A letter to the teachers of English: 95Prewriting, writing and Rewriting (1) [Archives:2005/872/Education]

Dr..M.N.K.Bose ([email protected])
Associate Professor of English,
Faculty of Arts, Ibb.
Dear Fellow teachers,

Sometime ago, I wrote a series of letters on how to teach writing to our students in schools and colleges. I discussed, if you remember, the importance of writing and the different steps involved in the teaching of writing. My main attention was on developing writing at the early stage. In this letter and the next, I'll discuss the teaching of writing at the post-beginning stage, namely in the secondary and post-secondary stages.

It is incredibly true that most of the western universities have separate departments and syllabuses for teaching writing; so much importance is given to the development of writing. In our universities, on the other hand, writing is a part of a course called, Reading and Composition and receives scanty attention, and the result is that our students' writing (not to speak of the teachers') is awfully intolerable. Our preferences are, unfortunately, wrong: if you ask any student about his priorities in the learning of skills in English, he or she will say 'spoken English', and this is the top in the list of priorities of the teachers too. In other words, we think, wrongly though, that our students need spoken English more than writing; this is mainly because of the ordering of the language skills – listening, speaking, reading and writing – dinned into our ears in the Faculties of Education. We forget that this sequencing is to highlight the fact that this is how the language skills are acquired naturally, and this is not to stress that the language skills should be taught in this order. The order changes according to the needs of the learners, for example, if we run an English course for the news readers in the radio and TV, our priorities will be speaking, listening, reading and writing; if we run an English course for editors in newspaper industry, the priorities will be writing, reading, listening and speaking.

In our situations where English is taught as a foreign language, the priorities should be reading, writing, listening and speaking; I have been saying this consistently but most of my colleagues in the Faculties of Education do not realize the necessity of this prioritizing and overplay spoken English and expend their valuable energy in teaching it at the expense of other useful skills, namely reading and writing. The unfortunate result is the underdevelopment of these skills in out students throughout their educational period. It should be stated here that most of our students are weak in writing in Arabic, according to my Yemeni colleagues in the English Department.

How to develop writing in our students? Writing is said to be the seed of understanding, as we bring our knowledge into life while we write. Writing reinforces grammar, vocabulary and rhetoric that our students have been learning in their classes. Writing is a wholesome activity in that it involves thinking, expressing, risk taking, satisfying the readers; in a way, it is discovering and rediscovering what we want to say. It is no doubt a complex process and presents a challenge to the students but it has to be mastered as well as possible to make us 'perfect men and women'. It involves several sub skills such as developing the size and shape of the letters, punctuation, word selection and collocation etc; in addition, it involves a lot of thinking. That is why, writing is said to involve both mind and body of the writer.

More in the next letter.

Yours fraternally,

Dr.M.N.K.Bose
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