Conditions for liberal arts and science courses contained composing answering homework questions and research reports/essay tests for our chosen observed ESL students mentioned in our previous article.

Betsy was enthused about writing assignments for her sociology class. Assignment issues were chosen by the pupils, and they were well chosen due to their great ESL instruction. Issues were high interest, for example career opportunities, pay and gain structures. The teacher gave guidelines and was more worried with the conveying of ideas than with punctuation and grammar.

Bozena was also much more comfortable with and inspired by writing strategies used in liberal arts and science courses, as she showed interest in them even while studying at her Hackensack English school. One reason for this was the focus of writing was one of the more powerful communication of thoughts. The reply was wrong, if the professor couldn’t comprehend the significance. Thus, Bozena spent less time searching over spelling and grammar, and much more time on ensuring her thoughts were clearly conveyed. On written tests or in class exercises there was no time to fix grammar and spelling. Betsy found the faculty developmental reading class powerful because her professor understood her writing despite surface errors. Bozena concluded that clear context was the secret to clear communication.

An instructor of the liberal arts class showed that Bozena’s writing was scrupulous, but revealed her misery and had little content. This educator noted that the paper which Bozena composed in haste had interesting content but ample surface errors. The teacher believed that the papers Bozena committed to were perfect grammatically, but lacked content. This educator was searching for content, which is something only certain English schools in Las Vegas cover. Neither Betsy nor Bozena had adequate writing skills to finish assignments with both complex content and correct grammar.

When writing research papers participants reported issues with sequencing, issue choices, and clarity of expression. Betsy thought that sequencing was challenging because there were so many options. Expressing studied information in her own words was also challenging. Bozena agreed that if the issue offered no natural order, for example with an event or narration, that sequencing could be hard.

Teacher Response

The most common educator answer was grading. One educator gave a grade for the work plus content for mechanics. These levels were neither objective nor consistent. Pupils were confused about why the teacher asked them to choose a subject and then rated this inclination. Nebulous answers such as “really great!”, “MMMMMMM”, and “fine, but redo,” confused rather than instructed.

Occasionally the teacher answered that a paper was too long.

The teacher generally wrote within the correction, indicating the existence of an error without indicating the kind of error committed. There was no uniformity in error correction strategy between classes. One educator usually applied the editor’s notations, another usually gave the right response. Corrections were generally grammatical but often altered the pupil’s intended meaning. Thus, writing requirements in college can often be confusing, especially so to ESL students. Instructors should do better to properly convey what they want from their students in writing courses.