Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc.

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Out of the Woods: Emerging Traditions in the Teaching of Writing

Author(s): Ann Raimes
Source: TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 407-430
Published by: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL)
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 TESOL QUARTERLY, Vol. 25, No. 3, Autumn 1991

Out of the Woods:

Emerging Traditions in the
Teaching of Writing
ANN RAIMES
Hunter College, City University of New York

Twenty-five years ago, writing instructionwas characterizedby

an approach that focused on linguisticand rhetoricalform. Since
then, we have gone into the woods in searchof new approaches,
focusing in turn on the writer and the writer's processes, on
academic content, and on the reader'sexpectations.In our search
for a new approach,we have come up againstsome thornyissues,
five of which are described in detail: the topics for writing, the
issue of "real" writing, the nature of the academic discourse
community, contrastiverhetoric, and responding to writing. The
difficulty of negotiatingour way also makesus susceptibleto false
trails.The paper ends with a discussionof emergingtraditionsthat
reflect shared recognitions rather than provide new methodolo-
gies.

Most good fairy tales, at least the ones that delight us and make us
or our children beg for more, begin with looking back to "once
upon a time." Since the TESOL organization has now reached its
25th anniversary, this seems a good way to begin looking at the
story of how the teaching of writing to adult (secondary and higher
education) nonnative speakers of English has developed since 1966;
we can follow it up with an account of the thickets and thorny
problems we face as we journey into the woods. Despite false trails,
we might still, true to the best endings of fairy tales, be able to find
a way out of the woods and live happily ever after. But that last is
only speculation. Let's begin by looking back at the trails we've
followed up to now, keeping in mind that we might not all have met
the same witches, wizards, wolves, or good fairies along the way.
Readers should be aware that the author of this article has been
teaching ESL for more than 25 years, and so her telling of the story
is inevitably influenced by the paths she chose to follow.

407
ONCE UPON A TIME:WRITING INSTRUCTION
AND RESEARCH1966-1991
This brief historical survey delineates four approaches to L2
writing instruction that have been evident in the last 25 years. Each
approach, at least as it emerges in the literature, has a distinctive
focus, highlighting in one case the rhetorical and linguistic form of
the text itself; in another, the writer and the cognitive processes used
in the act of writing; in another, the content for writing; and in the
last, the demands made by the reader. The dates given mark the
approximate time when each focus first appeared consistently in
our literature; no final dates are given, since all the approaches are
still, in varying degrees, subscribed to in theory and certainly in
practice.

Focus on Form, 1966-

Once upon a time, when the TESOL organization first was
founded in 1966, the audiolingual method was the dominant mode
of instruction. The view that speech was primary meant that writing
served a subservient role: to reinforce oral patterns of the language.
So in language instruction, writing took the form of sentence drills-
fill-ins, substitutions, transformations, and completions. The content
was supplied. The writing reinforced or tested the accurate
application of grammatical rules. In the 1970s, the use of sentence
combining (O'Hare, 1973; Pack & Henrichsen, 1980), while still
focusing on the manipulation of given sentences and thus, according
to Zamel (1980), ignoring "the enormous complexity of writing"
(p. 89), provided students with the opportunity to explore available
syntactic options.
In the early 1970s, too, passages of connected discourse began to
be used more often as classroom materials in the teaching of
writing. Controlled composition tasks, still widely used today,
provide the text and ask the student to manipulate linguistic forms
within that text (see, for example, Byrd & Gallingane, 1990; Kunz,
1972; Paulston & Dykstra, 1973). However, the fact that students are
using passages of connected discourse does not necessarily
guarantee that the students view them as authentic. If the students
are concentrating on a grammatical transformation, such as
changing verbs from present to past, they "need pay no attention
whatever to what the sentences mean or the manner in which they
relate to each other" (Widdowson, 1978, p. 116).
It was not only grammatical form that was emphasized in the
1960s and early 1970s. Concern for rhetorical form was the impetus

408 TESOL QUARTERLY

for Kaplan'sinfluential 1966 article that introduced the concept of
contrastive rhetoric. His "doodles article," as he calls it (Kaplan,
1987, p. 9), represents the "thought pattern" of English as
"dominantly linear in its development" (Kaplan, 1966, p. 4) in
contrast to the paragraphpatterns of other languages and cultures.
It has led to compensatory exercises that offer training in
recognizing and using topic sentences, examples, and illustrations.
These exercises often stress imitation of paragraphor essay form,
using writing from an outline, paragraphcompletion, identification
of topic and support,and scrambledparagraphsto reorder(see, for
example, Kaplan& Shaw, 1983;Reid & Lindstrom,1985).
Formal considerationsare also the basis for a great deal of current
L2 writing research. Textual features, such as the number of
passives or the number of pronouns,are counted and compared for
users of different cultures (Reid, 1990). Researchersexamine the
structure of such features as introductory paragraphs (Scarcella,
1984), the form of essays in various languages (Eggington, 1987;
Hinds, 1987; Tsao, 1983), cohesion and coherence (Connor, 1984;
Johns, 1984), and topical structure(Lautamatti,1987). A large-scale
study of written composition across 14 countries established to
codify tasks and describe the state of writing instruction has
provided a rich data base for cross-culturaldiscourse analyses
(Purves, 1988). (For a summaryof text-basedresearch,see Connor,
1990.) A form-dominatedapproachhas the largestbody of research
to inform and support it; it has been with us for a long time, and
lends itself to empiricalresearchdesign.

Focus on the Writer1976-

The 1970ssaw the development of more thansentence combining
and controlled composition. Influenced by L1 writing research on
composing processes (Emig, 1971; Zamel, 1976), teachers and
researchers reacted against a form-dominated approach by
developing an interestin what L2 writersactually do as they write.
New concerns replaced the old. In place of "accuracy" and
"patterns" came "process," "making meaning," "invention," and
"multiple drafts." The attention to the writer as language learner
and creator of text has led to a "process approach," with a new
range of classroom tasks characterized by the use of journals
(Peyton, 1990; Spack & Sadow, 1983), invention (Spack, 1984), peer
collaboration (Bruffee, 1984; Long & Porter, 1985), revision (Hall,
1990), and attention to content before form (Raimes, 1983a; Zamel,
1976, 1982, 1983). Zamel (1983) has recommended that teachers not
present instruction in the use of thesis sentences and outlines before

TEACHING WRITING 409

the studentshave begun to explore ideas. In response to theory and
research on writers' processes, teachers have begun to allow their
studentstime and opportunityfor selecting topics, generatingideas,
writing drafts and revisions, and providing feedback. Where
linguistic accuracy was formerly emphasized from the start, it is
now often downplayed, at least at the beginning of the process,
delayed until writers have grappled with ideas and organization.
Some practitionerseven entirely omit attention to grammar,as in
ESL writingtextbooksthat containno grammarreferenceor instruc-
tional component (e.g., Benesch & Rorschach,1989;Cramer,1985).
Researchpublicationson L2 writingprocesses grew rapidlyin the
1980s to inform and support the new trends in instruction (e.g.,
Cumming, 1989; Friedlander, 1990; Hall, 1990; Jones, 1982, 1985;
Jones & Tetroe, 1987; Raimes, 1985, 1987;Zamel, 1982, 1983;for a
summary,see Krapels,1990). However, although we are beginning
to discover much about the writing process, the small number of
subjects in case study research limits generalizations,and we are
rightly warned that the "lack of comparability across studies
impedes the growth of knowledge in the field" (Krapels, 1990,
p. 51).
Despite the rapid growth in researchand classroom applications
in this area, and despite the enthusiasticacceptance of a shift in our
discipline to a view of language as communication and to an
understandingof the process of learning,teachers did not all strike
out along this new path. The radical changes that were called for in
instructionalapproachseemed to provoke a swift reaction,a return
to the safety of the well-worn trail where texts and teachers have
priority.

Focus on Content 1986-

Some teachers and theorists, alienated by the enthusiasm with
which a process approach was often adopted and promulgated
(Horowitz, 1986a), interpreted the focus on the writer'smaking of
personal meaning as an "almost total obsession" (Horowitz, 1986c,
p. 788) with "the cognitive relationshipbetween the writer and the
writer'sinternalworld" (Swales, 1987, p. 63). Those who perceived
the new approach as an obsession inappropriate for academic
demands and for the expectations of academic readersshifted their
focus from the processes of the writer to content and to the
demands of the academy. By 1986, a process approach was being
included among "traditional"(Shih,1986, p. 624) approachesand in
its place was proposed what Mohanhad alreadyproposed in 1979-
a content-based approach. In content-based instruction, an ESL

410 TESOL QUARTERLY

course might be attached to a content course in the adjunct model
(Brinton, Snow, & Wesche, 1989; Snow & Brinton, 1988) or
language coursesmight be grouped with coursesin otherdisciplines
(Benesch, 1988). With a content focus, learnersare said to get help
with "the language of the thinking processes and the structureor
shape of content"(Mohan, 1986,p. 18). It is interestingto note here
that the content specific to English courses-language, culture, and
literature-is largely rejected (see Horowitz, 1990) in favor of the
subject matter of the other fields the ESL students are studying.
The researchstudiesthat inform thisapproachinclude analysisof
the rhetorical organization of technical writing (Selinker, Todd-
Trimble, & Trimble, 1978; Weissberg, 1984), studies of student
writing in content areas (Jenkins& Hinds, 1987;Seizer, 1983), and
surveysof the content and tasks L2 studentscan expect to encounter
in their academic careers (Bridgeman& Carlson, 1983;Canseco &
Byrd, 1989;Horowitz, 1986b). While classroommethodology might
take on some of the features of a writer-focusedapproach, such as
prewriting tasks and the opportunity for revision, the main
emphasis is on the instructor'sdetermination of what academic
content is most appropriate, in order to build whole courses or
modules of reading and writing tasksaroundthat content.
This content-based approach has more repercussions on the
shape of the curriculum than the two approaches previously
described, for here the autonomousESL class is often replaced by
team teaching, linked courses, "topic-centered modules or mini-
courses," sheltered (i.e., "field specific") instruction, and
"composition or multiskill English for academic purposes (EAP)
courses/tutorials as adjuncts to designated university content
courses"(Shih, 1986, p. 632-633). With an autonomousESL class, a
teacher can-and indeed often does-move back and forth among
approaches. With ESL attached in the curriculum to a content
course, such flexibility is less likely. There is always the danger that
institutional changes in course structure will lock us into an
approach that we want to modify or abandon.

Focuson the Reader1986-

Simultaneously with content-based approaches came another
academically oriented approach, English for academic purposes,
which focuses on the expectations of academic readers (Horowitz,
1986a, 1986b, 1986c;Reid, 1987, 1989). This approach,in which the
ESL teacher runs a theme-based class, not necessarily linked to a
content course, is also characterizedby its strong opposition to a

TEACHING WRITING 411

position within a writer-dominatedprocess approach that favors
personalwriting. A reader-dominatedapproachperceives language
teaching "as socialization into the academic community-not as
humanistictherapy"(Horowitz, 1986c, p. 789).
The audience-dominatedapproach, focusing on the expectations
of readers outside the language classroom, is characterizedby the
use of terms like academic demands and academic discourse
community. Attentionto audience was, in fact, first brought to the
fore as a feature of the process approach, but the focus was on
known readersinside the language classroom,as peers and teachers
responded to the ideas in a text. An English for academic purposes
approach focuses on the reader, too-not as a specific individual
but as the representativeof a discoursecommunity, for example, a
specific discipline or academia in general.The reader is an initiated
expert who representsa faculty audience. This reader,"particularly
omniscient"and "all-powerful"(Johns, 1990a,p. 31), is likely to be
an abstractrepresentation,a generalizedconstruct,one reified from
an examinationof academic assignmentsand texts.
Once the concept of a powerful outside reader is established,it is
a short step to generalizingabout the forms of writing that a reader
will expect, and then an even shorterstep to teaching those forms as
prescriptive patterns. Recommendations such as the following:
"Teachers must gather assignments from across the curriculum,
assess the purposes and audience expectations in the assignments,
and present them to the class" (Reid, 1987, p. 34) indicate a return
to a form-dominated approach, the difference being that now
rhetorical forms, rather than grammaticalforms, are presented as
paradigms.
A reader-dominated approach, like the other approaches, has
generated its own body of research: mostly surveys of the
expectations and reactionsof faculty members (Johns,1981;Santos,
1988), studies of the expectations of academic readers with regard
to genres (Swales, 1990), and identifications of the basic skills of
writing transferableacross various disciplines (Johns,1988).
These four approaches are all widely used and by no means
discrete and sequential. Certainly the last three appear to operate
more on a principle of critical reaction to a previous approachthan
on cumulative development. In all, our path throughthe woods of
writing instructionis less clearly defined now in 1991than it was in
1966. Then there was one approach, form-dominated, clearly
defined, and relatively easy to follow in the classroom. Now
teachers have to consider a variety of approaches,their underlying
assumptions, and the practices that each philosophy generates.
412 TESOL QUARTERLY
Thus, leaving the security of what Clarke and Silberstein call the
"explicitly mandated reality" (1988, p. 692) of one clear approach,
we have gone in search of a new theoretical approach or
approaches to L2 writing instruction.

INTO THE WOODS:

THICKETSAND THORNY ISSUES
Once we have left the relative safety of a traditional form-
dominated approach and set off into the woods in search of new
theories, our progress is hampered by many thickets and thorny
issues. These we have to confront and negotiate before we can
continue our journey. Particularly thorny are five classroom-
oriented issues that arise in our literature and in teachers' discussions
frequently enough to trouble L2 writing instructors, issues that in
my more than 25 years of teaching have provided cause for
reflection and uncertainty: the topics for writing; the issue of "real"
writing; the nature of the academic discourse community; the role
of contrastive rhetoric in the writing classroom; and ways of
responding to writing. These areas, difficult to negotiate, will be
described as discrete items, each posing its own set of problems. A
word of caution is in order, though: Readers should not expect to
find here miracle solutions or magic charms to lead the way past
these thickets and out of the woods.

The Topics for Writing

One of the major problems teachers face is what students should
write about. Topics for writing are an integral part of any writing
course, and the four approaches outlined above lead to what can be
a bewildering array of topics for teachers. In a form-dominated
approach, topics are assigned by the teacher; since the interest is in
how sentences and paragraphs are written rather than in what ideas
are expressed, each piece of writing serves as a vehicle for
practicing and displaying grammatical, syntactic, and rhetorical
forms. For this purpose, almost any topic will serve. In a writer-
dominated approach (usually called a process approach), the
students themselves frequently choose the topics, using personal
experience to write about what concerns them, or responding to a
shared classroom experience, often a piece of expository writing or
a work of literature (Spack, 1985). In a content-dominated
approach, topics will be drawn from the subject matter of either a
particular discipline or a particular course, supplied either by the
content teacher when content and writing course are linked in the

TEACHING WRITING 413

adjunctmodel (Snow & Brinton,1988)or by the languageteacherin
theme-based EAP courses. And in a reader-dominatedapproach,
the model is one of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement,
with language teachersexaminingwhat other disciplinesassign and
training students how to respond to those assignments by
"deconstructing"(Johns, 1986a, p. 253) the essay prompt and by
following a model of the appropriateform of academic writing.
The problem of whether to teach personal or academic writing
has surfaced frequently in recent years (Mlynarczyk,in press) and
has no easy solution. Approaches that focus on rhetoricalform and
on the reader's expectations look to the larger community for
guidance. ESL instructionis seen as a service "to preparestudentsto
handle writing assignments in academic courses" (Shih, 1986,
p. 617). For EFL students and for internationalstudentsin the U.S.,
who will probably only write in Englishas part of their educational
requirementand not at all thereafter,this might be suitable. How-
ever, the purposes are different for the many ESL immigrantand
refugee nonnative speakers in secondary and college classrooms.
This last group, a rapidly growing one, Leki (1990) equates with
native speakers of English, who, she says, are "morelikely to write
for many different contexts in the course of their professional lives"
(p. 14). For native speakers-and, by extension,certainlarge groups
of ESL students-Hairston (1991) rejects the idea that writing
courses should be "service courses" taught for the benefit of aca-
demic disciplines, since "writingcoursestaughtby properly trained
teachersdo have importantcontent:learninghow to use languageto
express ideas effectively" (p. B1).

"Real"Writing
A great deal of the recent controversy about the teaching of
writing has centered not only around the topics students write about
but also around the dichotomy of process and product. Horowitz
initiated lengthy debate (see Braine, 1988; Hamp-Lyons, 1986;
Horowitz, 1986a, 1986b, 1986c; Liebman-Kleine, 1986; Lyons, 1986;
Reid, 1984; Spack, 1988; Zamel, 1983) by questioning the effective-
ness of the process approach with its focus on the writer. In
particular, Horowitz (1986) criticized what he termed the "cavalier
view" (p. 141) of a process proponent (this author) who said at the
1985 TESOL Convention that examination writing was not "'real'"
(p. 141) writing. Horowitz is not alone in his complaint. Cited as a
major flaw in a process approach is the fact that "the Process
Approach fails to give students an accurate picture of university
writing" (Johns, 1990b). The issue of what university writing is and

414 TESOL QUARTERLY

what kind of writing ESL students should be doing is a thorny one,
and the use of the term real relates to this issue in practice as well as
in theory.
In practice, I and many of my colleagues teach two types of
writing in our classes:writing for learning (with prewriting,drafts,
revisions, and editing) and writing for display (i.e., examination
writing). Our students are aware of the different purposes and
different strategies.They recognize that these are distinct. The use
of the term real in this context was initiated by Searle (1969), who
makes a clear distinction between real questions and exam
questions. In real questions,the speakerwants to know the answer;
in exam questions, the speaker wants to know if the hearerknows.
Similar distinctions can be made with writing. In a writing class,
students need to be taught both how to use the process to their
advantage as language learners and writers, and also how to
produce an acceptable product upon demand. A shortcomingof the
debate around these issues is that process and product have been
seen as either/or rather than both/and entities. However, while
students certainlyneed to learn how to pass exams, they also need
to perceive writingas a tool for learning,a tool that can be useful to
them throughouttheir professionaland personallives.
As evidence of the difficulty of defining authentic writing, it is
interesting to note that even Horowitz (1986b) has used the
designation real to describe writing. He suggests ways to simulate
"the essential characteristics of real university writing assignments"
(p. 449) and discusses the context of "a real academic task" [italics
added] (p. 459). Here, too, the use of the term real could be
questioned. However, we should not assume that the implicationis
necessarily that the topics and tasks that come from ESL teachers'
own repertoireare somehow unreal;it is, rather,that Horowitz and
others find them less appropriatein certainsettings.In any case, the
L2 debate provides a great deal of evidence for what Harris(1989)
has observed in L1 writing:"One seems asked to defend either the
power of the discourse community or the imagination of the
individual writer"(p. 2). Obviously, the whole area of the types of
writing students are expected to do and the types of writing we
should teach is one surroundedby controversy.

The Natureof the AcademicDiscourseCommunity

Frequently cited as importantin determiningthe natureof "real"
writing and the topics we should assign are the demands of the
"academic discoursecommunity."These demands provide a set of
standards that readers of academic prose, teachers in academic

TEACHING WRITING 415

settings, expect. So some L2 writing teachers look to other
disciplines to determine their course content, their readings, their
models, and their instructionof rhetoricalform. One thorny issue
here is whether we should put our trust in this community, or
whether we shouldn'tratherbe attemptingto influence and change
the academic community for the benefit of our students, while
teaching our students how to interpret the community values and
transformthem (for discussionof similarissues,see Auerbach,1986,
1990;Peirce, 1989).
According to Johns (1990a), teachers who emphasize the
conventions of the discourse community will begin with "the rules
[italics added] of discourse in the community" (p. 32), since
academic faculty "insistthat students learn to 'talk like engineers',
for example, surrenderingtheir own language and mode of thought
[italics added] to the requirementsof the target community (p. 33).
The language used here-"rules" and "surrender"-reveals
perceptions regardingwho exercises power in the community and
the value of that power. In contrast,PatriciaBizzell (cited in Enos,
1987) sees the academic community as synonymouswith "dominant
social classes"and has recommended that we not direct our students
towards assimilation but rather find ways to give them "critical
distance"on academic culturalliteracy,so that eventually"elements
from students' native discourse communities can be granted
legitimacy in the academic community"(p. vi).
Another thorny problem is whether we view the academic
discourse community as benign, open, and beneficial to our
students or whether we see discoursecommunitiesas powerful and
controlling, and, as Giroux (cited in Faigley, 1986) puts it, "often
more concerned with ways of excluding new members than with
ways of admitting them" (p. 537). These opposing views point to
the validity of Berlin's(1988)statementthat every pedagogy implies
"a set of tacit assumptions about what is real, what is good, what is
possible, and how power ought to be distributed" (p. 492).
Teaching writing is inherently political, and how we perceive the
purposes of writing vis-a-vis the academic community will reflect
our political stance.
Reflecting our stance, too, is how we interpret the information
that comes to us from members of the academic community. In a
survey of 200 faculty members'opinionsin responseto the question,
"Which is more important for success in your classes, a general
knowledge of English or a knowledge of English specific to the
discipline?", (Johns, 1981, p. 57) most faculty members ranked
general English above specific purposes English. This result was
interpretedin the following way:
416 TESOL QUARTERLY
 There could be a numberof reasonsfor the generalEnglishpreferences,
the most compelling of which is that most faculty do not understandthe
nature and breadth of ESP. They tend to think of it as an aspect of the
discipline that has to do with vocabularyalone. (p. 54)
The mix of signals perhaps reflects a more generalized ambivalence
of TESOL practitioners: Subject-area faculty are viewed as a valu-
able resource; however, when they do not support what ESL teach-
ers and researchers expect, it is tempting to discount their
perceptions.
A focus on the academic discourse community also raises issues as
to whether academic writing is good writing, whether academic
discourse "often masks a lack of genuine understanding" (Elbow,
1991, p. 137) of how a principle works, and indeed whether there is
a fixed and stable construct of academic writing even in one
discipline. Elbow goes so far as to say that we can't teach academic
discourse "because there's no such thing to teach" (p. 138). This
issue of the nature, requirements, even the existence of, an
academic discourse community is a thicket in which we could be
entangled for a long time.

Contrastive Rhetoric
Although it has been 25 years since contrastive rhetoric research
was introduced (Kaplan, 1966, Leki, 1991) and the concept is fre-
quently mentioned in discussions of theory and research, its applica-
tions to classroom instruction have not developed correspondingly.
Published research informs teachers about the different ways in
which the written products of other languages are structured (e.g.,
Eggington, 1987; Hinds, 1987; Tsao, 1983), but the nature of trans-
fer in L2 writing remains under debate (see Mohan & Lo, 1985) and
transfer has been found not to be significant in certain types of task,
such as paraphrase (Connor & McCagg, 1983). The declared inten-
tion of contrastive rhetoric research is, however, "not to provide
pedagogic method" but rather to provide teachers and students
with knowledge about how the links between culture and writing
are reflected in written products (Grabe & Kaplan, 1989, p. 271).
Rather than abstracting a principle of the "linear"development of
English prose (Kaplan, 1966) as a pedagogic principle, contrastive
rhetoric is more useful as a consciousness-raising device for
students; teachers can discuss what they have observed about texts
in different cultures and have students discover whether research
findings hold true in their experience of their L1 texts.
The thicket that contrastive rhetoric presents for teachers as they
wander into the woods of theory is the question of the value of

TEACHING WRITING 417

prescribing one form of text-English form-not just as an
alternative,but as the one privileged form of text, presented as the
most logical and desirable, with which other learned systems
interfere. Land and Whitley (1989), in discussing how readers read
and judge ESL students' essays, found that nonnative speaker
readers could "accommodate to more kinds of rhetorical patterns"
(p. 287) than could native-speakerreaders.If we are to move away
from courses that are "as retributive as they are instructive"and
away from "composition as colonization,"we need, they say, to
"recognize, value, and foster the alternative rhetorics that the ESL
student brings to our language" (p. 286), not treat them only as
features that interfere with language learning. Land and Whitley
fear that "in teaching Standard Written English rhetorical
conventions, we are teaching studentsto reproduce in a mechanical
fashion our preferredvehicle of understanding"(p. 285).
In the same way that multiple "literacies"(Street, 1984)are posed
against the idea of one dominant culturalliteracy (Hirsch, 1987), so
a broad use of contrastive rhetoric as a classroom consciousness-
raising tool can point to linguistic variety and rhetoricalchoices; a
narrow use would emphasize only prescriptionsaimed at counter-
acting L1 interference. An extensive research study (Cumming,
1989) of the factors of writing expertiseand second-languageprofi-
ciency of L2 writersrevealed in the qualitiesof their texts and their
writing behaviors warns against such a narrow use of contrastive
rhetoric:"Pedagogicalprescriptionsabout the interferenceof learn-
ers' mother tongue in second-language performance-espoused in
audiolingual methodologies and theories of linguistic transfer or
contrastive rhetoric-appear misdirected" (pp. 127-128)since stu-
dents' L1 is shown to be an important resource rather than a
hindrancein decision making in writing.

Respondingto Writing
With a number of approachesto teachingwriting to choose from,
teachers are faced with a similar variety of ways to respond to
students'writing. Since a responseon a student'spaper is potentially
one of the most influential texts in a writing class (Raimes, 1988),
teachers are always concerned about the best approach. Some of
the options follow, illustratingthe variety at our disposal. We can
correct errors;code errors; locate errors;indicate the number of
errors(see Robb, Ross, & Shortreed,1986,for a discussionof these);
comment on form;make generalizedcomments about content, e.g.,
"good description" or "add details" (Fathman & Whalley, 1990,
p. 182); make text-specific comments, e.g., "I'm wondering here
418 TESOL QUARTERLY
what Carver tells the readers about the children";ask questions;
make suggestions; emote with comments like "Nice!" or "I'm
bored" (Lees, 1979, p. 264); praise;ask studentsto comment on the
source of the error (Raimes, 1990); or ask L1 peers to reformulate
the students' texts (Cohen, 1983). Given the range of choices, it's
hardly surprisingthat responding is a thorny issue. It is, in fact, so
problematic that much of our written response to students'texts is
inconsistent,arbitrary,and often contradictory(Zamel, 1985).
In an effort to understand more about teachers' responses,
researchersare looking at students'responses to feedback (Cohen,
1987;Cohen & Cavalcanti, 1990;Radecki & Swales, 1988), finding
mainly that students simply "make a mental note" of a teacher's
response. The fact that little of the researchexamines activitiesthat
occur after the act of responding seems to get at the heart of the
problem. If teacherssee theirresponseas the end of the interaction,
then students will stop there. If, however, the response includes
specific directionson what to do next, an "assignment"(Lees, 1979,
p. 265), there is a chance for applicationof principles.

FALSETRAILS
The five thornyissuesjust discussedare ones that troubleteachers
and concern theoristsand researchers.There are many others, too,
rendering our journeyinto the woods exciting, even hazardous.As
teachers read the theories and research and try to figure out what
approach to adopt in a writing classroom, they will sometimes
confront a false trail that seems to promise a quick way out of the
woods, an easy solution.We have seen evidence of false trailsin the
rise and demise of various methods (Clarke, 1982, 1984;Richards,
1984). Similarly, prescriptions of one approach for our whole
profession and all our students can be seen as false trails,too, since
they actually lead back to another "explicitly mandated reality"
(Clarke& Silberstein,1988)to replace the mandateof form-focused
instruction.Such a prescriptionin the teaching of writing appearsin
proposals for the widespread adoption of content-based language
teaching as "the dominant approach to teaching ESL at all levels"
(Celce-Murcia,1989, p. 14).
I regard proposalslike this as false trailsbecause they perpetuate
one of the errorsthat has been at the heart of many of our thorny
problems about writing.That problem, alluded to earlier,is that we
tend to discuss ESL/EFL studentsas if they are one or at the most
two groups. Much of the dissension and controversy that has
surfaced at conferences and in our literature would, I submit,

TEACHING WRITING 419

simply cease to exist if we defined our terms. Our field is too
diverse for us to recommend ways of teaching ESL in general.
There is no such thing as a generalized ESL student. Before making
pedagogical recommendations, we need to determine the follow-
ing: the type of institution(high school, two-year college, four-year
college, research university?)and the ESL student (undergraduate
or graduate?freshmanor junior?internationalstudent [returningto
country of origin] or immigrant/refugee?with writing expertise in
L1 or not? with what level of language proficiency?) If we are to
prescribe content, we need to ask, Whose content? For the
nonnative-speaking first-year students in my university, to offer
modules of marketing,accounting,and nursingis to departfrom the
very traditionof a liberal artseducation.On the otherhand, for very
specialized international graduate students, a content approach
might be the most appropriate. When Johns and Connor (1989,
reported in Leki, 1990) maintain that no such thing as general
English exists, they are referringto internationalstudents,but immi-
grant students need general English; that is, they need more than
ways to adapt to course requirementsfor a few years. They need to
be able to write in English for the rest of their working and earning
lives. They need to learn not only what academia expects but how
to forge their place in it, and how to change it. Indeed, on many
campuses now, a diverse studentbody is urging the replacement of
the male Eurocentric curriculum model with one emphasizing
gender representationand cultural diversity. Adopting a content-
based approach for all ESL studentswould be succumbingto what
I have called "thebutler'sstance"(Raimes, in press), one that over-
values service to other disciplines and prescribes content at the ex-
pense of writer, reader, and form.
Being lost in the woods might be uncomfortable,but we have to
beware of taking an easy path that might, in fact, lead us back to
where we started, to a reliance on form and prescription.

OUT OF THE WOODS: EMERGINGTRADITIONS

IN THE TEACHINGOF WRITING
What is the story now after a 25-year journey, beset by thickets,
thorns, and false trails?Are new traditionsemerging?
I am reminded of an article I wrote for this journal8 years ago
(Raimes, 1983b), in which I argued that in spite of the thrust
towards communicative competence, there had been no real
revolutionin our field. While there were then signs of some shifts in
the assumptions about what we do, we were still enmeshed in
tradition but were beginning to raise important questions. At that

420 TESOL QUARTERLY

time Kuhn's(1970) description of a paradigm shift seemed apt for
the field of ESL/EFL in general: "the proliferationof competing
articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of
explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over
fundamentals"(p. 91). That descriptionseems still to be apt for the
teaching of writing, where there is certainly evidence of
competition, discontent, and debate, and where now, given the
plurality of approaches, designs, and procedures, it seems more
appropriateto talk of traditionsratherthan of one tradition.
If any clear traditionsare emerging, they have more to do with
recognition of where we are now ratherthan delineationof exactly
where we are going. I see five such emerging traditions of
recognition:recognitionof the complexity of composing, of student
diversity, of learners' processes, of the politics of pedagogy, and of
the value of practice as well as theory. I end with a brief discussion
of each.

Recognitionof the Complexityof Composing

Despite all the false trails and some theorists'desire to offer one
approach as the answer to our problems, what seems to be
emerging is a recognitionthat the complexity of the writingprocess
and the writing context means that when we teach writing we have
to balance the four elements of form, the writer, content, and the
reader. These are not discrete entities. Rather,
writersare readersas they readtheirown texts.Readersare writersas
they makeresponseson a writtentext. Contentand subjectmatterdo
not exist withoutlanguage.The form of a text is determinedby the
interactionof writer,reader,and content.Languageinevitablyreflects
subject matter, the writer, and the writer'sview of the reader's
backgroundknowledgeandexpectations.(Raimes,in press)
This complexity may mean that no one single theory of writing
can be developed (Johns, 1990a) or it may mean that a variety of
theories need to be developed to support and inform diverse
approaches (Silva, 1990).In either case, recognitionof complexity is
a necessary basis for principled model building.

Recognitionof StudentDiversity
While there is still a tendency to discuss our field as if it were the
easily definable entity it was 25 years ago, there are signs thatwe are
beginning to recognize the diversity of our students and our
mission, and to realize thatnot all approachesand proceduresmight
TEACHING WRITING 421
apply to all ESL/EFL students. Reid (1984) notes this when she
reminds Zamel of the differences between advanced students and
novice writers, particularly with regard to cognitive development;
Horowitz (1990) notes this when he lists the questions that we need
to ask about our students before we decide to use literature or any
other content. For heterogeneous classes, a "balanced" stance is
recommended (Booth, 1963; Raimes, in press), one that presents a
governing philosophy but pays attention within that philosophy to
all four elements involved in writing: form, writer, content, and
reader. The combination of complexity and diversity makes it
imperative for us not to seek universal prescriptions, but instead to
"strive to validate other, local forms of knowledge about language
and teaching" (Pennycook, 1989, p. 613).

Recognition of Learners'Processes
Amidst all the winding and intersecting paths and false trails, one
trail seems to be consistently well marked and well traveled. While
there is controversy about what a process approach to teaching
writing actually comprises and to what extent it can take academic
demands into account, there is widespread acceptance of the notion
that language teachers need to know about and to take into account
the process of how learners learn a language and how writers
produce a written product. Such a notion of process underlies a
great deal of current communicative, task-based, and collaborative
instruction and curriculum development (Nunan, 1989a, 1989b).
Even writing theorists who are identified with content-based and
reader-based approaches frequently acknowledge the important
role that the writer's processes play in the writing class (Johns,
1986b; Shih, 1986; Swales, 1987). The process approach more than
any other seems to be providing unifying theoretical and method-
ological principles.

Recognition of the Politics of Pedagogy

Along with the recognition of the complexity of composing and
the diversity of our students and their processes has come a more
explicitly political understanding: The approach we take to the
academic discourse community and the culturally diverse students
in our classrooms will inevitably reflect "interested knowledge,"
which is likely to be "a positivist, progressivist, and patriarchal"
view presented as "a method" (Pennycook, 1989, p. 589). All
approaches should, therefore, be examined with a set of questions
in mind: Who learns to do what? Why? Who benefits? (See

422 TESOL QUARTERLY

Auerbach, 1986, 1990). Recognizing the power of literacy, we need
to ask "what kind of literacy we want to support: literacy to serve
which purposes and on behalf of whose interests" (Lunsford,
Moglen, & Slevin, 1990, p. 2) and to keep in mind that "to propose
a pedagogy is to propose a political vision" (Simon, 1987, p. 371).

Recognitionof the Valueof Practice

Both in L1 and in L2 instruction, the power that theory, or
method, has held over instruction is being challenged by what
Shulman(1987) calls "thewisdom of practice"(p. 11). North (1987)
argues that in L1 writing instruction we need to give credit to
"practitioners'lore"as well as to research;teachersneed to use their
knowledge "to argue for the value of what they know and how they
come to know it" (p. 55). Before we heed our theoristsand adopt
their views, it will help us if we first discover how often they teach
writing to ESL students, where they teach it, how they teach it, and
who their students are. We need to establisha context. We need to
know the environmentin which they have developed what Prabhu
(1990,p. 172) calls "a teacher'ssense of plausibilityabout teaching,"
which is the development of a "concept (or theory, or in a more
dormant state, pedagogic intuition), of how learning takes place
and how teaching causes and supports it." But better than putting
the research into a teaching context is for teachers to become
researchers themselves. Classroom-based research and action
researchis increasinglyrecommended to decrease teachers'reliance
on theorists and researchers(Richards& Nunan, 1990). Teachers
can keep sight of the forest as well as the trees.
These recognitionscharacterizeour position at the end of our 25-
year journey from "once upon a time,"journeyinginto the woods,
facing the tangle of thickets and thorny problems to trying to
recognize-and avoid-false trails. Our own telling of the story
might also include having taken some false trailsor having met and
vanquisheda few big bad wolves in ourtravels.The fact thatwe are
beginning to emerge from the woods with new recognitionsbut not
a single new approachis perhaps the happiest 1991 ending that we
can expect, given the diversity and complexity of our students and
of learningand teachingwriting. But by the turnof the century, we
could well be reading (and writing) a different story.
U

TEACHING WRITING 423

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Manythanksto KateParry,RuthSpack, and VivianZamel, who read earlierdrafts
of this paper and offered perceptive and helpful advice. Thanks also go to the
graduatestudentsin my course, Rhetoricand Composition,who steered me away
from the idea of using "LittleRed WritingHood"as a subtitle for this paper.

THE AUTHOR
Ann Raimes is the author of many articles on writing research, theory, and
teaching, and on ESL methodology. Her books include Techniquesin Teaching
Writing(Oxford UniversityPress, 1983),ExploringThroughWriting(St. Martin's
Press, 1987), and How English Works:A GrammarHandbook with Readings (St.
Martin'sPress, 1990).She has taughtESL for more than 25 years.

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