Teaching English Writing to Nonnative English Speakers - By: Tom Aaron

Teaching native English speakers to write better English is a challenge. In our culture where people text each other in abbreviated English and limit their reading to cereal boxes over breakfast, many people lack the background necessary to either teach well or write well. The past, however, does not contain an era where everyone wrote well. Looking back, we cannot find a Golden Age of Writing. Thirty years ago television may have distracted people and eighty years ago radio. Before that people may have not had the time or may have been illiterate. To nostalgically remember a Golden Age where all English speakers were literate and waxed poetry is to deny reality.

Today's reality demands that more and more people write, and write well, to be successful. Students need to write to do well in school, people in business at all levels need to write to carry out their business, and many people need to write others at long distances to maintain personal relationships. Writing and writing well present a challenge for the native English speaker. For the nonnative English speaker, however, writing is even more of a challenge. Speaking presents a myriad of challenges too, but speaking focuses on getting our messages across. While some people who write speeches and some others do focus on crafting their speech, most people simply speak.

Writing, however, demands that we craft our words. First we think about what we are going to write. Then we write it. After that, we go back and examine what we have written. Sometimes we read our writing aloud to hear how it sounds. All this work helps us to edit our writing. Nonnative speakers, however, often lack the ear or a sense of the language, complicating the writing process for them. When we teach writing to nonnative speakers, we see writing that is a combination of knowledge from their English knowledge and from their first language. If nonnative speakers know languages other than their first language and English, we may see their influence too.

As an example, let's look at Japanese who are not native speakers of English and how their English studies and the influence of their native language may influence their English writing. Starting with the influence of their English studies, many Japanese are used to speaking English. When they first start to write in English, they use the same patterns that they use when speaking. Teachers teaching such Japanese students need to be sure that their students understand the difference between written and spoken text. This will require giving the students examples, providing reading, and showing them how to edit their written texts.

Japanese students are also influenced by the long sentences common to Japanese. Below is an example of how an English sentence might look if it were written a Japanese student in English but with Japanese construction:

As almost all our writing work concerns Japanese to English translations, this section will address sentence lengths of English sentences, which can get very confusing when they are too long; many Japanese writers use very long sentences, compared to English writers.

The above example is not well written and is just too long. The sentence has too much punctuation: three commas and a semicolon. The student did not understand that semicolons normally connect two short sentences, not two long ones. The Japanese student also needs to learn that sentences with too many commas are confusing. Lastly is the problem that the sentence has too many ideas. The student needs to learn the general rule that each sentence should have one idea.

Many Japanese sentences are very long and contain more than one idea. Japanese students may create such Japanese sentences in their mind and produce them as English sentences. This is one error that creates many difficult to understand English sentences. Japanese students need to remember that one long Japanese sentence will need to be reorganized into two, three, or even four smaller English sentences.

When teaching English writing to speakers of other languages, knowing about the influence of their native languages can help. Read the writing of enough nonnative English students with the same native language and you will see the influence. Understanding this influence is one way to help to better teach these students.

About the Author

Visit Aaron Language Services at http://www.aaronlanguage.com for translation from Japanese to English and more. If you can't read Japanese, you can always reach us via our personnel page.

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