Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

particularly to train students to produce sequences of
sentences which express their meaning most effectively.
Since, both when we speak and when we write, we work not
through isolated sentences but through blocks of sentences,
this should be a more natural activity than using exercises
which consist of lists of sentences without any context

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Writing
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whatsoever. None the less, the ability to put sentences
together effectively needs systematic encouragement, and
sometimes explicit teaching, and part of the work in a
writing course involves teaching students to be sensitive to
the rules of discourse in English.
Connected with the problem of discourse is that of
functional style, or ‘register’. When we use written language,
we obey certain conventions which are appropriate to the