Writing Better English (review)

Writing Better English is a user-friendly workbook on basic grammar and writing for second language learners of English. This workbook takes a building-block approach to improving ESL (English as a second language) learners' writing skills by guiding them as they progress from understanding the parts of speech to writing short sentences and then to completing stories.

The workbook is organized into six brief, easy-to-follow sections, each building on the previous ones. Setting the foundation for the rest of the workbook, the first section opens with a review of grammar basics that covers, for example, verb tenses, auxiliaries, conjunctions, pronouns, possessives, plurals, and also comparative and superlative word forms. This coverage also provides a base from which learners can self-assess their familiarity with basic grammatical elements and structures, as well as their readiness to write. The review then leads to a brief section on completing sentences, which prompts ESL writers to determine elements that are missing and the appropriate words to use. Following the sentence completion exercises, learners proceed to writing short sentences. The workbook then moves beyond sentence-level writing to story completion exercises. Before the final section on composing stories, with such suggested topics as 'The Most Unforgettable Day,' 'Peace or War,' and 'Your Autobiography,' the workbook includes a practical section on writing personal and business letters. This section includes sample letters and provides ESL writers with a simple way to approach letter writing by considering appropriate formats, structures, and components. In each section, the author provides non-technical explanations, examples, and plenty of guided application exercises, thus progressively promoting learner creativity in the writing tasks.

While this workbook is easy to understand and includes information that would be useful to ESL learners, several aspects of its presentation raise questions about its value.

First, the proficiency level of the learners this workbook is designed to help has not been clarified. Since the workbook is intended for self-studying and supplementary learning, indicating the intended readership's proficiency level would be helpful.

Second, the author claims that ESL writers can use the workbook to 'learn essential vocabulary and grammar' (front cover). It is not clear that the vocabulary development approach was used to 'increase [ESL writers'] proficiency in vocabulary usage' (back cover). Each of the 11 topics suggested for writing stories is followed by instructions about which specific grammatical structures to use. Then there are four to five questions intended to help the writers generate ideas, and five or six 'helpful vocabulary words' (pp. 143–147). I do not think that simply providing a list of five to six words for each composition topic is the best way to develop ESL writers' 'proficiency in vocabulary usage,' since research has shown that vocabulary can best be learned through reading 'authentic' texts (see Wallace, 1992) and seeing words used in a variety of contexts (rather than the constructed and artificial examples commonly found in textbooks) (see, e.g., Coady & Huckin, 1997).

With regard to grammar, I also wonder whether prescribing the tenses and grammatical structures to use is a helpful way to approach writing stories. In addition, there is no discussion of critical grammatical items that are particularly challenging or troublesome to ESL writers; that is, beginners and advanced learners alike. Such a discussion might include, for example, the use of singulars and plurals, articles, prepositions, modal auxiliary verbs, gerunds and infinitives, relative pronouns, and ambiguous pronouns. These tricky elements are present in the written texts produced by ESL writers at all levels and deserve consideration for integration into the workbook.

Third, I question the provision of rules, drill-like grammar exercises that involve the manipulation of form (e.g., changing 'Her brother is very rich' to the past, past perfect, and future tenses or filling in the blank with the correct verb form), and isolated sentences and artificial examples that are devoid of context and situations of communication. This approach seems to move the teaching of writing back to the practice of prescriptive grammar, which emphasizes...