ESL students’ attitudes toward punctuation

Punctuation is a surprisingly underexplored area of second language writing and learning. The small body of published literature about punctuation tends to look at ways in which punctuation can be taught. Little is known, except anecdotally, about how English as a second language (ESL) students actually feel about using English punctuation, despite the fact that they must use it frequently if they are writing in English, and may have different notions of how it functions based on its use in their native language. In this paper we report on a survey study of university students’ attitudes toward punctuation in English as a first step toward generating deeper understanding about students’ use of punctuation. The results suggest that students are generally somewhat positive about their use of English punctuation, with some variance in their use of punctuation depending on the writing context at hand.