Reasons for teaching writing

In everyday life the need for longer, formal written -work seems to have lessened over the years, and this is reflected in many classrooms -where writing activities are perhaps less often found than those for the three other skills.

Despite this, there may still be a number of good reasons why it is useful to include work on writing.

•  Reinforcement: some students acquire languages in a purely oral/aural way, but most of us benefit greatly from seeing the language written down. The visual demonstration of language construction is invaluable for both our understanding of how it all fits together and as an aid to committing the new language to memory. Students often find it useful to write sentences using new language shortly after they have studied it.

•  Language development: we can't be sure, but it seems that the actual process of writing (rather like the process of speaking) helps us to learn as we go along. The mental activity we have to go through in order to construct proper written texts is all part of the ongoing learning experience.

•  Language style: some students are fantastically quick at picking up language just by looking and listening. For the rest of us, it may take a little longer. For many learners, the time to think things through, to produce language in a slower way, is invaluable. Writing is appropriate for such learners. It can also be a quiet reflective activity instead of the rush and bother of interpersonal face-to-face communication.

•   Writing as a skill: by far the most important reason for teaching writing, of course, is that it is a basic language skill, just as important as speaking, listening and treading. Students need to know how to write letters, how to put written reports together, how to reply to advertisements - and increasingly, how to write using electronic media They need to know some of the writing's special conventions (punctuation, paragraph construction etc.) just as they need to know how to pronounce spoken English appropriately. Part of our job is to give them that skill.

•  It can give the teacher a break, quieten down a noisy class, change the mood and pace of a lesson, etc.