Goals for Academic Writing: ESL Students and Their Instructors (review)
- Goals for Academic Writing: ESL Students and Their Instructors
This book reports on a multi-year research project that demonstrates how an investigation of goals for writing improvement provides a window on the complexities of teaching and learning to write in English as a second language (ESL) for academic purposes. With the frameworks of goal theory and activity theory, Alister Cumming and his research team (a post-doctoral research fellow and a number of graduate students) first conducted their research in a pre-university intensive ESL program in Canada involving 45 students with various L1 backgrounds and five ESL instructors and then, a year later, in university academic programs, following 15 of the original participants and working with nine university instructors. Using multiple research methods such as questionnaires, interviews, classroom observations, and stimulated recalls, the study aimed
to describe the students' goals for writing improvement, to relate students' perspectives about their goals to those of the instructors who taught them, and to determine how these goals might differ or change between the context of an ESL program and first year university studies one year later.
(p. 1)
The book has 10 chapters. In chapter 1, Cumming introduces the purposes and conceptual foundations (goal theory and activity theory) of the study; chapter 2 describes the context and design of the main study. The main data were collected from parallel interviews and stimulated recalls with students and instructors, using writing samples. The coding scheme illustrates a taxonomy of 31 categories of goals for writing improvement, grouped under 'Force of Goal,' 'Objects,' 'Actions Taken,' 'Contexts of Actions,' 'Aspirations,' 'Origins of Goal,' and 'Responsibility for Goals.' The frequencies of these categories of goals are analyzed, following the statistical procedure of [End Page 365] dual scaling (for analyzing symmetrical relations among categorical data).
The next two chapters report the main study's findings on students' goals for ESL and university courses (chapter 3 by Zhou, Busch, Gentil, Eouanzoui, and Cumming) and on ESL and university instructors' goals for writing improvement (chapter 4 by Cummings, Erdo00 sy, and Cumming). By analyzing categorically and systematically the goals expressed by students and teachers, researchers found that most students focused on improving language, rhetoric, and ideas and knowledge in their writing during the research period. As they moved from ESL to university programs, however, some students broadened their range of goals to also focus on, for example, the composing process, as their instructors increasingly expected them to express content knowledge 'in modes of English writing appropriate to the academic discipline and tasks assigned' (p. 69).
Chapters 5 through 9 are devoted to case studies. Except for chapter 9 (by Gentil), which reports a parallel study in a bilingual English/French college, all are based on sub-samples of data or participants in the main study. Yang (chapter 5) examines the writing-improvement goals and activities of nine Chinese students in university courses. Barkaoui and Fei (chapter 6) examine a group of 11 students, comparing their own and their instructors' assessments of the attainment of writing goals. Busch (chapter 7) reports a systemic functional linguistic analysis of participants' use of language of intentions for writing improvement. And Kim, Baba, and Cumming (chapter 8) explore the interplay of goals, motivations, and identities of three ESL writers (two Japanese and one Korean). Together, these case studies indicate that goals for writing improvement are 'intersubjectively negotiated and socially constructed' (Gentil, p. 9).
Goals for Academic Writing closes by describing the implications of the study for pedagogy, policy, and research (chapter 10). Cumming advises instructors to design curricula that will help students determine and achieve their goals for writing improvement. He also calls for the strengthening of pre-university ESL programs and for first-year bridging courses within the university to help ESL students make the transition. This research, as William Grabe points out in his foreword to the book, successfully highlights the transition points in academic writing development for ESL students.
Researchers and instructors who work with ESL students in both pre-university and university settings in North...
