Abstract
Research into the written performance of Arab EFL learners centres for the most part upon their failure to handle a variety of assignments as prescribed by the writing syllabus. All things considered, writing problems are primarily attributed to the students’ linguistic incompetence, immature mastery of rhetorical structure of the English text and Arabic discourse transfer (Al-Khuweileh and Al-Shoumali, 2000; Al-Hazmi and Schofield, 2007) By contrast, educational policies and teaching usually evade criticism. This study is an attempt to provide a new interpretation of learners’ writing problems. In other words, it posits that writing problems could also be caused by the employment of outdated approaches and resources. To verify this argument, the present paper explored the existing writing courses in three Arab Universities, revealing that English Departments adopted approaches and materials characteristic of the 1940s and 1950s. Needless to say, unless new developments into the linguistic theory and writing pedagogy, i.e. genre analysis, contrastive rhetoric and discourse analysis, are incorporated into the existing writing syllabus, Arab EFL learners will continue to have writing problems.
Highlights
Research into the writing of Arab EFL learners focuses for the most part on their failure to handle a variety of assignments prescribed by the syllabus that has constituted their writing training
Theoretical Background It is plausible to argue that part of the historical dilemma of writing pedagogy lies with the way it was approached vis-àvis the other language skills as can be shown by the formal and functional definitions of writing
The late 1970s witnessed a shift to a new direction in writing pedagogy where more attention was paid to the social context of writing as demonstrated in the literature produced by the advocates of the communicative, the functional and the genre theories, to mention but some
Summary
Research into the writing of Arab EFL learners focuses for the most part on their failure to handle a variety of assignments prescribed by the syllabus that has constituted their writing training. All writing forms characteristic of the oral and audio-lingual methods (technically known as controlled composition) are subsumed under this approach since they were concerned with the correct use of language structures These forms of writing could not be expected to develop learners’ composing abilities beyond the sentence level. The 1960s witnessed a new development into the product approach that came to be known in the literature as the "current-traditional rhetoric" This writing theory differs from its predecessor (i.e. controlled composition) in advocating writing at discourse level. Due to these considerations, the late 1970s witnessed a shift to a new direction in writing pedagogy where more attention was paid to the social (and cultural) context of writing as demonstrated in the literature produced by the advocates of the communicative, the functional and the genre theories, to mention but some. It persuaded language educators that the structural and transformational view of language does not adequately account for language as a system of communication; writing researchers started to approach the written text as a "communicative event rather than something that illustrates a theoretical point" ( Couture, 1986, p. 2)
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