Contents Introduction Main body Chapter I. Difficulties of writing and the status of writing in elt

The status of writing in ELT

Under the impact of behavioral psychology and structuralism and during the heyday of the audio-lingual approach to foreign language, the teaching skill of wring was neglected and at best was relegated to a secondary place and priority was given to oral fluency.
Moreover, writing language was seen as no more than recording of speech but the sentence level received the greatest emphasis. Thence, the student was expected to be able to proceed on his own. This assumption that this foreign language learner can proceed from the sentence-level to the proper essay-writing without adequate preparation simply because he can write an adequate essay in his native language is still one of the strong but mistaken beliefs that many language teachers act upon.
States that writing was "the hand maid" of other skills and did not have a separate place in the ESL. Curriculum, whatever writing took place was meant to serve as a reinforcement of language principles and not for other purposes as addressing a topic or communicating with an audience, and writing task was highly controlled in order to reduce the possibility of errors.
William Moulton summed up the principles of the structural approach in the following slogans: 1. Language is speech not writing. 2. Language is a set of habits.
Under the influence of audio-lingual approach to teaching language, it has been wise to consider speech as being of basic importance, with writing being placed a poor second. Actually, writing was looked upon as being a somewhat inferior form of language. This viewpoint, when applied zealously, has had a number of unfortunate consequences for learner. The learner was often denied the support of the written language during the early stages of the learning. The learner who wished to acquire a reading and writing control of the language had to proceed through a lot of spoken practice before getting down to the written form. Writing practice when introduced, tends to be an extension of spoken practice even through as is quite obvious when we think of it, we do not often write exactly what we say. Perhaps this historical stance led to negligence of writing which in turn became a cause of writing difficulty.
However, nowadays and under influence of the communicative approach, writings is no longer relegated to second place. Instead, writing is given its own status in ELT course. There is a number of reasons for this change linguists have become interested in studying the characteristics of written as well as spoken language, and it is now crystal clear for everyone that writing is not simply a poor relative of speaking or that speaking is nearly a sloppy version of writing: Teachers of English have become increasingly interested in the need to teach writing to students of science and technology, for whom ability in spoken language may be secondary or even irrelevant. The considerable growth in the study of language beyond the sentence level that is in discourse which coincided with the increase of interest in written language by both linguists and ELT teachers. Writing, in any language, can be so much fun! It’s exciting to send messages and letters to people in a language that they understand. Everyone enjoys describing events in their lives, talking about pictures and places, and sharing their thoughts and ideas. Many also like to create stories and songs, too! So, how can we, as teachers, help our ELT students develop this type of enthusiasm for sharing and writing in English?
Children enjoy the beginning stages of writing, when they are learning the letters or characters. Young learners are very willing to work at tracing letters and words. They are usually eager to learn how to print their names and the names of their brothers, sisters and pets. It’s this interest in writing that we want to maintain as we help our students learn and continue to develop their English writing skills. Yet writing can be a challenging skill for children to learn. So what can we do to help them retain their interest in writing while they develop their skills and confidence in writing in English?
To be able to write in English, students must have a basic foundation and understanding of the spoken language. To get our students prepared to write, we need to provide opportunities for them to recycle and review the language they already know. They need to know how to identify and talk about objects and people in English in order to write something about them. Of course, they must also know how to write the alphabet letters so that they can learn to spell words that they know. Finally, they need to know some basic sentence patterns in order to write sentences that are meaningful to them.
Students must also be able to read some words and sentences because the skill of reading goes hand-in-hand with learning to write. Reading provides the opportunity for students to become more familiar with language patterns, and it develops their vocabulary. Yes, reading, as well as listening and speaking, are important in helping our students learn to write. So our writing activities should always include these skills as part of the pre-writing steps.
As beginner ELT students become more skilled in writing words and sentences, they can expand on their own one-sentence descriptions by adding extra words, like adjectives, or one or two more sentences. If you have them describe several of their own pictures, they can then put them together to make their own small book. This is a great motivator for the students. They will enjoy reading their books and will be look forward to writing more. You could also let them take their books home to share their stories, and new writing skills, with their families.
You can also motivate your students of all levels to write by providing them with real-life writing exercises. For example, they can write about something that happened while they were all together in your English class. Start by talking about what happened as a class and then encourage each of the students to draw a picture and write a sentence or two about the event. Next have them share their sentences with the class and finally combine all the sentences into a story. It becomes a small book that was written by the class.
Other types of real-life writing activities include making lists of vocabulary words, making lists of things to buy at the store, and writing notes, text messages and emails to friends. You can also have your students create their own comic strips or keep a simple journal in which they share thoughts in English with you.
These are just a few of the ways you can keep your students engaged in writing in English. There are many activities that can be used which give children a realistic reason to write. Whatever activity you choose to use should be one that is motivating and that taps into your students’ interests. Doing this will help keep your students enthusiastic about writing in English.
Over the past decades, English has become a global language and the language of the internet. This means that in order to participate globally on the internet or elsewhere, literacy in which influences their perceptions of using English in speech and writing.
When young learners start learning English at primary school, many of them already know how to write in another language (their L1). Depending on what language they are familiar with, they may have an awareness of differences between scripts: that some are alphabetic, others syllabic or logographic; that concepts correspond with symbols (letters, signs etc.); how words are depicted and how text is organised using, for example, punctuation marks. They also know that the written language can be combined with pictures, colours, symbols and fonts to illustrate meaning, and they know how to use technology to do this. Technology and digital texts have transformed communication from primarily words to a logic of design (cf. Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; New London Group, 1996), turning multimodal text production into an important means for language learning.
Children also bring meaning-making and identity across languages. In a study of how 11-year-old Swedish children express interpersonal meaning when writing in English, Lindgren and Stevenson (2013) showed that even with limited knowledge of the language, children expressed their feelings and interacted with a reader in much the same ways as they did when they wrote in Swedish as their L1. It was rather gender more so than language that affected how the children communicated with the reader or expressed themselves through writing. Their identities came across strongly regardless of which language they used for writing.