Awkward Phrasing in Advanced EFL Writing, por Susana B. Tuero y Marina Selesán

Tuero, Susana is a full-time professor at the Departmento de Lenguas Modernas, and at the Facultad de Ciencias Agrarias, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. She holds a Master’s Degree in TESOL, and a Ph. D in English -Applied Linguistics from Michigan State University, USA. Her areas of interest are testing, vocabulary, and writing in EFL.

Research findings in the late 1970s, changed our perception of the writing process. The product-based approach that viewed writing as a linear process was abandoned as writing was considered a cognitive-based process that was recursive in nature. In this paradigm, writing is perceived as a process in which the writers moves back and forth throughout a series of stages: thinking about the topic, organizing ideas, writing, revising, and re-writing.
Even though it is claimed that it is absolutely necessary to revise, inexperienced writers are very reluctant to revise their own writing. They find it hard to understand that revision is an essential part of good writing. Professional writers go through several drafts to achieve the results they want. Good writers are in fact re-writers.
In EFL writing classes, feedback on the various drafts is what helps students move through the process, and improve their writing skills. A review of the literature reveals three major areas of feedback as revision: the teacher, other learners, and the student him/herself (Keh, 1989). Researchers and composition instructors agree that teacher feedback is highly effective in the process of constructing a text.
Most writing teachers use symbols and abbreviations to indicate the sections in the student’s text that call for improvement; for example, ‘gram.’ written on the margin suggests that a syntactic structure must be corrected/improved; ‘not relev,’ helps students understand that the detail(s) provided may not be connected to what is being discussed; and ‘sp’ is used to indicate that there is a spelling error. One comment that student writers find particularly puzzling, and do not know what they should do, is the notation awkward. The problem of awkward phrasing is not easy to define, its characteristics are difficult to define, and its solution hard to achieve.
The purpose of this presentation is to discuss the common features of awkward prose, to present a working definition, and to suggest steps that writing teachers can follow to help their students eliminate awkward phrasing from their writing. A set of awkward sentences will be presented to the audience and possible solutions discussed.