Page 65 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

TEACHING LANGUAGE FEATURES OF ACADEMIC WRITING 51
• Compound noun phrases (e.g., afive-credit-hour university composi- tion course(s), a twenty-five-year-old student(s) vs. the student is twenty-five years old)
Subsequent Error Types Group
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Word order in noun and adjective clauses (e.g., Theauthors state that they know which way the wind is blowing; It is not clear whether the price will rise; The lab where the research takes place is located in Pennsylvania}
• Also, word order in how-noun clauses (e.g., The scientists described how they identified the virus; The scale was used to measure how much the minerals weighed)
Word order with adverbs of manner, time, and indefinite frequency (e.g., Investors need to make decisions quickly; Usually, car mileage (usu- ally) depends on the size of its engine)
The placement of even and also (e.g., she was even/also elected, (also) she also/even finished the book, ... was high also/even in the 1990s)
The placement and uses of enough (e.g., high enough, enough time/funds, enough of that/them, enough to complete the experiment; op- tional: the placement and uses of almost, almost + enough,e.g. almost + enough time/funds; almost never, almost the same, almost finished/the tallest, almost + every [+ noun])
Quantifiers with prepositional phrases (e.g., some/many/most manag- ers vs. some/many/most of the managers in the accounting department), most as an adverb (e.g., the stock price of dot-corns grew the most in 1999}
L2 writers may not be able to identify and correct all errors covered in the in- struction no matter how much effort and time during one or two composition courses is devoted to the task. Teaching learners to edit their writing independ- ently does not have the goal of making their writing native-like, and it is crucial that both teachers and students set realistic expectations of noticeable im- provement in student writing, but not the elimination of errors. The goal of the error awareness practice and self-editingtraining is to enable students to mini- mize the number and extent of the most egregious types of errors in their texts.
A key to effective and productive teaching of self-editing skills is to hold students responsible for their errors just as they would be in real coursework.
In many cases, when students receive low grades on their assignments and papers in mainstream courses, they do not know the reasons that their work received a lowevaluation, and fewwould actually endeavor to find out by asking their professors (Johns, 1997). Even in the rare cases when some
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