Idiom
Idiom Archive (Winter 2002):
Theme: Meeting Individual Needs

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Should We Invite Students to Write in L1?
by Peter Elbow
Not so long ago I became an advocate of using home dialects of English (e.g., AAVE, Caribbean Creole, and Hawai’ian Creole English) in writing classrooms where most or all final drafts need to be in the standard variety of edited written English (see my articles “Mother Tongue” and “Vernacular Englishes”). Now I am engaged in trying to explore whether it might also make sense to invite ESL/EFL students sometimes to write in their home languages or mother tongues.
I started down this path when I was teaching at the University of Hawaii and reflecting on my own writing history. The only way I had been able to get over a writing block in graduate school was by eventually teaching myself to write in my own oral variety of English—a dialect that of course differs from standardized edited written English. I had to learn to use freewriting. At first, freewriting felt like writing “wrong”—and indeed, by most standards, freewriting is wrong for writing. Eventually, the penny dropped: If I was stymied when I tried to “write right”—to the degree that I had to quit graduate school as a failure before being kicked out—maybe others are stymied too. If I can’t write successfully unless I “write wrong,” why shouldn’t others be allowed to write wrong too—even if their home language is further from standardized English than mine?
As I researched and wrote about the issue of writing in nondominant varieties of English, I came across a few teachers and researchers who have in fact explored whether ESL/EFL students might benefit from some writing in L1. (See Friedlander for a review; see also Auerbach; Kobayashi and Rinnert; Woodall.) Of course the objections to writing in L1 are obvious: if we want students to master L2, then they should use L2 all the time. But I persisted in my interest. How can students get to their best thinking and their strongest voice unless they use the language that is closest to them? And I’d already learned that people can usefully start a writing task in one language and end up with a final draft in another.
This past summer, I convened a week-long symposium at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) to explore all these issues. Our big step forward was methodological and came early. We figured out that the question is not so much whether or not to invite students to write in L1 when they need end up with a text in L2; rather, the question is when and under what conditions it might make sense to try this out. Because of our own writing and teaching experiences, it was clear that it made sense in at least a few situations. So in our seminar, we tried to work out which variables or conditions are most important to think about in deciding whether to invite L1. We’ve written a paper exploring each of these variables or conditions in turn (Bean et al., accepted for publication in the journal Composition Studies). I am drawing on our paper for a kind of thumbnail summary here—condensed, of course, through my own lens.
(1) What is the goal? If fluency is the only goal, students should never compose in L1. But if, on some occasions, a teacher wants to help students capture their richest thinking and strongest voice for an essay or story—even or especially when that writing is to be revised into English—it can make sense to invite them to start off in L1. Of course, freewriting in L2 is excellent practice for developing fluency in L2; nevertheless, it’s hard to discover new thoughts and ideas without freewriting in a mother tongue.
(2) What are the stakes? For low-stakes writing, where the only purpose is to explore one’s thinking or one’s responses to a reading or to collect thoughts for a class discussion (writing that is often entirely private), then writing in L1 makes more sense than it does for a high-stakes-final, revised, public product.
(3) What is the genre? Writing in a home language can make more sense for pieces that convey personal experience: genres like memoir, fiction, or poetry. L1 writing is harder to justify for academic or formal writing. And yet, most writing teachers are accustomed to inviting students to freewrite when beginning pieces of academic writing—and freewriting is characteristically an oral-based “home language” (at least it is for writers who have learned to exploit it).
(4) What is the audience? L1 makes obvious sense for pieces aimed at readers of that language—perhaps family members, friends, or even a local employer. Teachers sometimes invite students to write this kind of nonacademic piece in L1 in order to increase their sense, ownership and investment in writing.
(5) What are the politics of stigmatization? Do students feel their identity—or even their home language—is threatened by English? If so, students will probably be able to think and write better if teachers honor their language by inviting them sometimes to write in it.
(6) Are students literate in L1? It’s easier to justify writing in L1 if the answer is yes. But I cannot help adding this thought: If students are not literate at all—if they have not written either in L1 or English (which is true of some ESL students)—they face a double hurdle when they try to write in English—an unfamiliar language and an unfamiliar medium. Students can get comfortable writing in a language “by ear,” even when they are not literate in it. There is ample evidence of this in countless U.S. first-grade classrooms, where students write comfortably and productively with virtually no knowledge of spelling.
(7) I’ll lump three similar questions together:
—Is the teacher able to help students understand larger political and cultural issues of language and discourse?
—Is there good trust between students and teacher?
—Does the teacher even know the L1 in question?
In every case, L1 writing makes most sense if the answer is yes. However, I don’t believe that “no” answers rule out the possibility of careful experiments with L1.
(8) Who decides whether the student might try L1? I suspect that few readers would ever want to force or even pressure students into L1; thus, I stress the word “invite,” not “assign” or “require.” But if choice is important, it must be acknowledged that in many ESL/EFL classrooms, students now lack choice. L1 tends to be experienced as forbidden.
(9) I’ll explore just a bit more fully the variable that is probably most important for ESL/EFL teachers: What is the process by which students move from exploratory writing or early drafts in L1 to revised or final versions in English? Do they translate or do they rewrite/revise without even looking at the L1 writing?
There are obvious and frequently noted problems when students simply try to translate L1 writing into L2. They naturally go word by word and the L1 text leads them to use many false cognates and many syntactical constructions that are awkward, unidiomatic, or wrong for English.
Yet we can bypass many of the problems of translation if we get students to revise or rewrite instead. For example, I’ve experimented with getting students to put their L1 exploratory drafting out of sight and to rewrite or revise without consulting it. This process brings a double benefit. By composing in L1, they get more words, more thoughts, more subtle distinctions, more voice on paper, and more comfort and pleasure in writing. Then by putting this writing aside and recomposing in English, they get practice in composing in L2. Of course they are frustrated at trying to say things in L2 that they are not skilled enough to say easily (and sometimes, things that L2 does not easily express); yet this very situation impels them to push the boundaries of what they normally write or say in L2.
This method of moving from L1 to L2 illustrates how misleading it is to fall into yes/no either/or debates: e.g., “Should students compose in L1 or L2?” Students can compose in both languages—even while working on the same essay. Their L1 exploratory writing will drive them to more complex composing in L2. There’s yet another benefit to this rich composing process: it affords students a good opportunity to reflect on the contrasting resources of each language—and the discourse or culture it tends to carry.
Finally, the big question: how useful will it prove to invite ESL/EFL students to compose sometimes in L1? That’s the question that drives me to write this essay. We know very little about this mysterious but important process. There’s very little published data to draw on. Students and writers compose in L1 all the time—often surreptitiously. What will happen when they are invited to do it under good conditions and with the best help we can give? I invite you please to experiment in various ways with the use of L1 in your classrooms (and outside). The authors of the collaborative paper I am drawing on here will be meeting again this summer to continue our explorations. I would love to hear from you about the results of any experimentation you engage in.

References
Auerbach, E. R. (1993). Reexamining English only in the ESL classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 27(1), 9-32.
Bean, J., Cucchiara, M., Eddy, R., Elbow, P., Grego, R., Kutz, E., et al. (in press) Should we invite students to write in home languages? Complicating the yes/ no debate. Composition Studies.
Elbow, P. (1999). Inviting the mother tongue: Beyond “mistakes,” “bad En- glish,” and “wrong language.” Journal of Advanced Composition 19(2) (1999): 359-88. Reprinted in Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing. NY: Oxford University Press, (2000).
Elbow, P. (2002). Vernacular Englishes in the writing classroom: Probing the cul- ture of literacy. In Schroeder, C., Bizzell, P., & Fox, H. (Eds.), ALT DIS: Alternative discourses and the academy. (pp.126- 38). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Friedlander, A. (1990). Composing in En- glish: Effects of a First Language on Writing in English as a Second Language. In Kroll, B. (Ed.), Second language writing: Research insights for the class- room (pp. 109-125). NY: Cambridge University Press.
Kobayashi, H. & Rinnert, C. (1992). Effects of first language on second language writing: Translation versus direct com- position. Language Learning 42(2), 183-215.
Woodall, B. R. (2002). Language switching: using the first language while writing in a second language. Journal of Second Language Writing 11(1), 7-28.

Peter Elbow is emeritus professor of English at UMass Amherst. He directed the writing program there, and earlier at SUNY Stony Brook. He also taught at M.I.T., Franconia College, and Evergreen State College. Besides his earlier books about writing (Writing Without Teachers,1973; Writing With Power, 1981), he has a book about Chaucer, a book about teaching and learning (Embracing Contraries, 1986), and a book about the profession (What Is English?, 1990). With Pat Belanoff, he wrote a textbook, A Community of Writers. His recent book, Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing, was given the James Britton Award by the Conference on English Education. In 2001, NCTE gave him the James Squire Award for his “lasting intellectual contribution.” He has served on MLA’s Executive Council and NCTE’s Executive Committee. <elbow@english.umass.edu>
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