U.S. academic readers,1 ESL writers, and second sentences

Abstract Traditionally, ESL writing teachers have taught the concept of the topic sentence to introduce academic paragraphs. However, ESL students frequently develop paragraphs that do not fulfill the expectations of native English speaker (NES) readers proffered by the topic sentence. Recent writing-reading connection research suggests that different contextual and rhetorical schemata may result in ineffective ESL written communication. This article describes exploratory research focusing on the sentence that immediately follows the topic sentence in an American-English paragraph and seeks to answer the following: Can second sentences be (a) consistently predicted by experienced NES readers; (b) successfully predicted and written by inexperienced and/or experienced NES student writers; (c) successfully predicted and written by inexperienced ESL student writers? Results indicated that whereas NES inexperienced writers sometimes used unexpected, inappropriate second sentences, NESs were able to appropriately predict the “expected” second sentences nearly twice as often as ESL writers. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

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