Does the way that English is taught to ESL students affect their academic writing?
There is some evidence that ESL higher research candidates, wherever their origin, have common trends in errors with their grammar and sentence constructions. This becomes apparent in theses. Two or three decades ago, literacy educators had a focus on ‘interference’ theories – that interference from the first language was a main factor in ‘mistakes’ made in the second language. In fact over the past 30 years or so, language teaching has gone through many phases, including the language laboratory approach, ‘traditional’ grammar, communicative approach, systemic functional grammar, etc. Currently, most English language teachers use an eclectic approach made up of useful elements of all previous approaches when appropriate, but most importantly, that they are flexible in their approach to meet each student’s needs. Certainly, at research student level, it is more important to focus on the discourse level first (always more difficult than it looks, since there are very different discourses
There is some evidence that ESL higher research candidates, wherever their origin, have common trends in errors with their grammar and sentence constructions. This becomes apparent in theses. Two or three decades ago, literacy educators had a focus on ‘interference’ theories – that interference from the first language was a main factor in ‘mistakes’ made in the second language. In fact over the past 30 years or so, language teaching has gone through many phases, including the language laboratory approach, ‘traditional’ grammar, communicative approach, systemic functional grammar, etc. Currently, most English language teachers use an eclectic approach made up of useful elements of all previous approaches when appropriate, but most importantly, that they are flexible in their approach to meet each student’s needs. Certainly, at research student level, it is more important to focus on the discourse level first (always more difficult than it looks, since there are very different discourses
