Michelle's independent resources for ESL Students at Vancouver Community College

This is a Canadian ESL blog for Intermediate and Advanced Students who want to learn and improve their English. Each PAGE above contains thousands of free English lessons, tutorials and practice exercises to help you learn and improve your English grammar, reading, listening, pronunciation, speaking, writing and editing. Some of the resources are Canadian. Others are from around the world.

The resources on this Canadian blog are all free, and I spend a lot of my time working on it, so please consider becoming a SUPPORTER. I appreciate all the support I get. It is the fuel that keeps me going.

Membership is FREE.

NOTE: To leave a comment, click on the word "comment" at the bottom of the page. A comment page will pop up.


Sunday, November 6, 2011

Writing Test Anxiety

Picture this. You announce an in class writing test at the end of the week, and virtually every student in your Upper Advanced level class visibly shudders. One student jokingly asks,"Can you tell us the topic the day before?” You equally laughingly reply, "You know I can't do that. Then it wouldn't be a  real test ”   .

On test day, you arrive to a group of silent, frozen-faced students. Gone are the smiles and the hellos, as they stare at you awaiting to be told  what the dreaded writing topic will be. Will it be something they can write about, or is it going to be a topic that leaves them completely blank?
 
As the instructor, you think you have prepared them. The students have read several articles about the topic, worked on building topic related vocabulary, they've discussed aspects of the topic, and even retold stories. As far as you are concerned, given that you have given the tools they need,  they should be ready to write about it. 

Unfortunately, the one tool neither you, nor any other instructor seems to be able to give them is the kind of confidence it takes to pick up a pencil, brainstorm a topic they actually DO know something about and then begin writing with ease and a high comfort level .

Instead,  a dozen or more students look at the page blankly, forgetting all the vocabulary they've  acquired, along with most of the ideas they have read and discussed. Panic and anxiety have brought them to a place in which they find themselves writing, wordy and often redundant sentences with some content, but a lot of basic level errors and minimal vocabulary. Many of the sentences are either short, choppy, and poorly connected, or long, awkward and unwieldy, with the wrong connectors and a drastic need for more punctuation. 

In some cases, a burning desire to sound like the well educated professional accountants, dentists and engineers they were in their former lives, leads these students down the forbidden path of thinking in their own language. Perhaps if they think out  what they want to say in Chinese, Russian or Spanish, and just put it into English, they will communicate what they really want to say. Unfortunately, the result is more like English word soup than elegantly phrased English prose.  
The final result is frustration for both instructor and students. The instructor is frustrated  because she had much higher expectations, and didn't quite understand the underlying panic producing the final writing product. The students are frustrated because they had hoped their newly acquired vocabulary would not desert them once again. They had also prayed that finally, they would be able to convey their ideas using more details, and a relatively error free sophisticated sentence structure.  

So here's the question. How do we make our highly educated adult ESL students comfortable enough to be able to write under pressure without having full blown panic attacks that produce writing that does not reflect their true abilities. 
  • Do we have students do breathing exercises before writing tests? 
  • Do we have them perform physical exercises that might help reduce anxiety?
  • Do we brainstorm vocabulary related to the topic on the board? 
  • Do we put appropriate sentence structure words and transitions up on the board to help them remember complexityor is all of this providing too much help in a test situation?
 Should we be actively helping these students who now live and work in our country to succeed by helping therm to deal with their anxiety, or should we just expect them to  learn  to deal with their anxiety on their own, and get on with the job of writing under pressure just as native speakers do 
.
Please be the first to comment on this question.

2 comments:

  1. Among the communication skills, Writing is the most difficult. No wonder because people are so lazy to construct sentences to develop different types of essays. Templates are always their savior in writing from informal to formal letters. It takes a pile of vocabulary words to strengthen one’s Writing and this could be achieved from reading a lot. It is not yet too late to practice writing: writing a diary daily will help you construct your sentences, check tenses and eventually if it gets mechanical, writing can be easier. This https://www.ieltspodcast.com/ielts-vocabulary/lexical-resource/ will explain more on how Writing can be of help. Enjoy!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Its true that Secure English Language Tests(SELTs)are very popular and useful when one intends to apply for a citizenship.But on the other hand what makes some tests different from this is the speaking and listening ability rather than writing.

    B1 Speaking and Listening

    ReplyDelete

If you do not have a web site, or a Google account, click on Name/URL and simply leave your name. You do NOT need to be a member to leave a comment.