More and more ESL (English as a Second Language) students come to the United States for their college education every year. "Researchers estimate that by the year 2000, ESL students will make up more than 25% of the college student population; colleges in some large cities have already reached this percentage" (Belanoff et.al. 211). It is critical that ESL teachers provide them with the kind of language skills they need to be successful in college and their future career. Marianne Celce-Murica has said:

There are currently two extreme positions in ESL concerning the teaching of English grammar. At one extreme, the proponents of audio-lingualism (Lado, 1964) and the methodologists such as Gattegno (1972, 1976) argue that we must make grammar the core of our language instruction and that we must correct all student errors. At the other extreme, methodologists such as Krashen and Terrell (1983) tell us not to teach grammar explicitly and not to correct any learner errors (Celce-Murica 4).

The chart shows how much grammar should be taught at each level and age. According to the chart, ESL college students belong to the category of adults with formal English instruction, and their purpose is to enter professional careers after graduation. Whether each ESL student sees himself in this way or not, all ESL students applying to colleges in the United States have to have a TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) score of over 500 in order to be accepted; some colleges demand a 550 minimum. (TOEFL is a kind of English proficiency test including listening and reading comprehension and a short composition on a given topic). Such a score on TOEFL typically indicates that ESL students have learned English school grammar in their home countries. However, school grammar itself is far from enough to enable them to efficiently communicate both in written and spoken English in America. (I will explain the relationship between grammar and communication later on). Generally speaking, this group of ESL students puts great value on education and their opportunity to study in the U.S.

Some people argue that ESL college students use English primarily for writing academic papers; teaching traditional grammar does not help their writing, so why should we bother to do that. Jean Sanborn tells us her personal experience in "Grammar: Good Wine Before Its Time" :

I learned grammar then the way I 'learned' geometry, as a set of rules to be applied to given situations as assigned. In neither grammar nor geometry did I have the foggiest notion where the rules came from or how they worked. . . If grammar is never taught in the schools, I think little will be lost as long as students are using language widely and constantly (Sanborn 75).

While I agree that learning rigid rules without applying them to context is not very helpful, Sanborn throws the baby out with the bath water. There IS something wrong with the way we teach grammar. A Short History of Writing Instruction edited by James Murphy states that our teaching methods are handed down from the Greeks and Romans. To elaborate Murphy's notion, although we have made some changes over the years, the basic teaching methods remain unchanged. In ancient Greece and Rome, grammar and language instruction were the core of education and ordinary people did not have access to education. Literary people purposely wrote the language in a way to show that they were more elite and smarter than common people. Today most people have access to higher education and the purpose of writing is communication, for making oneself understood. It is certain that just learning rigid rules will not help. The methods used in Roman schools will not work effectively for schools in the 1990s. We have to have a better way to teach grammar to meet today's communication needs.

When we talk about teaching ESL college students, we have to realize that the way adults learn a second language is quite different from the way we learn our native language while we are growing up, although both cases belong to one of Celce-Murica's language learning categories. Native language can serve both as a bridge and a block in foreign language learning. Robert Bley-Vroman maintains in "The Fundamental Character of Foreign Language Learning":

Adult foreign language learners are equipped with a general Universal Grammar. They construct a kind of surrogate for Universal Grammar from knowledge of the native language. The native language must be sifted: that which is likely to be universal must be separated from that which is accidental property of the native language. (27)

The basic purpose of learning a language is to be both communicative and grammatical in using the language. The Grammar 4 is the rules of common school grammar, literally the grammar used in the schools.

Grammar 5 is stylistic grammar, defined as grammatical terms used in the interest of teaching prose style. (Hartwell 166-178).Once we are clear about the definitions of grammar, we will be in a much better position to engage in an argument for what kinds of grammar should be taught to ESL students. The five kinds of grammar above may be applied to different learners and purposes.

Some people say that since we teach grammar to native speakers, we should also teach ESL students in the same way; we do not have to put them in different categories. I do not agree. Native English speakers and ESL students make very different mistakes. The following examples are mistakes made by a native English speaker and a Chinese ESL student:

Native English speaker

"I should of gone with you." "I believe it is important for young people getting out of high school today attend college" (Shaughnessy 100).

"There was really no such record like mine before." (from my students' homework)

The following example will present a difference between native English speakers and ESL students in mastering English grammar. When Hartwell asks a group of native English speakers to arrange the adjectives (French, the young, four) in a natural order, they show productive control over the rule they denied knowing. Hartwell says:

I have never seen a native speaker of English who did not immediately produce the natural order, 'the four young French girls.' The rule is that in English the order of adjectives is first, number, second, age, and third, nationality. Native speakers can create analogous phrases using the rule; and the drive for meaning is so great that they will create sense out of violations of the rules for emphasis: 'I want to talk to the French four young girls' (Hartwell 167).

Grammar 3 is linguistic etiquette. According to Hartwell, it is not really grammar, but usage. Here is a conversation between an American and an ESL student:

American -- "May I close the door?"

ESL student -- "I'd like you to close half of it."

American -- (laughs) "I'll close the whole door half way."

I used to tell my students: this is not English; it is Chinglish, meaning Chinese English: the words are in English; but the logic is in Chinese. Lacking knowledge of English etiquette, ESL students are sometimes hampered in their communication. In order to make ESL students both grammatically and communicatively competent (the bigger circle (CC)), we should teach them grammar 3.

Grammar 5 is stylistic grammar, grammatical terms used in the interest of teaching prose style. The purpose of our writing class for ESL students is to teach them how to write. In American colleges, no one can survive without being able to write a standard academic paper. ESL students need to learn some style and format in order to be accepted by the academic world. Stylistic grammar enables them to control the language by manipulating it in meaningful contexts. So, if we combine grammars 1, 3, and 5, they should fit into the bigger circle (CC) of the following diagram.

The diagram implies that some areas of linguistic competence are essentially irrelevant to communicative competence, but that, in general, linguistic competence is a part of communicative competence. This modified part-whole relationship implies, in turn, that teaching comprehensively for linguistic competence will necessarily leave a large area of communicative competence untouched, whereas teaching equally comprehensively for communicative competence will necessarily cater for all but a small part of linguistic competence. (Allwright 168)I equate linguistic competence with grammatical competence for ESL college students. (I will explain grammatical competence later). I look at the diagram in this way: grammatical competence falls entirely within the area of linguistic competence that falls within communicative competence. The place where the two circles overlap is the place which covers basic language skills for both communicative and grammatical competence and is the place our writing class should focus for ESL students. The area where LC stands by itself is the branch of linguistic science, which, I do not think ESL students should deal with -- at least not at the beginning; the area where CC stands by itself contains the unwritten rules of social convention in communication and some usage where grammar rules do not lend themselves. The goal of an ESL writing class is to teach ESL students to communicate with others; therefore, the class should begin with the bigger circle (CC), where both communicative and grammatical competence are emphasized. I conclude that grammar should be taught to ESL students as an important part of their language acquisition since language competence will be a major determinant in their future career.

Grammar 1 is the set of formal patterns in which the words of a language are arranged in order to convey larger meanings. (the grammar in the natives' heads)

Grammar 2 is the branch of linguistic science which is concerned with the description, analysis, and formulation of formal language patterns.

Grammar 3 is linguistic etiquette. The word in this sense is often coupled with a derogatory adjective: we say that the expression" he ain't here" is bad grammar. (it is actually usage)

I suggest ESL students should not have to deal with grammar 2 at the beginning because grammar 2 is Linguistic science - learning about language instead of learning to use the language. Most ESL college students are not ready to cope with it yet (the LC part that stands by itself). I also suggest strongly that we do not teach ESL college students grammar 4 -- common school grammar, because most of them have already become tired of learning school grammar in their home country. Teaching grammar 4 will only diminish their interest in learning to write.

In conclusion, teaching Grammar 1, 3, and 5 will help ESL college students improve their writing abilities in English and express themselves clearly, effectively, and vigorously.

How to Integrate Grammar With Writing Instruction

Once we decide grammar should be taught and what kind of grammar should be taught to ESL students, we are faced with the issue of how to integrate grammar with writing instruction. As Jan Frodesen points out in "Grammar in Writing":
Developments in composition theory and research during the past few decades have certainly contributed to our understanding of writing processes and have helped us to design and implement more effective composition programs and teaching materials. The paradigm shift in composition theory from a focus on writing products to that of writing processes has also resulted in confusion about the role of grammar in ESL writing instruction (264).
The role of grammar is confusing because grammar rules simply guide students' writing without necessarily improving their written product. On the one hand, ESL teachers want to teach ESL students how to write; on the other hand, ESL teachers are aware that they cannot simply teach grammatical rules. The special relationship between grammar and writing makes the teaching of writing to ESL students more challenging. The following research is shown in "Grammar in Writing":
A study by McGirt (1984) showed a statistically significant difference between holistic ratings of ESL essays with morphosyntactic and mechanical errors intact and ratings of the same essays in which errors had been corrected; in contrast, the difference in ratings for a control group of native English speaker essays with and without errors was not significant (Frodesen 264).
The study shows that ESL writers' errors negatively affect assessments of overall writing quality. The essays are rated in terms of how well ideas are communicated. If we look at the example of mistakes made by the ESL student mentioned above, ("I 'd like you to close half of the door"), we are likely to accept what McGirt's study has shown. Because of the ESL students' special situation and need I suggest that we should integrate grammar with our writing instruction in our ESL college students' writing classes. There are four steps to be taken in sequence to help ESL students start learning how to write standard essays and research papers in English.

I. Reading and analyzing texts:

ESL students come from many different countries with different levels of English competence; we cannot expect them to write standard academic papers from day one. Some people think that free writing is a good way to get started, but ESL students feel that they have much to say about a certain topic in their native language while they only have a few sentences to say about the same topic in English. Some of them may have written a couple of letters in English; others may have translated some information they are interested in from English into their native language; but few have been required to write an academic paper in English. Some of the students' TOFEL scores are over 600, (considered to be high proficiency in English) yet they still cannot write properly and clearly in English.

At the beginning stage of the writing class, teachers should purposely select some reading material that illustrates some of the main features of the English language. For example: texts containing restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses; texts containing the usage of definite or indefinite articles; texts containing different tenses, etc. ( Frodesen 267). Through reading and analyzing the texts, students will become more conscious of how and why the writers write the way they do. In different types of text-analysis exercises, students can develop greater understanding of how grammar contributes to communication by identifying and explaining the meanings or functions of grammatical structure in discourse contexts. One important thing the ESL teachers have to bear in mind is that the material chosen must not only show grammatical functions, but also be interesting to students. Over a period of time, the reading and text-analysis will help students build up their ability to express themselves in English. If necessary, one or two exercises in modeling may help students get started writing in English.

II. Guided writing:

Although the time spent at the outset reading, doing text analysis, and modeling is a necessary investment, the object of any writing class is to have students work on their writing; the only way to learn to write is to write. I do not believe that anyone has become a good writer just by reading books like The Power of Writing, College Writing, How to Write, etc. Learning to write is like learning to drive a car: both demand practice. Just as you will not be able to learn to drive a car until you sit behind the wheel to practice, no matter how well you have scored on the written test, writing skill only comes with writing. So, after some reading exercises, teachers should let students start to write -- at first, some short paragraphs or papers. The topics students write about must be carefully designed, sequenced, and structured so that the teacher knows exactly what the learning goal of each assignment is and so that students gain something specific by working on it (Frodesen 268). There are many factors to consider in selecting topics for student writing. Teachers can decide what to select according to the needs and goals of a particular class or give students a choice of topics so they can write about something they are familiar with from their experience. Even an excellent writer without specific knowledge will not write good instructions on how to put the parts of a machine together.

Once the topic is chosen, teachers should hold group or class discussion before ESL students actually engage in writing. The discussion can help students develop their ideas. Sometimes I find ESL students have excellent ideas, but the ideas are blocked from their writing because the students are still struggling between thinking in English and thinking in their native language. The ideas are incubating, the ESL student is mulling them over in his mind but is not yet ready to articulate them. It is the time when reading texts, group or class discussion, and teacher's suggestions can be really helpful. We should use a policy of from part to whole and back to part and from students to teacher and back to students again. This diagram illustrates the process:

words --> sentences --> paper (global revision) --> --> paragraphs --> sentences --> words

students --> teacher --> students --> teacher -->students

(Punctuation is included in sentences and spelling is included in words.)

After the discussions have been held, the students begin to write. After students write a first draft, one or two grammar lessons can be developed and inserted to deal with the errors students made in their initial writing. This way of learning grammar is more effective than picking up a handbook and starting from "Parts of Speech." Or better yet, have students teach a grammar section dealing with one of the recurring errors in their own papers to a small group or the whole class. (They have to study the section in the handbook relevant to their errors and try to become an expert on the problem.) The benefits of letting students teach are enormous: the grammar study is well-targeted; the student's role changes from being passive to being active; through teaching, they gain insight into the problems instead of only knowing how to use a certain grammatical rule; the activity will give students better ability to manipulate the language in their own writing; and they will acquire more confidence to master other problems (Vieta 94-96).

I use guided writing as the second step so that ESL students can lay a good foundation for their writing. Once students become more comfortable writing in English with more grammatical competence (I do not mean they are perfect), we should quickly move on because our goal is to teach them how to write, not simply to teach grammar. The purpose of teaching grammar is to make them more competent in their writing and to teach them how to approach the language. Grammar only serves as a bridge to reach our goal.

III. Teacher's response:

Teachers' responses are very important, especially for the first paper. I suggest teachers not put a grade on the paper until ESL students learn how to revise. Teachers' responses now should focus on the general organization of the paper since grammatical errors have been addressed by teachers and students working together in the process of the writing. Teachers' responses should view the paper as a whole and ask students whether they have expressed what they wanted to say. The responses should be concise and specific, not like a rubber stamp. For example, one teacher's comment on a student paper is "Think more about your readers." Another is "Wordy - be precise." Responses like these can be put on any paper; students will not get the kind of help they needed by these kinds of comments. The responses should be in accordance with what the students have read and the kinds of text analysis they have done. "The challenge we face as teachers is to develop comments which will provide an inherent reason for students to revise; it is a sense of revision as discovery" (Sommers 148). For example, a student writes a paper on "The American Indians"; the teacher could write the comment, "I am very interested in your topic and would like you to tell me more about the American Indians". A comment like this will make the reason to revise inherent and encourage the student to do more research. Teachers' positive responses at this time can be a useful reinforcement for students' writing. Learning to write takes time and teachers cannot expect students to become good writers overnight or even over a semester. Teachers should focus on how much progress the students have made over a period of time.

The next step in the writing process is to teach students how to revise.

IV. Global revision

Teaching ESL students revising skills is very important so that they are able to step back from their own writing and look at it from a reader's point of view.

Linda Flower states: "Writer-Based prose is a verbal expression written by a writer to himself and for himself." She goes on to say that we should move "the focus of how did I go about my research or reading of the assignment and what did I see" to a focus on "What significant conclusion can be drawn and why" (37). Revision can help students read their own writing as if they were reading someone else's writing.

1. Read the paper aloud:

In the process of writing a paper, the writer is always the first reader. Reading the paper aloud at the beginning can help them hear whether the paper is well organized and states what they wanted to say, and may help them find some grammatical errors. 2. Let a native speaker read the paper:

Native speakers will be very quick to find whether ESL students have expressed themselves in idiomatic English and whether they have written in English words but in their native language's logic. Very often native speakers will say to ESL students: "Yes, I understand what you mean, but it sounds awkward because we do not say it in the way you do." Asking ESL students to have their papers read by a native English speaker is also an effective way to get them to intermingle with American people instead of hanging on to their own native language communities; this intermingling will also accelerate their acquisition of English.

3. Revise paragraphs:

Once ESL writers are satisfied with the overall organization of the paper, they can go on to revising paragraphs. Three source books that are widely used to develop writers' revision skills are Revising Prose by Richard A. Lanham, Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity & Grace by Joseph M. Williams, and The Right Handbook: Grammar and Usage in Context by Pat Belanoff, Betsy Rorschach, and Mia Oberlink. I found The Right Handbook that focuses on global revision more useful and appropriate for my exploration of the teaching of writing to ESL students; the former two focus only on style.

Revising Prose, a style manual, concentrates on providing ways to get rid of "The Official Style"--which "builds its sentences on a form of the verb `to be' plus strings of prepositional phrases fore and aft" (Lanham 15). ESL students, almost all beginning writers, do not have "The Official Style" in their writing. They may make similar mistakes, but these mistakes are not their major problem and so not of paramount concern. Although this book is not suitable for ESL students, one of the methods put forth in the book can be utilized by ESL students: ask the question, "Who is kicking who?" to find the basic structure of a sentence. This approach can help ESL students to find the subject, verb, and object of a sentence so as to avoid sentence fragments.

Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity & Grace is not as dogmatic as Revising Prose, presenting rules both absolute and optional with a touch of creativity. I would not choose it for ESL students, although most can use lesson two: "Correctness" and lesson nine: "Punctuation" as a reference; these two lessons effectively show the basic grammatical rules of sentence formation (e.g. He is, not He are; the book, not book the) and punctuation through examples. However, as the writer himself tells us in his preface:

This book addresses only one aspect of composition: style. It does not take up matters of intention, invention, or all of organization. Nor is this book intended for basic writers. I intend it to be a short book that focuses on a problem that mature writers wrestle with: a wordy, tangled, indirected prose style (Williams).
This is a bit beyond most ESL students, at least until they have mastered most of the basics.

The Right Handbook is quite suitable for ESL students because it guides readers through the whole process of writing and revising and even has a separate chapter for ESL learners. In addition it has suggestions for ESL learners in other chapters at appropriate spots. As an example:

If you are not a native speaker of English, you have to actively seek out situations where language is integral to the activity, where you have to interact with others in English, so that you can start to develop a feeling for what is correct. Reading this book will give you ideas about how to evaluate your writing, as well as ideas about how context influences choices you make as a writer (Belanoff et.al. 3).
Other than the fact that it has special advice for ESL learners, I would recommend The Right Handbook to all teachers and students of writing because of its concise and direct style. This is not a typical handbook and yet it is filled with good advice and many examples. We can see its approach in its practical method to revise paragraphs:
We suggest that you read each paragraph in your essay closely. Once you have done that, write in the margin as briefly as possible what the paragraph says; this will be a summary of its content. Under the content statement, jot down what the paragraph "does". If you have trouble doing either of these, you' ve got more writing and thinking to do. If you can't give a brief summary of the content of a paragraph, perhaps the paragraph is trying to say too much. If you find more than one sentence in a paragraph which can serve as a statement of its central idea, you'll want to check and make certain that ideas in the paragraph are developed, not just restated. If you can't figure out what a particular paragraph is "doing," either there's no reason for the paragraph to be there or -- what is more likely -- you need to retrace your prior thinking and try to recapture what was in your mind when you first wrote the paragraph (26-27).
This method is very effective in that it makes the writer think about the paragraphs in a reverse way. The summary statements for each paragraph become a kind of outline. It is especially useful for writers who do not have an outline before they start to write. It allows the writers to step back from their papers and rethink the thesis of each paragraph.

In this part, I only dwell on paragraph revision by using The Right Handbook as a reference. In the following part I will briefly talk about how to revise sentences, phrases, words, and mechanics. The Right Handbook will give ESL teachers and students detailed examples.

4. Check sentences, phrases, words and mechanics:

Grammar comes in handy when student writers check individual sentences, phrases, words, and mechanics. The rules students analyzed in their reading (step I) are reinforced by their own writing, and peer grammar teaching at the beginning of the writing stage makes them more aware of how the English language works. As Mina P. Shaughnessy explains in Errors and Expectations,

Proofreading becomes an indispensable aid to the mastery of grammar. What the students are not in the habit of doing is looking long and carefully at sentences in order to understand the way they work rather than what they mean. This involves a shift in perception which is ultimately more important than the mastery of any individual rule of grammar (129).
By learning to revise sentences, phrases, words, and mechanics, students will ponder more on the way language works and how to make it work in a better way to express what they have to say instead of focusing on the meaning of the language itself. Once again, I suggest ESL teachers or students check out the Right Handbook because it is not a traditional handbook. It does not preach rules; you will not find the answer for a particular question. The book helps you make choices and decisions in the special context you have created in your writing.

Learning grammar is only a means; it is not the goal. The goal is to help students become efficient writers through teaching grammar and other class activities. ESL teachers should keep this goal in mind at all times and reinforce it in writing class whenever possible.

The writing process itself is not linear; it is recursive: the revision process may take place well before the writer finishes a draft. The writing style of each writer is not the same; it is very personal: some people begin in the middle, and some people like to write on a computer, others have to write drafts longhand. One way is not necessarily superior to others, so students should be allowed to write in their personal style. After students have learned how to revise, ESL teachers should teach them how to use an English handbook efficiently to enable them to make their writing standard by themselves. In the future, they will have to be independent of their teachers and write for the real world.

Once the students become more confident in their writing and more familiar with the method of global revision, the teacher can ask students to revise before they turn in the paper, or even have a peer evaluation to make them think more about the audience and work harder on making themselves understood. According to the theory of transactional rhetoric, we should not let writer and audience, process and product outweigh each other. They are all important elements in our writing class (Berlin).

Conclusion

Although this paper elaborates many ways of teaching writing, there are always different situations and requirements for ESL writing classes. Sometimes it may be appropriate to start from the second step -- guided writing; or the third step -- teacher's response; or even the last step -- global revision, instead of from the very beginning. Often times, we have to deal with an individual student differently from the rest of the class although they are all ESL students. No matter what our approaches are, ESL teachers should understand that writing is both creative and social. We teach them how to write, but at the same time, we are also helping them to assimilate into college and society. As Shaughnessy says in Errors and Expectations,
Neglected by the dominant society, they [ESL students] have nonetheless had their own worlds to grow up in and they arrive on our campuses as young adults, with opinions and languages and plans already in their minds. College both beckons and threatens them, offering to teach them useful ways of thinking and talking about the world, promising even to improve the quality of their lives, but threatening at the same time to take from them their distinctive ways of interpreting the world, to assimilate them into the culture of academia without acknowledging their experience as outsiders (292).
Especially for teachers who have ESL students as a minority in their classes instead of having a whole ESL class, we need to make special efforts to meet ESL students' needs, and very often they need extra help. A view of writing being social has significant practical implications for the teaching of writing:
We write not as isolated individuals but as members of communities whose beliefs, concerns, and practices both instigate and constrain, at least in part, the sorts of things we can say. Our aims and intentions in writing are thus not merely personal, idiosyncratic, but reflective of the communities to which we belong (Harris 268).
No matter where they come from, they have to speak English and to write according to the standard of the American academic world, but that does not mean that they will not reveal their values and beliefs in their writing.

ESL teachers should try to know ESL students' cultures and background, even their languages so as to understand why they write or make mistakes in writing the way they do. It may well be that ESL students are suffering from writer's block because of missing their home country, or feeling alien, or not being able to succeed. As Karen Burke LeFevre points out in Invention as a Social Act, "Invention is a dialectical process in that the inventing individual(s) and the socioculture are co-existing and mutually defining" (35). Sometimes ESL students feel frustrated because they see themselves as neither part of the American culture nor as part of their home culture. The fear of losing identity distracts them from concentrating on their writing. ESL teachers should be understanding and help them get over this culture shock period. ESL teachers should work hard to train ESL college students to be successful writers in American colleges, let them contribute to American academia, and make American culture richer and more diverse.

Works Cited

Allwright, Richard. "Language Learning through Communication Practice." The Communicative Approach to Language Teaching. Oxford UP, 1979.

Belanoff, Pat, Betsy Rorschach, and Mia Oberlink. The Right Handbook: Grammar and Usage in Context. Portsmouth NH: Boynton/Cook, 1993.

Bley-Vroman, Robert. "The Fundamental Character of Foreign Language Learning." Grammar and Second Language Teaching: A Book of Reading. Boston, MS: Heinle & and Heinle, 1988.

Celce-Murica, Marianne. "Making Informed Decisions About the Role of Grammar in language Teaching." TESOL Newsletters 9.1 Feb. (1985): 3-4.

Flower, Linda. "Writer-Based prose: A cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing." College English 41.1 Sep. (1979): 19-37.

Frodesen, Jan. "Grammar in Writing." Teaching; English as a Second or Foreign Language. Boston, MS: Heinle & and Heinle, 1991.

Harris, Joseph. "The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing." Rhetoric and Composition: A Sourcebook for Teachers and Writers. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1990.

LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Murphy, James J. ed. A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Twentieth-Century America. Hermagoras Press, 1990.

Sanborn, Jean. "Grammar: Good Wine Before Its Time." English Journal 75 Mar. (1986): 72-75.

Shaughnessy, Mina P. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Sommers, Nancy. "Response to Student Writing." College Composition and Communication 37. 1 Feb. (1986): 94-96.

Vieta, Carroll. "Helping students to help themselves." College Composition and Communication. 33. 2 May (1982): 148-149.