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ENG 732 – Dr Shih Cherry Ngai
Annotated bibliography entry #3 28 Apr 2010
Teaching ESL Writing:
Haynes, J. (2006). Circle time: Giant steps through nonfiction writing. Essential Teacher, 3(2), 6-7.
Summary:
This article describes how an experienced writing teacher modifies the process of process writing to
accommodate the needs of new children English language learners. The author agrees with the principle
of process writing, which is focusing on the process, not the product; however, she doesn’t necessarily
agree with all the steps suggested in process writing. Haynes starts the article by stating the cause of
most of the beginners’ problem in writing – they tend to translate their native language into English
while developing their text. This makes the writing full of grammatical mistakes and makes the
sentences very hard, even for the teachers to understand, let alone to correct them. Therefore, Haynes
doesn’t suggest free writing for beginners. If the students don’t worry about making grammatical
mistakes in their free writing, their sentences tend to be even more unintelligible. Similarly, Haynes
doesn’t encourage journal writing for the beginners either, as journal doesn’t have any structure for the
learners to follow while writing. As a result, the writings will either be again incomprehensible or
overcorrected by the parents. In other words, these writings are not focusing on the process, but the
product. Another problem of the beginning writers is their limited vocabulary. They can only use the
same words and phrases over and over again, which also makes their sentence structure confusing.
In order to solve the above problems, Haynes suggests teaching the beginners to start with nonfiction
reading and writing with the use of graphic organizers, which provide students with chunks of word to
be readily used in their writing. Oral development of the topic can also expand the students’ vocabulary
and model the sentence structure for them. Next, Haynes provides five modified steps of process writing
to teach the mentioned suggestions. But before teaching, Haynes recommends the topics chosen should
be the students’ subject-area:
1) Prewriting – lots of time should be spent in this stage.
After the nonfiction reading, brainstorm about the topic in sentence form. Have the students read
the chart out to connect written form with oral form.
Practice speaking and writing complete sentences with the content vocabulary every day.
Fill in the graphic organizers with sentences instead of phrases to arrange ideas, as beginners
have trouble moving onto sentence phase from phrase phase.
2) Writing – practice writing with the use of graphic organizers as they give the students the language
and organization to use in their writing.
3) Editing – regular conferences with the students is encouraged as low level learners can’t correct their
own mistakes. As for peer-edit, grouping them with native speakers and giving them a linguistic item to
focus on are recommended.
4) Revising – give specific feedback to students’ writing. Students will find this process more
meaningful in peer-edit.
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ENG 732 – Dr Shih Cherry Ngai
Annotated bibliography entry #3 28 Apr 2010
5) Publishing – showing the students’ works and sharing with their family help them to develop a sense
of audience.
Haynes shows a student’s sample before and after the nonfiction writing workshop. It shows great
improvement in all vocabulary, grammar and sentence structure after having classes with her.
Response:
I’m interested in this article because of my teaching experience in the past. I had taught children reading
and writing for six years in HK and it had always been a challenge for me. Just like Haynes’ students,
most of mine were low-level English beginners. They found it extremely difficult to construct a
complete sentence with correct grammar, let alone to write a short piece. Haynes explained the precise
reason why they have such problems – it’s because they try to translate their writing from their native
language, which is Cantonese in my case to English. Therefore, I absolutely agree with Haynes that free
write isn’t a good idea at this level. It will only burden the student with a task that they know they can’t
achieve and they will end up with chaotic grammatical mistakes and incomprehensible sentences. As a
consequence, the students will eventually lose the confidence to write in English as they think it’s too
difficult. Haynes suggested starting teaching the beginners with nonfiction reading and writing, which
has me reflect upon my own approach of teaching writing with fiction reading. For sure, I have my
rationale behind my choice. However, the parents of my students had sometimes reflected a fact to me
that the children couldn’t use the “fancy” words that I taught them in their school work. After reading
Haynes’ recommendation of choosing a topic taken from the student’s subject area, it made me think of
opening another possibility to approach teaching writing. By reading an article about an experienced
teacher reexamining and modifying her own way of teaching along her professional life remind me that
teaching is an ongoing journey. I need to constantly amend and improve my way of teaching to suit the
need of my students. Although I agree with most of Haynes’ arguments and suggestions, there’s one
point I don’t necessarily agree with is to provide the whole sentence as an idea for the students to write.
I understand that low-level students need a lot of modeling, but giving them a complete sentence only
means copying for them. They need some variables to process and practice the language. Even though
it’s hard for the beginners to go from phrases to sentences, copying isn’t a solution. I see the teacher’s
specific feedback as the essential tool here. One point I really like is Haynes’ suggestion of focusing on
one language item for peer edit. I can already imagine the engagement of the students and the
effectiveness of the activity due to the manageability of the task and skills required.
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