2. Lierature Review(eunnyeong Seong)

Ⅱ. LITERATURE REVIEW

Writing English as second language or foreign language is more difficult than speaking. When ESL learners speak English, they focus on delivering some messages and contents. Sometimes, they don’t use correct grammars and perfect sentences, but the listeners can understand what they say. They can communicate with each other. However, when students write in English, they should be aware of spellings and grammar rules unlike speaking. If they use wrong spellings or incomplete sentences, the readers are confused and cannot understand what they want to mean because their writing does not make sense. Writing skills need more attention and effort than speaking skills. Therefore, many ESL teachers have researched the effective ways for students to learn writing skills and have applied many different writing methods in their class. When someone writes some words and sentences in a foreign language, it means that he/she can read them and understand the meaning of them. People usually can read before write. Written language has different acquisition processes from oral language. In case of the L1acguistion, learners can naturally learn oral language by be exposed to the language through environment. But, they can learn written language by intentional studies and instructions. L2 language learning has similar processes like L1. When the ESL teachers teach speaking English, they focus on more fluency than accuracy, because the purpose of speaking is communication. If they teach writing skills, they focus on accuracy as same as fluency, because the purpose of writing is the expression of the writer’s intention without misunderstanding. Brown said writing is more than changing from oral language to written language. It needs thinking, drafting and revising which don’t develop naturally. ESL teachers should show students

1

how to create ideas, how to organize them and how to revise them which don’t teach in speaking class (Brown, 2001). Let’s imagine. ESL learners have writing tasks about a specific topic, but they do not have any background knowledge or didn’t think about that before. Even if they are good at vocabulary and grammar, they are difficult to start their writing. On the contrast, students have good thoughts in their mind, but they do not know how to write them concretely. They could not finish their assignments. At that time, reading the other person’s works gives good information and good writing models. Reading materials show perfect sentences, well-formed organization and extended texts. Students want to be good at writing, and they would better to read more. Reading-writing relationship is an interesting topic to ESL teachers and researchers. Reading and writing deal with written English. That is commonly discussed on the impact of reading on writing. Students were generally required extended reading for improve their writing skills. But we don’t imagine that students learn content information from writing with involving the reading of text material (Grabe, 1986). Efficient reading skills become a foundation for the growth of writing proficiency and composing skills must necessary be preceded by the establishment of good reading skills. But in the bidirectional view, writing practices promote the development of reading skills, just as improved reading proficiency can enhance writing skills (Zamel, 1992). Anyway ESL teachers should provide meaningful input, for promoting the construction of meaning and maximize learner’s evolving and interdependent reading and writing proficiencies (Ferris & Hedgcock, 2005). Students learn information from the texts and the summary writing tasks. Undoubtedly, reading and writing are reinforced the learning of contents, the development of literacy skills and the acquisition of language abilities in second language learning.

2

Grabe said Reading and writing abilities are highly correlated; however, correlations do not mean casual relations; particularly in the direction from writing to reading, What will be suggested here is : (1) that the relation between reading and writing is not close enough to assume full development of abilities in one from the other-and (2), by extension, that ESL students cannot learn to read by learning to write, by learning discourse grammar only, or by any purely “intensive” approach to reading-since all such approaches assume the readingwriting relationship consists only of converse manifestation of the same process (Garbe, 1986. p33).

In the past, when ESL learners learned writing in English, teachers focused on the final products. Now days, the focus moves from the products to the process. In other words, writing is an ongoing process. The focusing on the final products of writing, such as essay, report, and story, is supposed to meet certain standards of prescribed English rhetorical style, to reflect accurate grammar, and to be organized in conformity with what the reader would consider to be conventional. However, the process approach to writing focuses on students’ composing process, steps of writing like prewriting, drafting and revising, and feedback from their peers or teacher (Shih, 1986). Ferris and Hedgcock arranged of writing process to six steps: 1) prewriting, 2) planning and drafting, 3) rewriting and revising, 3) feedback, 4) incubation and revision, 5) editing and polishing, 6) publishing (Ferris & Hedgcock, 2005). There is an experimental research about teaching writing through reading. Anastacio tried to help the students to improve their writing skills through reading tasks. The students are not ESL learners but the middle school students. At first, he prepared a lot of reading materials, such as new and old literature, realistic and fanciful literature, prose and poetry. Through the processes of transcribing, translating, paraphrasing, condensing, and imitating, students read and reread 3

some work, learned which were good or bad writings and practiced writing sentences following the models which they read. Finally, the students could reproduce other writers’ thoughts by daily writing practices and write their own creative writings (Anastacio, 1979). It indicates that reading activities supply good sources of writing contents and good models of writing formats. In ESL class, there are many different kinds of reading and writing activities. Some kinds of activities focus on each special skill and some kinds of activities are very helpful both of them. Sometimes, reading and writing are integrated in ESL class. If teachers find out which activities are more related to each other, they serve ESL students to learn English effectively using those activities. Students learn to write by carefully observing others’ writings. By reading a variety of relevant types of text, students can gain important sight about how they should write and what kinds of subject matter come to their writing topic (Brown, 2001). Reading-based writing tasks that encourage students to read like writers (John, 1997; Smith, 1984) and to write like readers (Garriga & Peterson, 2001). The most effective writers learn to image reader’s attributes and to use those attributes to assess their own writing. Such tasks may include reading for meaning, reading for details, drawing an inference, predicting, skimming, scanning, critical reasoning, journaling, and so forth (Ferris & Hedgcock, 2005). Malia(2006) researched the effectiveness of linking the writing course with social issues for ESL learners in college and the meaning of ESL learners’ background knowledge in writing. linking courses with social issues with writing courses can benefit ESL students and that teachers should take advantages of their ESL students’ writing ability between their first language and second language. Also, writing instructors should encourage students to improve arguments and treat grammar secondary.

4

Anker (2007) wrote a course book for writing including reading section. She said reading the essay will help the college students to develop several different abilities. By looking at how someone else states main ideas, provides supporting details, organizes ideas, and introduces and concludes an essay, they gain a better sense of how they write their own essay. Also, reading the essay help students choose writing topics because there are many divers topics : making money, investing, starting your own business, finding a job, raising a family, buying a car at the best price, protecting yourself from unfairness. The researchers are interested in improve writing skills. They look for the effective way to improve students’ writing skills. Evidently, reading and writing are related to each other, and so teachers suggest the ESL learners to read for writing. There are many different reading materials and reading activities which students choose and experience, but teachers do not suggest specific reading activities related writing. Thus, it needs to research which reading activities more effective in improve writing skills.

5