Can Youssef Write?

Abstract

On the heels of research in the 1970s by Briton and others at the University of London, where they discovered that classrooms were disturbingly teacher-centered, the article Why Johnny Cant Write? , appeared in Newsweek in 1975 and set the academic world on a path of reform. Briton is credited with labeling the subsequent pedagogical movement that promoted writing as a means to engage students in the process of knowledge formation as 'writing across the curriculum' (WAC). The literary crisis the Newsweek article generated resulted in WAC programs being implemented in more than 50% of institutions Of higher education in the US by the late 1980s (Kemper, 2013). The assumption that writing is not just a means of expressing what was learned but is, in fact, an integral part of the learning process is the central thesis of this essay. The essay explores how writing has played a major role in the learning process in tertiary programs in the Western world and how WAC is beginning to inform learning at the tertiary level internationally. The paper argues that if such extraordinary measures were taken in a native-speaker context to avert a perceived literacy crisis, then a context, such as the University Of Balamand, where English is a second or even third language, should also put equally extraordinary measures into practice for the benefit of students.