Developing writing competence in educational process

Extensive writing implies successful management of all the processes and strategies of writing for all purposes, up to the length of an essay, a term paper, a major research project report, or even a thesis. Students focus on achieving a purpose, organizing and developing ideas logically, using details to support or illustrate ideas, demonstrating syntactic and lexical variety, and in many cases, engaging in the process of multiple drafts to achieve a final product.

Asking the pupils to discuss their mistakes may provide us with wide information about interference, typical mistakes, usage of skills and give us clear evidence of language learning. A piece of writing (for instance, essay) as a final work at advanced level can be evaluated on the basis of criteria:

1) Task achievement: relevance and appropriateness of ideas and examples, coverage, variety, suitability of the text, type and length, awareness of a target reader, precision;

2) Organization: cohesion, coherence sequencing, paragraphing, layout and punctuation, length/complexity of sentence, textual fluency;

3) Range: structures, vocabulary, appropriateness, flexibility, detail, avoidance of repetition;

4) Accuracy: grammar, vocabulary, spelling.

Writing is a complex communicative activity. It helps to communicate in the written form with the help o f graphical symbols. Writing is a type of speech activity as «a communicative skill to encode, store and send messages with the help of written symbols».The product of this type of speech activity is a text for reading.Writing is meant as acquiring graphical and orthographical systems of EL by students for fixation speech and language material to remember it and support acquiring oral speech. Modern approaches to teaching writing recognize its dual purpose: as a means (a support skill) and as an end (communicative skill).Writing refers to several subskills: putting words on paper,making sentences and linking them in paragraphs, developing essays and many others. So, writing is also a support skill . At the elementary and intermediate levels it helps to think and to learn. Writing new words and structures help students remember new words; written practice helps students focus their attention on what they are learning. It is important for developing all skills.Writing serves as learning and controlling means.

Table 1. Writing as a means and purpose in ELT.

Writing to learn	Learning to write
A means o f engaging students with other language skills: 1) as a means o f getting students to practice a particular language point; 2) as a method o f testing it.	. A purpose for developing a writing skill. Practice written forms at the level o f a word, sentence, structure and content organization
Activities: note down new vocabulary, copy out grammar rules; write answers to reading and listening comprehension questions, to written tests	Activities: writing a letter, report, narrative stoiy, describing the picture, combining writing with other speech activities - writing a response to reading an article, writing an annotation to the text, etc.

Writing is, of course, not easy, but it is less difficult than what many students imagine. To improve their writing skill, all the students have to do is practicing writing as much as possible, since, once more to say, writing is a skill gained by practicing. Practicing writing does not mean that they have to write something scientific. They can write freely anything they want without worrying about the correctness of every kind. They should understand that the main function of writing is conveying meaning or communicating. Nevertheless, meaningful writing involves the aspects of writing skill. Therefore, students should read much from the writing of the more proficient writers in order to get the examples of good writing. The more they read, the more they understand about the way how they write.

References:

Brookes,Arthur&Grundy , Peter . 2000. Beginning to Write.Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Chandrasegaran,A.,&Schaetzel ,K. (2004) Think your way to effective writing(3^rd ed.).Singapore:Pearson/Prentice Hall.

Ferris, D. R. (2014) Language power:Tutorials for writers. Boston,New York:Beldford/St.Martin’s.

Flanegin,M., and Rudd B., (2000).Integration Communication Skills and Business Education.Journal of Business Education.

J.J.Jalolov,G.T.Makhkamova,Sh.S.Ashurova .2015.English Language Teaching Methodology.Tashkent.