Writing Conferences with ESL Students

by Rachel Dodge, WAC Fellow

It is important to give all students the opportunity to revise essays before the final version is due for a grade.  Revising allows students to receive feedback from their peers (in workshops) or from the teacher (in conferences or written response), and is especially valuable for ESL students.  In writing conferences, students have the chance to clarify what is being asked in the writing prompt, go over written responses from the teacher, and ask questions they may be uncomfortable voicing in class.  Ideally, conferences should be scheduled at various points during the writing process, leaving adequate time for revision.  If teachers do not allow for a revision period before essays are due, or do not require individual writing conferences, it is important to encourage ESL students to schedule at least one conference at some point during the writing process.

The following excerpt (Fig. 1), from CSU Sacramento Professor Dana Ferris' Response to Student Writing, provides helpful guidelines for designing successful writing conferences with ESL students:

 

 

1.      Before conducting conferences with students, teachers should discuss purpose and possible participant roles with the whole class.  They should not assume that students will understand why they are meeting with the teacher or how they are supposed to behave in that setting.  In fact, where teachers may anticipate a two-way collegial interaction, students' default assumption may well be that the teacher will deliver a monologue of comments and corrections - that a conference is merely the same as written feedback, only presented orally.

2.      Teachers should consider individual students' possible discomfort with the conferencing situation and either make conferences optional or three-way (two students with the teacher for a longer period of time).

3.      Teachers should, if at all possible, read the students' paper to be discussed in advance of the conference so that they can provide carefully thought-out suggestions during the conference.

4.      Students should also be encouraged to prepare for conferences by reading through their papers and making a list of strengths, weaknesses, and questions to bring up during the conference.  The teacher should model and structure this preparation step for students in class.

5.      During conferences, teachers should encourage student participation by asking them to begin with a self-evaluation of their own papers and by asking any questions they might have.  Teachers should strive throughout the interaction to ask questions of the students to draw them out, acknowledge student viewpoints, and so on.

6.      Considering that conferences place additional stress on L2 students' aural/oral skills, teachers should encourage students to summarize orally at the end of the conference what has been discussed and what the "next steps" are for the paper, to take notes and/or audiotape during the conference, and to write a cover memo to submit with the next draft explaining how the conference influenced the revision process.

7.      At the beginning of a course, teachers might consider writing comments on one set of student papers and conducting conferences for the next set.  Then the teacher can ask the students which they prefer and tailor future feedback to individual student preferences.

8.      Finally, the teacher needs to plan adequate time and appropriate space for conferences and be willing and able to accommodate students' schedules.  For some students, an online interaction may be more convenient, and may even offer the best of both worlds—the opportunity to negotiate and ask clarification questions but the slower paced, more concrete nature of written feedback.

Fig.1; Ferris, Dana. Response to Student Writing: Implications for Second Language Students. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publ., 2003. 133.