A study of the effects of the approaches to the teaching of writing on the efl instructors’ preferences at universities

Abstract

There are several ways to
 approach writing in the classroom and there is no best way to teach writing
 skills. Many learners cannot produce language although
 writing is a productive and active skill. Being reluctant, unconfident and
 unmotivated, they do not want to write in a foreign language. There are a
 number of traditional and current approaches to student writing.
 Writing-for-learning includes some form-focused and imitation-based approaches
 like guided, controlled and product-driven. However, writing-for-writing is
 directed at developing the students’ writing skills as writers. This article
 aims to examine how teachers approach the teaching of writing at tertiary level
 and also determine teachers’ preferences for which approach they use in the
 classroom and what type of writing teacher they are. A questionnaire in which
 seventy-one instructors teaching English at a variety of universities
 participated was conducted. This questionnaire including their preferences for
 teaching practices was analysed in SPSS. In the lights of the findings
 discovered, many teachers choose to integrate writing with other language
 skills. Skill integration is an increasingly popular approach to teaching
 writing. However, they have a negative attitude towards traditional approaches
 like teaching writing in isolation. There is a growing interest in the number
 of teachers who are in favour of writing as a creative, cooperative and
 integrated skill. Teachers can teach English best as an integrated mode, so
 content-based and task-based teaching methods are proposed as communication
 involves the integration of all language skills.