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Foreign Language Writing in Higher Education: Finding a Balance Among Current Teaching Approaches

Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: Writing is an essential component of any foreign language course. It not only constitutes a valuable resource for students to learn the target language, but also serves as a means for communicating their ideas and opinions about different topics from a variety of areas, thus contributing to their intellectual and personal growth. Learning this language skill, however, is not an easy task, due to the wide range of components students need to master in order to write coherent texts in a foreign language. They include planning and arranging their ideas before they are expressed, as well as finding the most appropriate vocabulary and syntactic forms to communicate them in a way that meets audience expectations and suits text conventions. It is therefore important that teachers find a fair balance among these elements taking into consideration the specific teaching context, including the students’ level of language proficiency, as well as their needs and expectations concerning writing. In this context, the present paper aims to provide an overview of the current approaches to teaching this important skill in Higher Education, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses in the light of Communicative Language Teaching. In this sense, the article suggests the use of an approach that integrates the best teaching practices from the current approaches in order to help students achieve successful writing productions in their specific learning contexts. The work is theoretically grounded on studies made by authors such as Badger and White (2000); Reid (2001); Seow, (2002); Broughton et al. (2003); Douglas (2004); Harmer (1998; 2007); Krashen, (2014); Nunan, (2015), among others who made important contributions in this area.
Language: English
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W3204863652
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