Students for whom English is a second or third language have a keen understanding of how languages work. However, they have different skills and needs than native speakers of English. This might be because they have to deal with competing cultural expectations and competing languages, ESL students can have special difficulties seeing problems with their writing and solving them.
Many ESL students come from cultural and educational systems where concepts of scholarship and individual ownership of ideas are very different from the English native speakers. In Malaysian context, the historical background of Malay Language and English, social surrounding and the acquisition of English and Malay and English morphology are the main reasons of the English writing problems among the ESL students especially the young ones.
There are many teachers out there will stay awake till midnight or wake up early in the morning marking piles of students' test or exam papers. Their smile will grow slowly as they read...'They will brought the money to the bank' or 'The girls were cleaned the house compound'.
Well, it's just a predictable sequence; the students will make writing errors and the teachers try to eliminate them. Unfortunately, in this issue of writing, we should focus on strategies for helping students gain control over their written language. Teachers' extra attention as they design assignments or homeworks and offer comments to guide students' revisions of their drafts can both help students and save time.
