L1 Composition & L2 Writing

Leki (2006) describes ESL writing as having prevalence in university courses aimed at helping ESL students succeed academically, while other skills are being ignored or deemed unimportant. She partially attributes this attitude to L1 composition legacy and the position it secured in many US universities, i.e. a required course for undergraduate students. In this light, it is definitely a positive development to recognize the needs of ESL students and have a separate writing course for them. It also seems to explain the lack thereof in my teaching context: Since we do not require all majors to take L1 composition courses, English writing courses seem redundant. In fact, the way (academic/college) writing is defined and viewed is quite different. In the US, as far as I know, most of the exams both on graduate and undergraduate levels, are taken in the written form (a test or a paper). In Russia, the preference is given to oral exams (which has its own drawbacks) that can be preceded by a requirement to submit a paper, however, a lot less attention is paid to the problems of plagiarism. Similarly to Yang's nursing classes, the content and the information rather than form is given priority when grading. Without seeing academic writing as a skill to be required of all students in their L1, it is understandable that L2 writing is perceived in the like manner.

In the USA, L1 composition classes resist being perceived and treated as a "service course" (Leki, 2006, p.68) in university programs. As far as ESL writing courses are concerned, it seems that they are meant to be "service courses", teaching students academic writing literacy that would be used in all their majors and all of their courses. In Russia, writing in English is even less independent. It is still used as a "means of reinforcing the acquisition of grammar and vocabulary" (Leki, 2002, p. 60). At a more advanced level, it includes particular sentence structures and linking devices. In other words, the content is irrelevant, especially because it is the language that is taught, not the subject. So, when writing is evaluated, it is usually accuracy and complexity of grammar structures and vocabulary that are graded, not the students' creativity. It also needs to be taken into account that students do not write papers in English; the maximum length of an essay would be two pages. Nobody (at my home university) writes research papers in English. Upon graduation, students are more likely to use English to take an exam (TOEFL or IELTS), to search for information, to translate or interpret than to write papers. Hence, the position of EFL writing – there are no exclusively writing courses.

So, I would say that the way L1 and L2 writing is treated at a university level does not merely hint at the university's attempt to define writing (Leki, 2006). It is the other way around: the way writing is defined at an institution (or country) determines the position (and existence) of writing courses at that institution. This is exactly the case presented in Chapter 4 by Kubota and Abels(2006): it took comparing the definitions of ESL literacies with those of foreign languages acquired by American students abroad to see the double standards and discrepancies (e.g. favoring monolingualism and monoculturalism)

Leki, I. (2002). Second language writing. In R. B. Kaplan (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Applied Linguistics (pp. 60-69). New York: Oxford University Press.

Leki, I. (2006). The legacy of first-year compostion. In P.K. Matsuda, C. Ortmeier-Hooper, & X. You (Eds.), The Politics of Second Language Writing: In Search of the Promised Land (pp.59-74). West Lafayette:Parlor Press.

Kubota, R. & Abels, K. (2006). Improving institutional ESL/EAP support for international students: seeking the promised land. In P.K. Matsuda, C. Ortmeier-Hooper, & X. You (Eds.), The Politics of Second Language Writing: In Search of the Promised Land (pp. 75-93). West Lafayette:Parlor Press.