Towards More Sophisticated Academic Writing: Moving Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay

This article argues that due to test washback, simplicity of instruction, misconceptions of Western-heritage teachers about Asian students, and prevalence in ESL textbooks, the conventional five-paragraph essay is the dominant writing form taught to Asian university students. Yet as Dombek and Herndon (2004) observe, such a simplified form does not reflect the “periodic development” commonly found in the essays of proficient English-language writers and expected in Western university courses. To address this shortcoming, two sophisticated teaching methodologies used in language and liberal arts programs in Thailand and Japan are presented: the essay based upon periodic rather than cumulative development, and the Situation-ProblemSolution-Evaluation (SPSE) approach. Such pedagogies, it is argued, challenge students to move beyond formulas, to incorporate and integrate sources (in addition to personal experience), to engage in critical and creative analysis, and to enact a richer process of thinking in their writing. The Orthodoxy of the Five-Paragraph Essay In a compilation of critical perspectives on language instruction in TESOL Quarterly in 1999, Alastair Pennycook observed that work in TESOL had for a long time been “too narrowly constructed to be of much interest to people outside the area” (p. 346). In other words, the instrumentalist assumptions that underlie much of the field seem to have been accepted to degree that analysis rarely occurred in the discipline. This rigidity continues to be illustrated in the widespread use – and misuse – of the “five-paragraph essay.” Any student who has been required to take an English proficiency examination, such as the TOEFL or IELTS, will have been taught this familiar several-paragraph thesis-driven form (typically five paragraphs, but Language Education in Asia, 2013, 4(1), 60-75. http://dx.doi.org/10.5746/LEiA/13/V4/I1/A5/Punyaratabandhu_Rush_Kleindl_Wadden Language Education in Asia, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2013 Punyaratabandhu, Rush, Kleindl, and Wadden Page 61 ranging from three to six). Driven by test washback (the back-to-front influence tests have on teaching and learning) and its ease of instruction, this model has become the norm in ESL courses and texts around the world. However, authentic writing by authors fully proficient in English rarely takes this form. Instead, as Dombek and Herndon observed, professional essayists tend to write . . . in the periodic style, leading up to the most important thought . . . in their final sentences. They do this because their ideas are so complex or counterintuitive that they could not be understood without the train of thought and pieces of evidence that precede them (2004, p. 27). As Dombek and Herndon pointed out, while the five-paragraph essay can serve as a good base for beginners, it is often inappropriate for higher-level writing. Thus, this paper will suggest and evaluate teaching methodologies which can be used to help students move beyond familiar formulas and challenge them to employ more sophisticated writing styles and rhetorical forms to better engage in the kinds of critical and creative analysis common in authentic discourse. The authors of this paper teach at two institutions. One is the Preparation Center (PC) for Languages and Mathematics, a pre-university program for Mahidol University International College (MUIC) in Thailand; the other is the English for Liberal Arts Program (ELA) at International Christian University (ICU) in Japan. Both programs are considered to be elite within their respective domains, and the English language skills of their students are generally higher than their peers in comparable universities. The common aim of these programs is to produce graduates who not only can use English to communicate functionally to complete basic academic tasks, but who also can use their language abilities critically and creatively. It is for these reasons that teachers in both programs have sought to introduce approaches to writing which move beyond the five-paragraph orthodoxy. To understand how these approaches can be used successfully, it is first necessary to understand why they are needed.