It is Important for Writing Teachers and Tutors (and even Students) to Understand Some Key Principles of Second Language Acquisition (SLA)

Insight #2 from reading Dana Ferris's Treatment of Error in Second Language Student Writing:

During my doctoral program, I remember reading a book that was titled something along the lines of Academic Writing as a Second Language. I just spent a few minutes on Google (trying to get the exact title and author) and wasn’t able to track it down, so I might have the title wrong.  However, one of the main arguments of this text was that writing, particularly academic writing, was no one’s first language.  This idea is one that has stuck with me for quite some time and I use this concept when I talk with my students (in any level writing class), and I also use it in presentations to students about college writing.  As I often think, no one expects to become fluent in Spanish after a few weeks of Spanish 1 or even a few semesters.  Yet, someone students are expected to be fluent in academic writing after just a class or two.  I guess what I’m saying is the idea of language acquisition, especially second language acquisition, is a rich metaphor to use when thinking of literacy learning of any kind.

That said, SLA isn’t just a general metaphor; it’s a bundle of theories that can help teachers develop realistic expectations for how students learn new languages, like academic English. In the opening of her book on page 5, Dana Ferris very clearly states three implications that SLA research has for writing teachers:

1. It is unrealistic to expect that L2 writers’ production will be error free or that even when it is, it will “sound” like that of native English speakers.
2. Since SLA takes time, we should not expect students’ accuracy to improve overnight.
3. L2 student writers need: (a) a focus on different linguistic issues or error patterns than native speakers do; (b) feedback or error correction that is tailored to their linguistic knowledge and experience; and (c) instruction that is sensitive to their unique linguistic deficits and needs for strategy training.

I suspect there’s a lot more that SLA can teach writing teachers, indeed all teachers, but this list is a good start; it emphasizes the complexity of the process of language acquisition and the time involved.  A non-native speaker/writer can’t through sheer force of will or even years of study become a native speaker/writer.  

In the video, Writing Across Borders, Tony Silva smartly points out that we don’t expect non-native speakers of English to speak without a foreign accent yet somehow teachers expect accentless writing—especially teachers who don’t spend any class time on helping students develop editing strategies.  My own feeling is that clarity (understandability) is a more practical and achievable classroom goal for most multilingual writers.  

Ferris’s list also suggests that teachers need to see error less as deficit and more as a sign of where the writer is at in terms of language or literacy acquisition and use this knowledge to develop focused ways to help individual students.