At CoTESOL 2009, Keith Folse's presentation "The Least You Should Know About ELL Grammar," offered interesting research based principals for pedagogy. Folse researched numerous college preparation ESL writing and grammar courses and found that instructor error correction on student writing made no difference in improving student performance. In other words, the practice of "the student writes and teacher corrects" in order to improve writing outcomes is not effective.
Rather, Folse suggests that in order to best prepare ESL writers for college level writing courses, instructors should focus only on the worst ESL grammatical problems and teach the same kinds of writing skills that native speakers need to know. Folse also notes that ESL writers benefit from having their papers evaluated one category at at time, for instance vocabulary or organization. Finally, he encourages writing instructors to collect student papers and then return them to students to edit themselves one week later.
These practical principals based on research of numerous ESL writing and grammar courses, help ESL students take the leap to college level courses. For further information about Folse's research, please visit kfolse@mail.ucf.edu or view his Great Writing
text series 1-5, Heinle Cengage Learning.
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