Free Writing for ESL Students

There certainly is a point about encouraging free writing. I think this strategy will work very efficiently with young and middle-grade level children. I remember all those years while I was in elementary school; I was so frustrated about writing class. “What to write?” is always a number one question. The nightmare was not over until I had had four-years of training in language and literature in college. I saw such struggling going on with schoolchildren in China, and schoolchildren in New York schools.

The point is to keep the students motivated to write. Only when they are interested in telling things about themselves and things they like to do, will they be highly motivated to write. In this sense, free writing is one of the best approaches.

The second point is that free writing permits the flow of the writer’s mind, whether the writer be a native English speaker or not. The habit of compulsive and premature editing hinders that flow. I see that our native English-speaking classmates have had such experience. For many years, I have often suffered struggling to produce academic papers. It is my dream to be able to write. So more than once I told my husband that the writing was too painful for me; if I had to do this for the rest of life, this would kill me; I did not see how someone could have fun writing. Then, my husband would comfort me, “when you really write what you want to write, it will never be as hard and boring like this. For god sake, I am sick of editing your papers. Too boring!” and indeed, he usually enjoys reading my free writing, which happens quite rarely, because I was too busy, and probably the real reason was because I was afraid, as a non-native English speaker, of writing incorrect English.

Recently, I witnessed the same apprehension at an ESL class at a primary school in Brooklyn during my observation. The students were asked to write freely about themselves and the paper would be used for the next grade’s teacher as a means of assessing their language levels. Students had struggled for over half of the class and barely had written any sentences. Then, the ESL teacher told the students to write in their native Chinese if they did not know certain words in English. This saved the whole class. Quickly, they all started to write fluidly.

Finally, maybe free writing should not be evaluated formally, but the writing should be looked at by the teachers and corrected grammatically. Otherwise, what is the purpose of asking the students to write freely?