HOW TO TEACH WRITING

Talking Points:

1. What do you think are the basic differences between written and spoken language as types of communicative activities?

2. Teaching writing has been rather neglected for a number of years, don't you think? What was the reason?

3. How should one start teaching his students written English?

4. Through what stage should a student pass before he acquires the skill of writing a composition?

I. a) Read the following text:

For some years linguists have been writing textbooks designed to teach foreign students spoken English. But only recently, as teach­ers have found that many students want and need to learn how to write English as well as to speak it, have linguistically oriented text­books designed to teach written English appeared .

It is obvious that grammar, aural comprehension, reading, and even oral production are to varying degrees involved in writing. Certainly we cannot teach a writing course that never touches on these areas. But, at the same time, teaching a writing course that covers only these areas is redundant. Given the limited time most of us have to teach the student as much as we can about English, we should, if only for efficiency's sake, use a method that teaches him something he will not learn in his other courses. That is, we should use a method that emphasizes that which is unique in writing...

Learning to write, then, involves more than learning to use ortho­graphic symbols. Primarily, it involves selecting and organizing ex­perience[2][3] according to a certain purpose. It follows that teaching the student to write requires active thought.

When writing the student must keep in mind his purpose, think about the facts he will need to select that are relevant to that purpose, and think about how to organize those facts in a coherent fashion.

Although, unlike pronunciation and grammatical production, the process of reading requires thought, it does not, as does writing, re­quire activity. Reading is a passive process, while writing is active. Although he can learn through reading how various writers have selected and organized facts in order to carry out a specific purpose, the student himself must ultimately undergo the intense mental ac­tivity involved in working out his own problems of selection and or­ganization if he is ever really going to learn to write. This is why the copybook approach, which requires the student to copy and emu­late certain writing, doesn't work very well. While it does require the students to memorize structures, thereby increasing the grammati­cal ability, and perhaps even teaching him something about style, it does not require him to do much thinking.

Because the combination of thought and activity carrying out that thought is unique to writing, we must, in planning a writing curricu­lum, devise exercises that necessitate intense concentration. While grammar and reading are both certainly indispensable to such a cur­riculum, we must present them in such a way that the student will learn to use them as tools. For example, one of the first things the student will have to learn is that writing has certain structural differ­ences from speech. One difference is that writing generally has long­er sentences — what might be two or three sentences in speech is often only one sentence in writing., So the student must learn how to combine the short sentences of spoken English by modification or

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by using sentence connectors of various kinds (conjunctions like however and therefore, phrases like in the first place, etc.)...

Of course, one of the biggest problems in teaching writing is that the student must have facts and ideas in order to write and that these must be manifested in the form of grammatical English sentences. But if we allow him to use the facts and ideas gained from his first­hand experiences, he will think of these first in his own language and then try to translate them word-for-word into English, often with most ungrammatical results. This is why the free composition approach to teaching writing is just as unsatisfactory as the copybook method, but in a different way. The student makes so many grammatical er­rors that his compositions lose much of the original meaning.

We can, however, avoid the problems caused by the student's lim­ited knowledge of grammar and of the idioms of English by requir­ing that, instead of using the facts of firsthand experience, he use secondhand facts gained through the vicarious experience of read­ing. Since what is unique in learning to write is not so much learn­ing to state facts as it is to use them, we can give the student the facts he will be required to use in the form of reading assignments. By using sentences gleaned from reading he can avoid making gram­matical errors and can actively concentrate on the purposeful selec­tion, and organization of those sentences: that is, he can concentrate on thinking.

(From: The Art of TESOL. Washington, 1975. Abridged.)

b) Answer the following questions:

I. What, according to the author, is the main drawback помеха of all text books designed to teach written English? 2. What does learning to write involve? 3. What must the student keep in mind when writing? 4. What is the basic difference between the processes of reading and writing? 5. What is one of the first things the student has to learn about writing? 6. Why does the author consider both the "copybook approach" to writing and "the free composition approach" unsatis factory? 7. What is the author's suggestion for teaching students to write?

П. Debate the following with your fellow-students:

1. To write a good composition it is enough to have a clear idea of what you are going to write about, the rest will take care of itself.

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2. "Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writ­ing an exact man." (Francis Bacon)

Key Words and Expressions: to give students ample practice in writing; to select facts relevant to a purpose; in a coherent fashion; to proceed by stages from the simple to the complex, to communi­cate ideas; constructions peculiar to written English; to explain spe­cific techniques

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