Native-Language Transfer

 

Certain elements of a student's native language (L1) may transfer into their English writing. This transfer (or influence) can be positive (helpful) or negative (not helpful).

 

Example of positive transfer:

• Spanish creates many plural nouns by adding [s]. This transfers directly and helpfully to the way English creates regular plural nouns.and explains why you will not see a pattern of errors with noun plurals among Spanish-spekaing inernational students.

 

Example of negative transfer:

• Chinese uses no articles. This creates an unhelpful influence for students whose native language is Chinese, and is why you will often find Chinese international students leaving out articles in their English writing, even those at a high level of overall English proficiency.

 

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Comprehensible Input

 

Non-native speakers are greatly helped by receiving input (instructions, directions, assignments) more than once, and in multiple formats.

 

• Have a visual representation of everything you explain orally.

• Use PowerPoints and post them to your online course site.

• Use models to demonstrate concepts such as paragraph structure, thesis statement, use of transition words and phrases.

• Find ways for students to physically manipulate text, such as having sentences on strips of paper to assemble into a paragraph.

 

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Reading Comprehension

 

International students may need more time and more scaffolding to understand course readings. If a writing assignment such as a summary response essay shows major problems, the issue may lie more with reading comprehension than with writing issues.

 

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Lexical Choice in Writing

 

International students may need your assistance in making appropriate lexical choices. Many language learners suffer from the ‘tyranny of the thesaurus’: they take a word they know and exchange it for a more ‘academic-sounding’ word from the thesaurus.

 

Example: A Saudi student replaced brown and grey in her first-draft description of proper business attire with sepia and leaden in a later draft.

 

• Help students to know that clear and straightforward language is desirable in academic writing.

 

Some international students may use a native-language-to-English translator app that offers questionable choices.

 

Example: In a summary response essay about arranged marriage, a Chinese student wrote:

“Marriages are not similar as amativeness. People can quit from amativeness without any worries.”

 

• Encourage students to forego native-language translation and instead to use English-English dictrionaries designed for English langage learners such as the Longman Dictionary of Comtemporary English online. 

 

International students may be less likely to catch incorrect suggestions from ‘spell-check’ or autocorrect resources. They sometimes type a word they way it sounds to them and choose the resulting suggestion, even though it is not the word they intended.

 

Example: In an essay about women in combat, a student wrote: “Many women surpass […] sacrificed their life to serve equally and briefly as men do.” It seems that ‘briefly’ may have been an autocorrect suggestion for the student’s phonetic spelling of ‘bravely.’

 

• Help international students to understand how spell-check and auto-correct can lead them astray. Encourage them to read their writing aloud and to take it to a writing resource lab or university writing center if available.

 

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Rhetorical Differences

 

Different languages have different approaches to structure and narrative. A Chinese student who has difficulty stating his/her opinion and bring in contrasting voices is likely having trouble with the whole concept of this rhetorical approach as much as with the specific writing task. China is a collectivist society where admired rhetoric is that which uses generalizations, appeals to authority, and speaks for 'everyone.' An Arabic student whose writing seems repetitive and redundant is tranferring an honored 'circular' rhetorical style into his/her English writing.

 

In addition, reflective writing - which many domestic incoming freshmen are already familiar with - may be foreign to international students. They may have not experienced this type of writing and have difficulty understanding the purpose initially.

 

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Education Cultural Background

 

Common in-class activities such as group work and peer feedback on writing may be completely new, and therefore uncomfortable and intimidating, to international students. Many of these students come from cultures where individual work, rote memorization, and teacher-centered classrooms are the norm. For the teacher to hand over control to groups of students is a strange and foreign concept to many international students.

 

The concept of plagiarism varies in different educational cultures as well. Our view in the U.S. tends to be stricter than some international students have been brought up with, so they may exhibit unintentional instances of plagiarism because their expectation is to 'copy the master' or because they do not have the lexical resources to paraphrase effectively.

 

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Individual Differences

 

Remember that international students will express individual differences in learning style. While there are certain patterns that have been identified and studied (as described above), avoid assuming that a student will have certain difficulties in writing because s/he is from a certain cultual or language background.