplemental and explicit training should be given to students on forming and writing fluently the letters of the alphabet. Therefore, teachers should give importance to students’ handwriting skills as much as they give importance to the process and the content of writing if they want to develop this skill. First of all teachers should come to realise that they have got to give priority not only to the content but also the form of writing. If not, this will create much difficulty for the adult ESL classroom. For example, if a teacher ignores the acquisition of this skill, the student will start to develop a negative attitude towards English. To illustrate, when the teacher asks students to write down some information from the board, they will not be aware of what they are writing about and what it actually explains because they have to focus their attention on getting the shape of the letters right in their notebooks. Later on, when an activity is done to practice the information, they will not be able to do it. As a result, the English lessons will be big complex and frustrating for them.

Berninger et al. (1998) mention that whole language approach and process writing offer much more instruction on content and process of writing. These approaches tend to leave handwriting training out of their writing programme and put much less emphasize on form. However, Berninger et al. (1998) continue saying that those approaches may not be beneficial with students who have hard times in managing the difficulties of handwriting in the beginning. Thus, the teacher should be aware of the crucial role of this skill in students’ learning process of English and implement the necessary actions for students to acquire it.

The general finding of the survey done by Mei Hui & Murray (1994) on perceptual motor measures was that visual-motor coordination and eye-hand coordination contribute most to legibility. My students did have a link between their visual-motor coordination and eye-hand coordination. However, this link was not as automatic as that of other students and this was because they had poor educational backgrounds. They had not had a regular school life. As a result, they were not used to using a pen and so could not maintain automatic control over this skill. Most importantly, it is essential for students to make this skill automatic but there is very limited space for the teachers to work on it.

Sheffield B. (1996) agrees with this situation, stating that teachers don’t know how to train students for their poor handwriting skills because educational institutions ignore this topic and there is less emphasize on this skill in the school curriculum. At this point, it is the teacher’s responsibility to find enough time and appropriate activities integrated into the curriculum to practise this skill, finding sources and materials to develop it.

According to Dobbie, and Askov (1995) students who are exposed to various types of classroom materials such as visual aids and so on (enabling easy comprehension) and who are provided with meaningful repetitions while handwriting training improved much better than students who simply copy models. Thus, the more teachers support writing exercises with visual aids and utterance sequences, the better the results are achieved by students in writing skills. Another view on how to give handwriting instructions comes from Wood et al (1987) who suggest that teaching handwriting directly and systematically for a certain period of time makes a huge contribution to student’s legibility in writing. Mabee (1988) identifies that using explicit drills to rectify students’ incorrectly written letters will double the number of legible letters that they can write. These strategies work well especially with adult ESOL students, as they need direct and simple instructions which directly after need to be supported with meaningful activities.

Koenke, (1986) emphasizes the importance of teaching the rules of letter formulation for students to develop more legibility in their handwriting. Thus, writing the letters big on the board and providing students to watch the hand movements as formulating the letter was a good instruction to boost their legibility in handwriting.

Lastly, Ellis, Standal, Pennau & Rummel, (1989) emphasize the two crucial aspects concerning handwriting teaching strategies. It is essential to practise the handwriting as soon as it is taught. Again teaching and practice of the skill taught should be incorporated into each other. However, not only is it essential to give instructions on how to implement the handwriting strategies but also, it is highly important to keep in mind some goals of the handwriting programme. Ross (1990) suggests that students may want to improve their writing for communication, to be able to write fluently and to make use of the benefits of a good handwriting so it might be a good idea to determine an aim which students might be interested to improve their writing. Teachers especially those dealing with adult ESOL learners, have to have some goals for their handwriting teaching strategy as learning is more meaningful for adult ESOL learners if they know the purpose and benefits of that particular handwriting strategy.

Sound Letter Correspondence

This section will address my assumption that students’ copying incorrectly was due to their low level of literacy skills in reading and writing. I will mention necessary reading skills for an individual to be able to read accurately, through which a person is actually and naturally acquiring writing skills as well because Pinnell (1994) suggests that reading and writing are complementary processes and interrelate each other. In other words, reading is an umbrella term including writing. Thus, any definition or argument about reading will be introduced to clearly explain the reasons for their incorrect writing. First, I will define some necessary skills to read and write properly, then relate these to my students’ incorrect writing.

Kruidenier (2002 p.35) defines alphabetics as ‘the whole process of using the letters in a written alphabet to represent meaningful, spoken words’. Ever since I have found this definition, I realize that this is the area which I need to investigate. Gillon (2004) suggest that a person who acquired phonemic awareness should be aware of the sound units within the spoken words with the ability to hear, identify and manipulate these sounds to form words. In English there is no direct one-to-one mapping of sounds to letters, yet if there was a one-to-one correspondence between sounds (phonemes) and letters (graphemes) producing accurate spelling would be simple.

According to Ehri (2004) readers use their phonemic awareness for decoding, the process of turning letters into sounds and blending these into recognizable words. Ehri et al. (1999) elaborates that knowledge of spelling-sound relations (grapho-phonemic knowledge) and phonemic awareness are the basis of decoding skills, while Bradley et al. (2002) defines grapho-phonemic knowledge as recognition of the letters of the alphabet and understanding of sound-symbol relationships. Shinn (1989, p.115) further states that ‘phonics refers to the pattern of sound-letter correspondences in written language’.

My aim in bringing in the definitions of these key skills is to indicate that these definitions constitute the deficiencies or shortcomings of my students when they had to write appropriately from the sound letter correspondence perspective. They needed to be aware and manage to identify that the English orthographic and phonologic system is different from that of Turkish. In addition, they needed to be trained or given instructions to identify that the letters (graphemes) or combinations of letters may represent different sounds or a sound each time they are pronounced. Thus, with the help of this training, they would come to know that the words are not written as they are pronounced. In other words, the phonemic and the orthographic codes of English do not exactly match each other. As Stubbs (1980) suggest, English spelling is morphophonemic.

In English, one word can have several pronunciations and spellings. That’s why people often call English language ‘inconsistent’. Students’ inaccurate writing may be because of this difference in English. Here, I would like to mention about orthographic differences between languages. According to Koda (2005) shallow orthography means that in the writing system the correspondence between letters and sounds (graphemes/phonemes) is close to one-to-one, in other words, the symbol-sound relationship are highly regular. Turkish is a good example of shallow orthography. It has 29 associations that match the exact number of letters. This means that there is not even a single possibility of writing incorrectly due to inconsistency in the orthography. However, in contrast Koda (2005 p.36) states that in English orthography English is characterized as a ‘phonologically deep system that is while governed by phonemic constraints it tends to preserve morphological information at the expense of phonological transparency’. To illustrate, the past tense morpheme –ed is pronounced in three different ways, talked, visited called ‘/tɒkt/, /vɪzətəd/ /kɒld/’. Thus, he concludes (2005 p.36) that ‘preserving the grapheme –ed to exhibit its underlying morphological information creates a violation to one to one sound symbol correspondence’.

In summary, English orthography is based on various different principles and rules. For example, Bochner (1993) suggests that English spelling retains information about the relationship not only between words, but also spelling and transformational grammar. Thus, English spelling might be problematic because one does not know which principles to apply to the spelling of a given word. Stubbs (1980 p.45) agrees, stating that ‘while English orthography is fairly convenient for fluent adult readers, this is not so for young native speaking (NS) children learning to read, or for ESL/EFL students’. Proper instruction in teaching reading and writing therefore plays a crucial role. There are many debates, researches and surveys in the literature about how to teach reading and writing. Basically, most of the approaches are developed to train students to gain phonemic awareness and decoding skills. My focus will be on the training offered for developing decoding skills. Ehri & Robbins (1992) states that recoding words by translating letters into sounds and blending them is called decoding. Thus, we can say decoding helps to identify words and to find out the spelling of words. Ehri and Nunes (2001) emphasizes that phonics instruction teaches students the major grapheme-phoneme correspondences and how to use these to decode and spell words. Research done by NICHD (2000) indicates that the most effective method for beginning readers is explicit, systematic phonics instruction which emphasizes the importance explicit and systematic teaching.

Getting back to phonics instruction, researchers have identified different approaches to systematic phonic instruction. For example NICHD (2000) categorizes these instructions as synthetic phonics, analytic phonics, phonics through spelling, phonics in context and phonics by analogy. According to NICHD (2000), the efficacy of these is similar but the most widely used is the synthetic approach. For my particular survey, my students needed to see that the pronunciation and written forms of words are different. So, they needed to write the words differently from how they read them. Given this idea, the synthetic approach and phonics through spelling approach would help my students as in ‘synthetic phonics programmes students learn to convert letters into sounds or phonemes and then blend the sounds to form recognizable words’ (NICHD 2000, p. 2-89). Alternatively, ‘in phonics through spelling programmes students learn to transform sounds into letters to write words’ (NICHD 2000, p. 2-89). I implemented three activities designed to get students to notice the difference between sound and letter correspondence. My activities aimed to enhance my students’ graphophonemic awareness. The theoretical inspiration lying behind the design of my activities was the philosophy of phonics instruction, based on phonemic awareness and mainly decoding skills.

In the discussion above, I have tried to bring in some definitions of necessary basic skills for reading and writing. My aim in doing this is to discover why my students were lacking these skills. I touched upon the orthographic differences between languages and moved on to the instructions and approaches used to teach English literacy. I believe the discussion above explains the theoretical background inspiring and informing the design of my activities raise a graphophonemic awareness among students' with inaccurate writing.

I used my data collection instruments to document my experience which I later used as a proof overlapping with the theoretical background. Burns (2005) points out the importance of systematic data collection. I did my best to document my experiences even though flexibility and change are part of nature of an action research study. My data collection instruments are journals, observations and questionnaires. I took journals about what happened in the class right after the lessons finished as to bring data from my perspective. One of the colleagues observed my lessons on a regular basis. This provided me to present data from an observer perspective. Last of all, questionnaires enabled data to be gathered from students' perspective. I organized my process of data collection as shown below.

Figure 3.1: Timetable and Data Collection Instruments

As pointed out by Altrichter et al. (1993) the importance of experiences is in producing theories. The way data are structured is very important because this provides consistency in the documentation of the data. As I mentioned previously, I wanted full control over my study and the best way to get the spontaneous reactions and feelings of students, which I believe are the cues to guide me to improve my practice, was to document them in a journalistic style. As Whitehead and McSniff (2006) state, this gave me the opportunity to demonstrate the facts and my own analysis at the same time. Moreover, this methodology enabled me to participate more in my study.

Findings and discussion

First, I will summarize the main findings of the activities which helped the students improve their inaccurate writing. Then, I will indicate other findings which occurred in the process of conducting the activities. The findings which I will introduce after summarizing the main findings also contributed to the students’ improvement.

The main findings of the cycles are the positive effect of using L1 to help rectify students’ inaccurate writing, the benefits of using activities as an ongoing assessment tool and of combining explicit instruction with integrated activities such as group work and project work while working on their low level writing problems. The first finding was that I realized using L1 for explanations in my adult ESOL class was very useful. It was the right way to reach my students and to enlighten them. This was because explanations were meaningful and fulfilled their purpose as they were in their native language. Thus, using the mother tongue in ESL classes might bring solutions in some cases. I believe that being a teacher requires an ability to evaluate different approaches and materials in this area rather than simply selecting and implementing ready-made and trendy recommended approaches. In other words, teachers should not be prejudiced towards the “classical” (grammar translation…etc.) approaches and techniques which some people might say ‘unfashionable’ in this decade. Using the mother tongue helped my students to break down their negative characteristics and initiated positive features such as, self-esteem, good attitudes towards the class and the language, interaction, autonomy and so on. They were better able to participate in the lesson and to speak out and interact. The second finding was that using simple copying activities, putting a time limit on the activities and using them as an ongoing assessment tools made a good contribution to my students’ low level writing skills. In my opinion, it is much more important for an activity to be useful to a group of students than its being “communicative”, implicit or inductive. Teaching preferences should be based on what students need and how they are accustomed to being taught. A teacher must consider these ideas for their students to get them to accept what is being taught. I used my activities to contemplate how my students were getting on rather than exposing them to a sit down examination. It was much more useful for me to consider each activity as tools to see how they were proceeding in the process. I make my students the central consideration while developing my activities. This provided opportunities for self study and autonomy for my students. Thus, I suggest the more students get involved, the better they will be able to overcome their problems.

The third finding was that my students’ idea for an activity (making cartoon letters of the alphabet.) was a signal that they were developing their self confidence and a positive attitude towards rectifying their low level writing skills and towards the class. Furthermore, I experienced that it was beneficial to combine explicit instructions with communicative or integrative practices in a certain order to develop their low level writing skills. In other words, it was a very good sequence to teach the alphabet and sound letter correspondence issue explicitly on the board, then move on to more integrative and attractive activities such as group work and project work. I suggest that teachers should try this sequence as it might also work for their students who have low level writing skills. I am aware that my activities may not seem suitable for adult learners. However, I suggest teachers can never know what is most appropriate for their students until they try different approaches with them. The group work, project work and reinforcement that I used, (such as displaying their works) worked well for my students to develop a positive attitude towards improving their writing skills. Thus, I would say that using L1, combining explicit instructions with communicative practices and using activities as ongoing assessment tools helped my students to overcome their low level writing skills as possible as it could.

I have already cited references in relation to these findings in the theoretical background section. Now, I would like to introduce other findings (documented in my data collection instruments) which occurred in the course of conducting the activities . These findings emerged right after the students realized the importance of writing accurately in English.

It is essential to identify and meet the interests and needs of adult ESL students. Thus, I can say that considering how they might like doing an activity, or how they can get interested in doing an exercise realised these findings or outcomes. Once a teacher identifies what students are interested in doing, she triggers their motivation (first other finding) which creates enthusiasm for learning. In my context, the students’ motivation was instrumental. My students were aware that they had problems in copying. However, they were not aware how important it is to copy accurately in English for their lives as they were trying to pass English proficiency test to get indefinite living passport as to live in London officially . Thus, identifying the importance of copying in English for them by using L1 solved this problem to a large extend. Dornyei (2001 p.57) agrees, stating that ‘promoting students’ awareness of the instrumental values associated with the knowledge of an L2 is a very effective strategy’.

The second positive result of considering students’ interests and needs was that students’ felt an interactive atmosphere occurred (second other finding). Here, not only was there a relation between the exact identification of the needs and interaction, but also, there was a second variable affecting the interaction. This variable was my students becoming a cohesive group. According to Ehrman and Dornyei (1998) a cohesive learner group is one that students are happy to involve in where they provide mutual support, and welcome each other in the group. Thus, as their attention had already been attracted by the clear identification of what worked for them to solve their problems, being a cohesive learner group naturally created an interactive atmosphere in the classroom. The third positive finding was that they became autonomous by working on their problems or exact needs, which became attractive to them. In addition, according to Dornyei (2001) students are able to take the control gradually over their own functioning. I designed activities placing students at the centre. In this way they became the only responsible parties for their decisions or ideas on the activities. In other words, I introduced situations in which they would be in charge of what they were doing. This reinforced and developed autonomy. According to Dornyei (2001 p.104) giving learners ‘choices about as many aspects of the learning process as possible’ encourages their involvement in the learning process while doing project work definitely enhance autonomy. In emphasizing these elements, autonomy was naturally maintained through my whole teaching experience with them.

The fourth finding was that their self-esteem and confidence naturally grew in the first cycle and continued right to the end of the third cycle. The word encouragement is closely linked with self confidence or self- esteem. According to Dornyei (2001 p.91) ‘encouragement is the positive persuasive expression of the belief that someone has the capability to achieve a certain goal. It can explicitly make the learner aware of personal strengths and abilities and indirectly communicate trust in that the person’.

Even a simple personal word of encouragement can be effective as giving positive encouragement motivates students and develops their self-esteem. In some circumstances, not only be the teacher but anyone that the students respect can improve their self-esteem, such as the school manager or other teachers. As Raffini states (1993 p.147) ‘self-esteem grows from the beliefs of others. When teachers believe in students, they believe in themselves and when those you respect think you can, you think you can’.

All these factors are closely linked with each other. In other words, satisfying one factor may simultaneously satisfy others. Cooperation (the fifth finding) is one such term, being an umbrella term including most of the expressions I have mentioned so far. According to Dornyei (2001) cooperation fosters the cohesiveness of the classroom. My teaching group developed a cohesive nature and as we progressed, their cooperation made a tremendous contribution to their problem. Nelson-LeGall (1992 p.52) captures the nature of cooperative learning when she states that

‘Learning and understanding are not merely individual processes supported by the social context; rather they are the result of a continuous, dynamic negotiation between the individual and the social setting in which the individual's activity takes place. Both the individual and the social context are active and constructive in producing learning and understanding’.

This definition indicates, as long as there is interaction, dynamism, cohesiveness and negotiation of information in the classroom we can talk about the learning and understanding of a situation. As a sixth finding, Kessler, Price & Wortman (1985) claim that anxiety in the classroom is reduced with cooperative learning.. As the students interacted with each other and felt responsible for their peers’ learning they were continuously involved in an information sharing process. All the students were active and curious to share their information. In this kind of atmosphere, there is a high possibility of willingness rather than anxiety. One of my students suggested a project work. In other words, he came up with an idea, and he felt free and was not hesitant to speak out. He attempted to seek alternative offers where can only be done in a safe environment. Dornyei (2001) mentions that the teacher’s rapport with the students is a significant factor making the classroom atmosphere secure as his attitudes are important determiners for students to act freely and safely in the classroom. Thus, he felt safe and comfortable enough to articulate his suggestion.

Kang (1999, p.1) ‘learning styles are internally based on the characteristics of individuals for the intake or understanding of new information’. Therefore teachers should take students’ learning styles into consideration. The third activity of my last cycle required students (in groups) to make puzzles. This activity utilized each of the three main learning styles which were kinaesthetic, auditory and visual at one time. Thus, the practice of the sound-letter relation became more meaningful and permanent as the more an activity refers to more than one learning style at one time the better the learning takes place.

Lastly and most importantly, from the teacher’s perspective, according to Hertz- Lazarowitz (1992) thanks to the cooperative learning approach, teachers are able to step back from being the centre of the teaching process to the guides of the process. They move from teacher centred teaching to student centred learning. As a newly qualified teacher, this statement makes me think about how English language teaching is done in Turkey. Even though, the majority of English teachers are informed on the latest developments and approaches to ELT, they somehow can not stop using teacher- centred approaches. The reason for this is that they are taught English using these approaches. Yet, if they train their students using student-centred approaches, they can break this cycle, and introduce a new perspective to teaching English. I imagine if this happened, ESL/EFL students (especially Turkish students) would make much more enjoyable and entertaining associations with the word English, when they recall it.

I have discussed the positive outcomes of identifying or meeting students’ language needs accurately and supported these findings with some academic arguments from the literature.

Conclusion

In this research, I produced some solutions to students’ low level writing skills. While designing my activities, I did not consider any language approach as I thought this might be unfamiliar to my students culturally. In contrast, I considered the students’ needs and interests’ as a priority while conducting my activities. The findings may provide certain solutions in my particular study context. However, I believe, other teacher practitioners could gain inspiration and different ideas from this research too as the general point of this research is to improve students’ low level literacy skills in writing in ESL adult monolingual classes. The main points made are the positive effects of using L1 in language classrooms, writing the shape of letters, sound letter correspondence (by touching on using explicit instruction for adult ESOL students) and using activities as ongoing assessment tools. Moreover, they will find ideas about the importance of a relaxed classroom atmosphere, interaction, self-confidence, cohesiveness and students’ motivation towards English language learning. They will find the opportunity to gain a different perspective and compare this research with other studies to devise an appropriate way for their specific research context. Nevertheless I also recognize that the implementation of my activities in different settings might not work as they are uniquely tailored to my particular students.

Beside the relevance of the study I mentioned above, this study supports the importance of teachers’ active involvement in research as they can bring about practical and real solutions regardless of whether their findings or solutions are suited to the traditional language approaches. Since the language and teaching contexts are exposed to change from day to day, it is the teachers’ responsibility to actively engage in this process to observe different situations and make changes within language classrooms.

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