Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007) 238–254

Academic writing of adolescent English learners:

Learning to use ‘‘although’’
Pamela Spycher *
University of California, Davis & WestEd, 1107 9th Street, 4th Floor, Sacramento,
CA 95814-3607, United States

Abstract
Increasing calls for equity and accountability in U.S. secondary schools have led to intensified scrutiny of
the academic literacy development of English learning (EL) adolescents. This paper discusses some of the
challenges that EL secondary students face in achieving the language and literacy skills that will enable
them to succeed in their mainstream classes, graduate from high school, and continue their academic careers
into college. It presents an instructional approach used to work with students on academic language
development and describes the language resources that students were able to take up following instruction.
This paper suggests ways that secondary teachers can teach their EL students to use linguistic analysis in
order to recognize the expectations of academic writing and produce texts that increasingly incorporate the
linguistic features of academic language.
# 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Academic language; Second language writing; English learners; Adolescent literacy

‘‘They think we’re slow.’’ (Leticia,1 EL 10th grader from Mexico, personal communica-
tion, September 15, 2004)
An English learning (EL) student who arrived in the U.S. in the seventh grade, 16-year-old
Leticia felt that, regardless of her intellect and fluent conversational abilities in English, she was
not considered intelligent by her teachers and native English-speaking peers based on her limited
academic literacy proficiency in English. In her fourth year of schooling in the U.S., Leticia still
found it difficult to fully comprehend grade-level textbooks in English and to effectively express
her ideas in writing using an academic stance. Leticia perceived that her teachers incorrectly

* Tel.: +1 916 492 4026; fax: +1 916 492 4002.

E-mail address: pspycher@WestEd.org.
1
All names in this manuscript are pseudonyms, and all students gave permission to use their comments and written
work.

1060-3743/$ – see front matter # 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jslw.2007.07.001
 P. Spycher / Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007) 238–254 239

equated her limited abilities to meet the particular expectations of academic writing in English
with an overall inability to achieve in school. Students like Leticia may benefit from instruction
that explicitly addresses the expectations of academic writing. This paper discusses findings from
a study whose primary goals were to explore the challenges a group of secondary EL students
faced in academic writing tasks, and the effects that implementing instructional strategies that
addressed these challenges had on their writing.
Currently, about 25% of students in California’s public schools are English learners (CDE,
2007a). The academic achievement gap between EL students and their English monolingual
peers is well documented. In California, EL students in secondary schools perform at
significantly lower levels than their English-proficient peers on the California Standards Test for
English Language Arts, with 29% of English-only 10th graders scoring at the ‘‘below basic’’ and
‘‘far below basic’’ levels and 76% of EL 10th graders scoring at those levels (CDE, 2007b).
While the achievement gap between EL secondary students and their English monolingual peers
is certainly not a new topic of interest in the field of education, studies documenting the effects of
academic writing instruction designed to meet the particular second language (L2) learning
needs of EL adolescents remains an under-examined area in the research literature.
The characteristics of EL adolescents vary widely depending on multiple factors such as age at
the time of first exposure to English, access to interaction with monolingual speakers of English,
educational background in the home country, migrant status, socio-economic status, attitude, and
motivation (Ruiz-de-Valasco, Fix, & Clewell, 2000). While some EL immigrant adolescents may
have strong foundations in literacy in their first language (L1), others may have significant gaps in
their schooling and may not be fully proficient in academic registers in their L1, a factor that
affects literacy development in their L2. Some of these students, such as newcomers who have
strong L1 literacy foundations, seem virtually ready to jump into mainstream class work.
Nevertheless, even with strong L1 foundations, EL adolescents may still struggle to understand
and use academic English, given the accelerated time frame in which they are expected to master
it in order to meet grade-level content area expectations.
The varying characteristics of EL adolescents have made it challenging for schools and teachers
to effectively identify and systemically address the learning needs of their EL students. However,
regardless of the background and other mediating variables that affect the literacy development of
their EL students, all schools are held accountable for ensuring that their EL students meet rigorous
academic standards. This study addressed some of the ways in which teachers might facilitate
progress toward achievement of academic standards for their EL students. The next section
discusses the theories and research that informed the design of this study.

Conceptual frameworks
?
‘‘Maestra, qué quiere decir ‘although’ en español? [Teacher, what does ‘although’ mean
in Spanish?]’’ (Ernesto, 10th grader from Mexico in the U.S. for 2 weeks, Personal
Communication, September 20, 2004)

The complexity of Ernesto’s question and how a teacher might provide a useful response may not
be readily apparent. Part of what is needed is an explanation about how the conjunction ‘‘although’’
helps construct meaning in the particular text in which it appears. Conjunctions such as ‘‘although’’
are used by writers to create logic and cohesion in their writing and requires the writer to understand
that the main point is contained in the independent clause, while ‘‘although’’ signals subordination
and is contained in the dependent clause. Further, the use of ‘‘although’’ helps to link the clause to
240 P. Spycher / Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007) 238–254

information not only in the same sentence, but often to information presented earlier in the text,
building cohesion and moving an argument or explanation along. Understanding the different
meaning-making functions of conjunctions such as ‘‘although’’ may enable students to both access
academic writing more readily and participate in a broader range of linguistic communities since
they have a better understanding of the language that is expected of them in these contexts.
These explanations about how language ‘‘works’’ in academic contexts do not always occur in
classrooms with EL students. In her study of a Northern California high school’s approach to
meeting the learning needs of EL students, Harklau (1994) followed four Chinese immigrant
students as they transitioned from English as a Second Language (ESL) to mainstream classes. A
significant finding from Harklau’s study was that neither the ESL nor the mainstream, discipline-
specific classes were sufficient in helping ESL students to develop academic writing proficiency.
While the ESL class was supportive, it was insufficiently rigorous. Meanwhile, the mainstream,
content-area teachers lacked the linguistic knowledge to be able to explain how students could
improve their writing. As a result, these students were essentially left to learn how to write on
their own.
Similarly, Moje, Collazo, Carillo, and Marx (2000) demonstrated how, in a junior high
inquiry-based science class, EL students who did not understand certain kinds of academic
discourse experienced confusion when participating in class activities. These researchers
observed that the EL students lacked the linguistic resources to write using an academic stance.
Furthermore, scientific writing was not an instructional focus of the science class. Referring to
one writing event in relation to a lesson on air quality, Moje et al. concluded that the EL students
wrote in a more conversational or everyday kind of language, more like ‘‘creative writing rather
than scientific or even informational writing’’ (p. 483). These examples illustrate how, although
writing tasks may be assigned in secondary classrooms with EL students, the type of writing
instruction provided might not be compatible with what EL students require in order to meet the
expectations of academic writing.

Academic language

Academic language has received a considerable amount of attention in recent years, and there
are multiple definitions of it, each definition depending upon the theoretical perspective of those
defining it. In a broad sense, it involves the functions and forms of language needed to engage in,
profit from, and display learning in school and other academic contexts (Villalva, 2006). Some
scholars have focused on specific aspects of academic language such as vocabulary knowledge
(McLaughlin, August, & Snow, 2000; Nagy, Berninger, Abbott, Vaughan, & Vermeulen, 2003).
Others have emphasized the differences between language used in informal versus school-based
contexts (Cummins, 1989; Snow, 1990). Drawing upon the work of Cummins and others,
scholars such as Scarcella (2003) as well as Wong-Fillmore and Snow (2000) have provided
multi-disciplinary frameworks for understanding the various demands of academic language.
The work of these scholars has contributed to increased teacher awareness about the
characteristics and challenges of academic language.

Genre theories
One perspective on academic language emphasizes the social contexts of text creation and
use. Genre theories focus on the social realities in which language is embedded and how these
social realities constrain or facilitate language use. Genres are socially recognized ways of using
language that enable people to say things about the world, establish relationships, and accomplish
 P. Spycher / Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007) 238–254 241

tasks. According to genre theorists, successful texts will demonstrate writers’ awareness of their
context and of their relationship with the readers who are part of that context (Hyland, 2002). In
this sense, academic language use requires readers and writers to be conscious of the expectations
for language use that participants in a specific social context have, and also for readers and writers
to have the linguistic resources available to them in order to meet those expectations. This view of
academic language, which recognizes the social, cultural, linguistic, and even the ideological and
political dimensions of advanced literacy, shifts the reader’s stance from a passive and compliant
one to an active and critical one in which texts are seen as ‘‘discursive constructs rather than
windows on reality’’ (Macken-Horarik, 1998, p. 75).
Although they vary in the degree of emphasis they give to context or text, genre theories all
attempt to understand and explain how people use language to achieve specific purposes, and how
these language choices are situated in social contexts. Hyland (2002) highlighted the similarities
between two schools of genre theories—English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and Systemic
Functional Linguistics (SFL). While ESP research has focused on post-secondary education and
SFL has included K-12 education, both schools have emphasized the lexico-grammatical and
rhetorical features of text, and have proposed intervening in literacy development through a
‘‘transparent curriculum which makes the genres of power visible and attainable through explicit
induction’’ (Hyland, 2002, p. 125). For example, novice L2 writers can learn to adopt an
authoritative stance and engage their readers through linguistic moves such as hedges like
‘‘possibly’’ and ‘‘might,’’ as well as directives such as ‘‘must’’ and ‘‘remember’’ (Hyland, in
Johns et al. (2006)), moves that help them to establish themselves as academic writers.
Genre pedagogies differ from traditional ideas of literacy development that place the
responsibility of literacy failure on learner weaknesses and that present text as natural and
uncontestable truth. Instead, texts can be analyzed and questioned in order to understand their
underlying notions and how particular linguistic features come together to construct different
genres. While broader notions of genre pedagogies informed the present study, SFL theory and
pedagogy has provided specific guidance for secondary educational settings and was therefore an
important resource in the design and analysis of this study. The next section discusses this
comprehensive theory and its pedagogical approaches.

Systemic functional linguistics

SFL, based on the work of Halliday (1994) and extended by a growing number of scholars,
emphasizes the interrelatedness between grammar, meaning, and social context, or what Halliday
refers to as a social semiotic. In this framework, language use is a social process, functional for
the social context in which it occurs. Meaning is not separate from language but is constructed in
and through language. The main pedagogical aims of a functional approach to language
education are to help students become more conscious of how language is used to construct
meaning in different contexts and to provide them with a wider range of linguistic resources,
enabling them to make appropriate grammatical choices so that they can effectively comprehend
and construct meaning in text.
Halliday (1994) identified three contexts of language – field, tenor, and mode – to explain how
variation in register (the lexical and grammatical resources that constitute particular genres) is
responsive to context and how different linguistic choices realize different social contexts. The
field dimension refers to what the text is about and the social activity in which people are
involved; the tenor dimension refers to the relationships between participants in the interaction;
and the mode dimension refers to how language is used (written, oral, visual, etc.). The
grammatical choices, or metafunctions, that correspond with each of these register variables help
242 P. Spycher / Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007) 238–254

writers and speakers meet the expectations of particular genres such as narrative, explanation, or
exposition. Ideational choices (in the field dimension) help present ideas and opinions about the
world through the use of linguistic resources such as noun phrases, verb phrases, and
prepositional phrases. Interpersonal choices (in the tenor dimension) allow one to take a stance
and establish relationships through linguistic resources such as modal verbs (‘‘could,’’ ‘‘should,’’
‘‘would’’) or adverbs (‘‘probably,’’ ‘‘certainly’’). Textual choices (in the mode dimension) help to
structure texts coherently through the use of linguistic resources such as conjunction,2 combined
clauses, or rhetorical organization. In every clause, these ideational, interpersonal, and textual
metafunctions work simultaneously to make meaning and realize context.
In secondary school contexts, research on academic written registers from an SFL
perspective in the disciplines of science (Schleppegrell, 1998) and history (Martin, 2002;
Schleppegrell, Achugar, & Oteı́za, 2004) has demonstrated how, as students move into the
secondary grades, the language used in the texts they encounter becomes increasingly distanced
from everyday language. Students move from more personal genres, which are closer to
everyday language, to analytical genres, which are more academic in nature. The texts they are
asked to read and write become more densely packed and take on the features, including the
vocabulary, grammar, and discourse structures that are functional for constructing meaning in
the different disciplines.
Christie’s (2002) research on student writing in the discipline of English reveals how students
make the transition from everyday ways of expressing knowledge to more advanced ways that
provide them opportunities for full participation in literate contexts. Grammatical metaphor
(Halliday, 1994), an essential resource for academic writing, refers to wording used to express
ideas in unexpected or ‘‘incongruent’’ ways, typically through the use of nominalization (i.e.,
turning verbs into nouns in order to turn processes into things). This linguistic resource can
enable writers to use abstraction to both densely pack ideas into clauses and link them logically to
other clauses. For example, in everyday language, one might say, ‘‘Many groups of people
discriminated against women, and then these women called for changes in the way society
works.’’ Using grammatical metaphor (italicized text), this can be expressed as follows:
‘‘Widespread discrimination against women led to increased demands for social change.’’ Here,
in addition to condensing clauses, the nominalized ‘‘discrimination’’ and ‘‘demands’’ allow the
writer to evaluate these abstractions as things. Christie’s analysis of student writing at different
levels of development provides a valuable resource to teachers for understanding this
development and identifying instances in which students incorporate linguistic resources such as
grammatical metaphor into their writing.
Huang (2004) demonstrated how the construction of content knowledge and writing
development in science are interrelated. Her 5-week long qualitative case study centered on
determining how explicit instruction in discourse analysis using SFL pedagogy supported
secondary (grades 8–10) EL students in making their science writing meet the register
expectations of the genre. The students in Huang’s study wrote multiple drafts of their papers, and
it was determined that, as a result of the use of a writing process model and explicit instruction in
particular grammatical resources used in science writing (e.g., the use of classification),
subsequent drafts improved, particularly in the use of reference and nominalization as well as in
the number of terms explained and exemplified.

2
SFL uses the term ‘‘conjunction’’ to refer to a discourse semantic system that is realized through wordings including
conjunctions but also other types of wordings (e.g., X is likely to lead to Y).
 P. Spycher / Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007) 238–254 243

The existing body of research on the practices currently in place in secondary classrooms with
EL students suggests that teachers need guidance in implementing effective strategies to support
their EL students’ understanding and use of academic language. Recent research grounded in
genre theories has identified features of academic writing that can be made explicit to students,
and has demonstrated that students can learn to meet the linguistic expectations of academic
contexts when provided with appropriate instruction.

Purpose and research questions

In an effort to contribute to the growing body of knowledge that aims to support secondary
teachers in successfully scaffolding academic writing development for their EL students, this
study explored two main questions. First, it sought to understand the nature of the challenges that
a group of immigrant EL secondary students in one California high school faced with academic
writing tasks. Second, it explored how this group of EL students responded to intentional
instruction that explicitly focused their attention on the linguistic features of academic writing.

Methods

As is true of all intervention studies, this study was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of an
instructional approach in order to improve the educational experiences of students. Case study
methods (Merriam, 1998; Stake, 1995) were used to gain an understanding of the contextual factors
that affected the students’ L2 literacy learning. Discourse analysis methods derived from SFL
(Martin & Rose, 2003; Schleppegrell, 2004) were used to examine features of academic language
that were present in student writing, as well as to design instruction that addressed these challenges.
This section discusses the context in which the study took place and the data collection and analysis
procedures used to examine student writing in relation to the instructional intervention.

Context and participants

‘‘I came here with my mom and dad and brothers because we should learn English . . . I
want to go to college because I want to be a psychologist.’’ (Marı́a, 12th grader from
Mexico in the U.S. for 3 years, student autobiographical essay, September 24, 2004)

The students and teacher

This study was conducted in a high school English Language Development (ELD) class in a
suburban town located in the central valley of California, not far from the state capitol. Overall,
the district was high performing. Nevertheless, there were differences in success rates among the
school’s students. At the time of the study, on the California Standards Test for English Language
Arts, 76% of English-proficient students in the school scored at the proficient level or higher,
whereas 19% of EL students scored at the proficient level or higher (CDE, 2004). Most of the 20
tenth- through twelfth-grade students in the ELD class were native Spanish speakers, the majority
from Mexico. At the beginning of the school year, their length of residence in the U.S. ranged
from 1 week to 3 years. About a quarter of the students had had some minimal English instruction
in their home countries before moving to the U.S. However, the majority of the students had had
little exposure to either oral or written English prior to immigration. All students in the class
could read and write in their native languages at varying levels of proficiency.
244 P. Spycher / Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007) 238–254

The ELD class was designed for EL students classified as having ‘‘beginning’’ or ‘‘early
intermediate’’ English proficiency on the California English Language Development Test
(CELDT), an English language proficiency test administered to all EL students in the state each
year. The class met 4 days a week for a total of 3 hours and 45 minutes per week and was offered
in lieu of a mainstream or ‘‘sheltered’’ English class. Students in this ELD class were
simultaneously learning language, learning through language, and learning about language
(Halliday, 1999). In the ELD class, learning through language occurred through the content area
of history, specifically the history of civil and human rights nationally and globally. Students
learned, read, talked, and wrote about topics such as immigration patterns, legal and social
obstacles to equity, and social activism. As the teacher of the class where data were collected, I
developed the curriculum using the conceptual framework discussed in this paper and provided
all instruction.
The focal student, Ernesto. The case of one student, Ernesto, is presented in this paper to
illustrate some of the challenges that the EL adolescent students in this class faced in their
academic writing tasks, as well as the linguistic features of academic writing that were taken up
by some students following instruction targeting these features. Ernesto was a studious and
confident 11th grader who frequently asked clarification questions and volunteered to share his
background knowledge and thoughts about history and politics. At the beginning of the school
year, he had been in the U.S. for 2 weeks and had had about 6 months of basic English classes in
Mexico prior to immigrating to the U.S. Based on his CELDT scores, his English proficiency
level was determined to be at the ‘‘early intermediate’’ level. Ernesto’s L1 formal literacy
assessments were unavailable. However, informal writing samples in his L1, Spanish, indicated
that he had a firm grasp of and interest in L1 literacy.

Instructional approach in the ELD class

I used multiple instructional practices in the ELD class in order to build students’ content
knowledge and scaffold their literacy development. These practices included daily oral reading
and discussion, vocabulary instruction, readers’ theater,3 a process-writing model for longer
writing assignments, daily short writing assignments, and instruction in discourse analysis
methods. For discourse analysis instruction, the teaching-learning cycle I used had three stages:
(1) explicit teacher modeling and explanation of how to analyze (or deconstruct) text; (2) practice
in deconstructing text, including opportunities for peer collaborative work; and (3) independent
practice.
Learning about language was part of this process. Some students were still learning basic
reading skills in English, but all learned about some of the ways in which language achieves
specific purposes. In this sense, I veered from traditional notions that low-English-proficiency EL
students must control foundational skills before they are taught more advanced features of
language. In order to raise students’ awareness about how language ‘‘works,’’ I taught them
metalanguage so that they would be able to talk about the language they were learning and
constructing. Students were introduced to the functions and terminology of linguistic resources
that are used in academic registers. Some of this metalanguage concerned the discourse, or

3
Readers’ theater is a group reading activity in which students read the dialogue of a script without physically acting
out the parts. In ELD, this activity helps students increase reading fluency and improve pronunciation while also
potentially building vocabulary and content knowledge.
 P. Spycher / Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007) 238–254 245

macro, level of texts such as thematic organization (e.g., ‘‘orientation,’’ ‘‘elaboration,’’ and
‘‘conclusion’’). Students also learned terms to discuss micro levels of text, such as the terms SFL
uses to distinguish between different kinds of processes: ‘‘action,’’ ‘‘thinking/feeling,’’ ‘‘saying,’’
and ‘‘being/having.’’ (Instructional strategies that use some of these terms are discussed later in
this paper.)

Data collection and analysis

Methods drawn from multiple traditions were used for data collection and analysis in this
study. Case study methods were used to gain an understanding of the contextual factors that
affected the students’ L2 literacy learning. As the teacher of the class, I frequently talked with
students about their school experiences, observed them during instruction, and had access to
all of the lesson plans and other instructional artifacts. Students often spoke openly with me
about their school and life experiences during class discussions or in casual conversation
before and after classes. I kept a journal where I collected students’ spontaneous comments on
a semi-regular basis. Students also had opportunities to write about school and outside-school
life in daily journal entries. When analyzing these instances of personal communication and
students’ journal entries, I looked for patterns in the ideas students expressed and selected
excerpts that represented these patterns. Some of these excerpts are used throughout this
manuscript.
I conducted discourse analyses on student writing using methods derived from SFL (Martin &
Rose, 2003; Schleppegrell, 2004). The types of student writing that I collected for analysis
included students’ daily journal entries, multiple drafts of essays, on-demand writing tasks, and
other writing activities that were part of regular classroom activities. One of these writing tasks, a
current events report, is featured in this paper in order to explore some of the challenges that
academic writing tasks presented to students and how one student responded to instruction that
addressed these challenges.
The students in the ELD class wrote two drafts (a first draft and a revision) of a current
events report about the series of tsunamis that occurred in the Indian Ocean in 2004. This was
an event that the students were interested in learning and talking about. Both drafts were written
at the end of the first semester of the school year in January, about 5 months after the focal
student, Ernesto, had arrived in the U.S. Among the linguistic features I tracked in Ernesto’s
writing, I report here on three: (1) how he established an authoritative stance (through
interpersonal linguistic choices); (2) how he used conjunction (through textual linguistic
choices); and (3) how he used reference (through textual linguistic choices). I focused on these
three features in particular because I emphasized them in instruction, and for instructional
purposes, I wanted to determine whether Ernesto was incorporating into his writing the things I
was teaching the class. Ernesto’s writing was chosen to feature in this paper not because he was
a star student, but rather because it helps to explore how lower-English-proficiency EL
adolescent students like Ernesto might begin to incorporate more academic ways of writing in
short time frames.
The procedures I followed to analyze Ernesto’s writing were derived from the discourse
analysis methods described by Martin and Rose (2003). I conducted separate analyses for each
target linguistic feature. For example, in order to examine the first feature, how Ernesto
established an authoritative stance using interpersonal resources, I used Martin and Rose’s tools
for tracking ‘‘appraisal’’ resources. Martin and Rose describe appraisal as the use of linguistic
resources to make evaluations, which include the kinds of attitudes established in a text,
246 P. Spycher / Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007) 238–254

the degree of feelings expressed, and ‘‘the ways in which values are sourced and readers aligned’’
(p. 22). The choices a writer makes regarding appraisal resources establish the writer’s ‘‘stance,’’
which ‘‘defines the kind of community that is being set up around shared values’’ (p. 54). For
instance, the two statements, ‘‘I’m furious about what you’re doing’’ and ‘‘Your actions are
infuriating’’ enable the speaker or writer to establish quite different stances. The former
statement foregrounds the participant’s feelings and has a more emotional quality while the latter
places the ‘‘action’’ as the point of departure and allows it to be evaluated in an authoritative way.
The latter statement also makes use of nominalization to establish an authoritative stance,
changing a process (‘‘what you’re doing’’) to a thing (‘‘your actions’’). To examine how Ernesto
used these resources, I created a table to plot the types of appraisal resources he used in each
draft.
Martin and Rose (2003) note that conjunction, the second feature tracked, is used to ‘‘manage
our expectations in discourse’’ (p. 128) by linking processes to create cohesion. In spoken,
everyday English, we frequently use conjunctions such as ‘‘and’’ and ‘‘but’’ to link ideas.
However, in written academic English, there is an expectation of an expanded set of resources to
include words such as ‘‘therefore,’’ ‘‘however,’’ and ‘‘consequently’’ in addition to phrasing that
uses more subtle ways of creating cohesion. In order to determine how Ernesto incorporated the
linguistic resource of conjunction, I looked at each clause in Ernesto’s initial and revised draft,
highlighted the words and phrases that created cohesion, and examined how they were used to
link ideas.
Once people and things are introduced into text, reference, the third feature examined, is
needed to keep track of them. Unlike narrative genres in which the characters carry the sequence
of events and are tracked or referenced through the use of pronouns, expository genres use other
reference resources such as text references (e.g., demonstratives such as ‘‘this’’ and ‘‘these’’),
which turn ‘‘big meanings into little ones’’ (Martin & Rose, 2003, p. 154) so that more
information can be added to the meanings throughout the text. In order to determine how
effectively Ernesto used reference resources to meet the expectations of the genre, I highlighted
the references he used in each draft and made a table to determine how he introduced
participants, as well as in what ways and how often he referred to previously introduced
participants.
Once I had analyzed Ernesto’s individual drafts for each particular linguistic feature
(authoritative stance, conjunction, and reference), I compared the drafts to see how Ernesto
incorporated these more academic ways of using interpersonal and textual linguistic resources
from the first to the second draft. In order to check my interpretations, I analyzed a published
newspaper article on the same topic to see how a professional writer used these resources and
how they compared to Ernesto’s writing.
My analyses of Ernesto’s writing paralleled the ways in which I taught students to analyze
texts for their linguistic features, although the students were taught less complex ways that would
be more useful for them to make sense of the texts they were using. These parallel instructional
strategies are discussed in the following section.

Results

Ernesto’s initial draft reflects the kind of writing students in this ELD class produced prior to
instruction targeting specific linguistic features. The three linguistic focal features of
establishing an authoritative stance, using conjunction, and referencing in academic ways will
be discussed.
 P. Spycher / Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007) 238–254 247

Ernesto’s initial draft

January 19, 2005

THE TERRIBLE EVENT
On December 26, the Tsunami sending up a wall of water that rolled across the Indian
Ocean and some countries such as: India, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Myanmar, etc.

Name of the disaster: the Tsunami was a terrible event in the world. It is like a earthquake
but more powerful like 9.0. And waves spreading in all directions moving as fast as
500 mph. This waves were very big as 15 m.

Many people died, as many as 170,000 and many more have problems. They don’t have
clean water, shelter, food, etc. The people lost fathers, mothers, and some people lost their
whole family. Many tourists were killed for the waves and houses, hospitals, restaurants,
schools, hotels were destroyed.

The people of the others countries are helping. Although the help can’t give all the people.
It is almost impossible to help everyone. It is a terrible landscape, the children don’t going
to forget the disaster.

I feel so sad because many people died and some people don’t have houses and food, clean
water, some diseases. I feel sadness and fear because one of these disasters can shake this
country or my country.
In his first draft, Ernesto generally used a register more typical of everyday language. As an EL
student not yet fully orally proficient in English, he was learning the language while learning how to
write according to the expectations of the writing context, which in this case included both school
writing and news-report writing. In his first draft, Ernesto primarily used everyday, non-technical
language (e.g., ‘‘problems,’’ ‘‘houses,’’ ‘‘big’’), and there were no nominalizations to pack ideas
more densely. Although Ernesto made use of conjunction and reference, he did not use these
linguistic resources entirely successfully to guide the reader through the text. For example, although
he used the conjunction ‘‘although,’’ it is difficult to know whether he meant to link the clause
containing ‘‘although’’ with the clause that preceded or followed it. In addition, Ernesto’s use of the
first-person pronoun in the last paragraph was representative of a more interactive, or spoken,
stance. This suggests that he may have been unaware that in academic expository writing, personal
opinions are typically not expressed using the first-person point of view but through more subtle
linguistic means. This is not to say that the first-person pronoun is never used in academic writing. In
fact, it is increasingly acceptable in academic genres to use the first-person pronoun to engage the
reader (Hyland, 2002). However, students must also be aware that in school contexts, teachers may
still expect a more distanced stance in academic writing assignments.

Instructional strategies

After students wrote their first drafts, I designed lessons to make explicit to them how to meet
some of the linguistic expectations of a current events report, which incorporates description and
explanation. I focused on features the students were attempting to use but found challenging. One
248 P. Spycher / Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007) 238–254

of the first register features of this genre that I taught was how to express one’s opinions, feelings,
or thoughts in more ‘‘objective’’ or authoritative ways. Schleppegrell (2004) points out that this
shift ‘‘requires that students understand how to use the features of academic registers to convey
their feelings and attitudes at the same time that they present themselves as objective experts with
information to communicate to others’’ (p. 61). To help the students gain an understanding of
how to convey their opinions, feelings, and attitudes in more subtle ways, I contrasted some of the
students’ writing excerpts in which they overtly described their opinions, often with the pronoun
‘‘I,’’ with a more distanced stance in order to establish themselves as authorities on the topics
about which they were writing. Dropping the personal pronoun ‘‘I’’ was a relatively easy
adjustment for the students, but identifying subtle ways of expressing authority was more
challenging. In order to help students acquire more flexibility with establishing an authoritative
stance, I showed them examples in professionally written texts in which writers used other
grammatical resources such as nominalization and the use of modal verbs for hedging to express
their opinions in less overt ways.
In order to help the students better understand clause structure, tease out cohesive devices, and
identify other text features, I taught the students how to use a graphic organizer, shown in Fig. 1,
to analyze sentences. (Note that SFL terminology was recast in terms that would resonate with
the students and that were congruent with the larger instructional context.)
Using the sentence analysis graphic organizer, I asked the students to consider questions such
as whether the text had sentences containing more than one clause, what came first in clauses or
sentences, how clauses were linked (e.g., with conjunctions, references, or adverbs), and how
noun phrases were elaborated. I modeled, explained, and guided the students in the analyses. The
students reported that this exercise helped them to better understand the texts they were reading,
because it made certain linguistic features stand out. This exercise was also very useful for
showing students how writers establish an authoritative stance by using resources such as
nominalization or directives (e.g., ‘‘it is necessary to,’’ ‘‘must’’) to guide their readers to see
things in a certain way (Hyland, 2005).
Another strategy that I used was process (or verb) analysis. Using the graphic organizer shown
in Fig. 2, I taught students to identify processes/verbs in independent clauses and to classify them
based on their function (action, thinking/feeling, saying, or being/having).

Fig. 1. Sentence analysis graphic organizer.

 P. Spycher / Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007) 238–254 249

Fig. 2. Process/verb analysis graphic organizer.

During instruction, I asked students to consider questions such as whether the text used a
particular type of process, as well as whether and how modal verbs were used and for what
purposes. This was perhaps the easiest of the text-analysis exercises in which the students
engaged, and often a lively debate ensued about in which category certain processes belonged
based on their function (sometimes with the students convincing me that my ideas may not have
been accurate!). This exercise appeared to help students think about verb choices in new ways as
they began to recognize that different words serve different functions in conveying meaning. One
student noted, ‘‘Para una persona que aprende un lenguaje diferente al suyo, es importante saber
las funciones de las palabras [For a person who is learning a different language, it’s important to
know the functions of words]’’ (Raimundo, Personal Communication, January 21, 2005).
Periodically, I also used contrastive analysis in order to demonstrate some of the differences
between everyday and academic ways of using English. I guided the students in jointly
constructing revisions of student or other writing (as a whole class on an overhead transparency
or on chart paper) in order to highlight specific differences between everyday ways and more
academic ways of using language. The graphic organizer shown in Fig. 3 illustrates one such
activity.
In this example, I showed students how to turn a verbal process (‘‘Rosa Parks/she fought
for . . .’’) into a nominal phrase (‘‘Rosa Parks’ fight against racism . . .’’). The intent here was to
show the students how to both foreground the ‘‘thing’’ in the sentence (the struggle against
discrimination) by placing it as the subject and to authoritatively set it up as something to be
evaluated. Instead of evaluating Rosa Parks as famous, nominalization, in this case, enables Rosa
Parks’ fight to be evaluated, allowing the writer to appraise the struggle against racism as
important.
Ernesto’s writing was frequently used for highlighting both what students were already doing
effectively in their writing and areas requiring improvement. In Ernesto’s revision of the tsunami
report, he incorporated several changes into his writing. Again, although there are many

Fig. 3. Contrastive analysis graphic organizer.

250 P. Spycher / Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007) 238–254

linguistic features that could be discussed, three features – establishing an authoritative stance,
using conjunction, and referencing – are highlighted here. It should be noted that Ernesto’s
revisions were not conducted independently, but rather were the result of a variety of in-class
support structures, including substantial teacher scaffolding in individual writing conferences,
whole group instruction, and peer feedback sessions. Nevertheless, only Ernesto was responsible
for incorporating this feedback into his revised draft.

Ernesto’s revised draft

January 27, 2005

Tsunami
Last month, on December 26, 2004, the world witnessed a terrible event. A tsunami which
occurred in the Indian Ocean. It was a big wave and then it shook some countries such as
India, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia.

Many people died, as many as 170,000 and many more now have problems. They don’t
have clean water, shelter, food, and medicine. Many tourists were killed by the waves, and
schools, hospitals, hotels, and restaurants were destroyed. People lost everything including
their lives.

The world is helping now with food, money, clean water, and clothing. Although this help
is necessary, it is impossible to help everybody.

This disastrous event is both sad and frightening because it could happen to anyone.

Establishing an authoritative stance

At first glance, Ernesto’s second draft may not seem to be much of an improvement. The
revised draft is shorter, in part because Ernesto infelicitously left out some important information
regarding the description of the tsunami. However, some very important changes were made. One
of the first changes Ernesto made was to drop the first-person singular pronoun and take a more
distanced third-person stance. In changing ‘‘I feel sadness and fear’’ to ‘‘This disastrous event,’’
Ernesto moved away from his feelings being the point of departure. Making the event as the point
of departure allowed him to evaluate the event rather than report on his personal feelings about it.
While many students tend to write about what they think or feel about events, this stance often
violates the expectations of academic registers since it does not come across as authoritative.
Instead of choosing thinking/feeling processes to report about current or historical events, being/
having processes are a more appropriate choice.

Using conjunction
In addition to adopting a more authoritative stance, Ernesto incorporated other important
features of academic registers into his revised draft. One of these is the effective use of
conjunction. Although Ernesto attempted to use newly learned conjunctions (‘‘although,’’ ‘‘such
as’’) in his first draft, the result was more reflective of a spoken register. As Schleppegrell (2004)
observes, in academic registers ‘‘more integrated logical relations are typically more highly
valued’’ (p. 65). These logical relations are presented densely in academic texts through the
increased use of embedded clauses and grammatical metaphor, as well as through the use of more
 P. Spycher / Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007) 238–254 251

text-based vocabulary and phrasing that is highly valued in academic writing such as ‘‘whereas’’
or ‘‘as a result of.’’ In his first draft, Ernesto seemed unsure about how to use ‘‘although’’ to
logically contrast the two clauses he presents. It is unclear what meaning he was using
‘‘although’’ to realize, although he seems to use it as he would use the spoken conjunction ‘‘but’’
to link the first to the second clause. In his second draft, Ernesto uses ‘‘although’’ more clearly
and accurately to logically guide the reader to concede that no amount of aid could possibly reach
every survivor of the tsunami. His use of conjunction could be made more effectively, but Ernesto
is moving steadily toward a more academic register.

Referencing
Once participants (people, things, or events) have been introduced in a text, writers must
‘‘track’’ or refer to them in particular ways in order to guide readers through the text. Ways of
referencing are, in part, dependent upon the genre the writer is using. Unlike a story genre in
which the characters carry the sequence of events and are tracked through the use of pronouns,
a factual genre must use other resources to track participants. Ernesto’s first draft used
references that are more typical of a story genre, which is an indication that he was not sure
how to use reference resources differently depending on the genre. For example, while Ernesto
used the pronouns ‘‘it,’’ ‘‘they,’’ and ‘‘I’’ several times to track participants, the expectation of
factual genres is to use lexical resources to continually refer to the same thing. In this way,
effective writers add details about the same participant each time they track it and are therefore
able to pack in more information and move the writing along much more fluidly than they
would by using a pronoun for reference. An example of this is provided in the following
excerpts from a student text and a professionally written newspaper article (text that is
underlined indicates the originally introduced participants to which the subsequent text in
each column refers):
Student text

An earthquake caused a tsunami.

It had a magnitude of 9.0 It was big.
It had waves that moved as fast as 500 mph. It was a terrible event.
Professionally written text

A gargantuan earthquake unleashed a series of tsunamis.

The 9.0 magnitude earthquake . . . The resulting convulsion . . .
The initial quake struck . . . The surging tides . . .

In his second draft, Ernesto began to make less use of pronouns and more use of lexical
resources to track participants. For example, in the following excerpt, Ernesto correctly uses the
nominalization ‘‘this help’’ to refer back to the previous clause, thereby condensing all of the
information in the previous clause into two words:
‘‘The world is helping now with food, money, clean water, and clothing. Although this help
is necessary, it is impossible to help everybody.’’ (Ernesto’s revised draft)
Similarly, in the final clause, he uses ‘‘This disastrous event’’ to simultaneously refer all the
way back to the thesis statement and to sum up the entire piece:
‘‘Last month, on December 26, 2004, the world witnessed a terrible event . . .
252 P. Spycher / Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007) 238–254

This disastrous event is both sad and frightening because it could happen to anyone.’’
(Ernesto’s revised draft)
These adjustments may seem minor. However, they are important steps for students learning
to control academic registers. The fact that Ernesto had only been writing in English for only
several months when he wrote the two drafts presented here cannot be overemphasized. Instead
of being overwhelmed with the prospect of writing an academic essay or, conversely, not being
given opportunities to develop academic writing proficiency, Ernesto was working in his ‘‘zone
of proximal development’’ (Vygotsky, 1978) to improve his writing according to the expectations
of the genre. He still had a long way to go in his writing development, but with significant
instructional attention identifying and addressing specific linguistic challenges, he was likely to
continue to progress.
Table 1 provides an overview of the three linguistic features in focus, the instructional
strategies implemented in the ELD class, and findings from Ernesto’s two drafts.

Discussion and implications

This paper examined two main questions: What kinds of linguistic challenges do newcomer
EL students face in their academic writing, and how do they respond to instruction that explicitly
addresses these challenges? These questions were explored using qualitative methods and
discourse analysis from an SFL perspective. Ernesto’s case suggests that teachers working with
EL adolescent students can support accelerated progress in academic writing proficiency, even
for students at lower levels of English language proficiency. In Ernesto’s case, instructional
practices that incorporated attention to particular features of academic language appeared to
promote his writing development.
There are, however, several limitations to this paper. First, this paper does not address whether
the linguistic features Ernesto successfully incorporated into his second draft transferred to other
contexts or were sustained over time. Of particular interest is whether he was able to use his new

Table 1
Overview of the three linguistic features in focus
Features in Instructional strategies (examples) Student writing before Student writing
focus instruction after instruction
Authoritative Explicit instruction in dropping I feel sadness and fear This disastrous event
stance the first-person pronoun; analysis because one of these is both sad and
focusing on the way academic text disasters can shake this frightening because
establishes authority (e.g., process country or my country. it could happen to
analysis, sentence analysis); contrastive anyone.
analysis (everyday vs. academic language);
whole class-guided text construction
Conjunction Explicit instruction of conjunctions Although the help can’t Although this help is
based on function; contrastive analysis give all the people. It is necessary, it is
of everyday vs. academic conjunctions almost impossible to help impossible to help
everyone. everybody.
Reference Explicit instruction in nominalization Many people died . . .. The world is helping
for tracking participants; clause analysis They don’t have . . . The now with food, money,
focusing on how participants are identified people lost . . . clean water, and
and tracked in expository genres clothing. . . . this help . . .
 P. Spycher / Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007) 238–254 253

understandings for writing tasks in his other classes. In addition, not all students incorporated the
linguistic resources addressed in instruction into their writing. Further data collection and
analyses are needed in order to determine whether students like Ernesto continue to use certain
linguistic resources in various contexts long after they are taught and practiced, and whether
students unlike Ernesto benefit from the same types of instructional strategies.
Even with these limitations, this paper has several implications. The first implication concerns
curriculum and instruction for EL adolescent students. EL students need opportunities to learn
about and practice how language works to get things done in different contexts so that they can
gain flexibility in meeting the language expectations of those contexts. One way to approach this
instructional area is through tangible instructional resources and strategies for using discourse
analysis in the classroom, some of which are provided in this paper. The second implication
concerns teacher education. This method of teaching is learned neither easily nor rapidly.
Learning to teach using genre-based and SFL-derived pedagogy requires intensive and sustained
professional development. Teachers first need to learn how to ‘‘unpack’’ academic discourse
themselves in order to effectively teach their students to understand and produce academic
language more successfully. A comprehensive understanding of how language works is critical in
the successful implementation of strategies that go deeper than the ‘‘activity’’ level. This
approach to instruction may be more effective when fostered in collaborative communities of
practice where teachers can share successes and challenges and be supported with the resources –
mostly time and on-going guidance from experts – to do so.
There is still a relative paucity of research on EL secondary writing development and
corresponding effective instructional strategies. This untapped area of research is clearly a rich
one where collaborative efforts between researchers, teachers, and students could result in useful
insights and concrete pedagogical tools. However, these collaborative efforts must be undertaken
with caution and with particular attention to teacher expertise and classroom teaching realities.
Teachers neither need nor want more pedagogical approaches that do not make sense to them and
that lack the supportive structures to implement effectively. Enhancing the abilities of teachers to
provide effective academic writing instruction to their EL students will not be achieved in a
Saturday workshop session, but rather through thoughtfully designed, seriously supported, and
sustained efforts.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Mary Schleppegrell and Dr. Barbara Merino for
their invaluable insights and feedback in the development of this manuscript.

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Pamela Spycher is a senior research associate at WestEd and a faculty member at the School of Education at UC Davis.
She has taught in K-12 classrooms in California, Oregon, and Southeast Asia and has mentored teachers to provide
effective instruction to their English learning students.