Writing: A Thinking Process

Why teaching writing is different from teaching other language skills. 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 linguisticallyoriented textbooks designed to teach written English appeared. These textbooks have a number of approaches, from variations on the copybook method at one end of the spectrum to the free composition method at the other end. No doubt most of you have tried some of these approaches, and, I suspect, found all of them lacking in some way. In my experience, this lack has always been in efficiency. None of the textbooks so far published seems to teach anything that cannot be learned from other ESOL courses: from courses in oral production, grammar, or reading. Obviously, grammar, aural comprehension, reading, and even oral production are to varying degrees involved in writing. Certainly we cannot teach a writing course which never touches on these areas. But at the same time teaching a writing course which covers only these areas is redundant. Given the limited time most of us have to teach students as much as we can about English, we ought to, if purely for efficiency's sake, use a method which teaches the students something