Bill Grabe outlined twelve ideas for future research in second language/ESL writing during his plenary talk at the Symposium on Second Language Writing today. His list included:

1. The importance of summary writing
2. The importance of exploring lexical, grammatical, and textual features contributing (or not contributing) to writing development
3. The need to move beyond the t-unit as a measure of writing complexity
4. The need to carry out more training studies with larger groups of students—the need to build a repository of controlled results across and within student groups, tasks, and topics
5. The need to build principled and controlled student writing corpora that multiple researchers can access for multiple issues and multiple studies (ICLE is not good enough)
6. The need to carry out (near) replications of highly-cited (and other) studies and have the replications published regularly
7. The need to study in more depth the linkages between vocabulary knowledge (both receptive and productive) and writing abilities
8. The need to study writing variability due to L1 language transfer factors, linguistic or textual
9. The need to expand research on writing assessment practices, particularly in classroom settings, and particularly with respect to “assessment for learning”
10. The need for controlled research on the impact of different media on writing, or using different media as part of writing development
11. The need to expand research on effective ways to carry out teacher training for more effective writing instruction (action research)
12. The need to examine relations between writing abilities (& development) and brain functioning

Admittedly empirically-focused. But thought-provoking. I’m interested, of course, in the implications of #10. What might such research look like? What kinds of questions should we be asking about the impact of different media on writing and writing development? So often administrators still ask whether or not computers are beneficial to students’ language learning and writing development. I’m just not convinced anymore that it’s interesting to ask whether or not the use of computers in the classroom is beneficial to teaching students to write. To me, that’s like asking 50 years ago whether or not it would be beneficial to students’ long-term writing to give them pencils. But what kinds of questions should we ask, especially in relation to L2 writers?

The longer I spend in the business of teaching writing (and especially in being a writing program administrator-WPA), the more I find myself challenged by a paradox that I can’t seem to solve. I believe that it’s vital that writing teachers and WPAs have knowledge and understanding of the linguistic diversity that they encounter in their classes. I think it’s important that writing teachers have a background in working with second language/ESL writers, for example. But I also find that the more I learn about linguistic diversity and the more I understand about my students’ complex linguistic and cultural heritages, the more I question the nature of what I do.

Writing programs are in the business of assimilation, so we’re caught in a dilemma. We want to honor (and if possible, preserve) students’ home languages and cultures, but our job is to teach them “Standard Academic English.” Sometimes I find myself coming back to Sharon Crowley’s argument about the nature of the first-year writing requirement, and how Jim Berlin pointed out the “gate-keeping” nature of the course. It’s a puzzling paradox, and I’m not sure I have a solution. Perhaps there isn’t a simple one. I don’t see the existence of the paradox as negative, though–maybe it’s just a step on the way toward developing a better approach to teaching writing and structuring writing programs. But I’d be interested to hear the thoughts of others.