Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

particular purpose we have in mind. Sometimes this is a
matter of layout, as in writing a business letter, or of
organisation, as in minutes of a meeting, but sometimes it is a
much more subtle process of recognising the level of
formality of certain combinations of utterance, or of
appreciating what would sound bizarre or inappropriate—
for any reason whatsoever—to a native speaker. Clearly it is
not possible to teach explicitly everything a writer needs to
know about English, but fortunately for teachers the learning
of language takes place to a great extent unconsciously. A
successful writing course must select the conventions and
styles which are most likely to be useful to the students, but a
great deal of the sensitivity which the students need in the use
of language will develop unconsciously from spin-off from
their reading and talking in the rest of the English course, so
writing cannot be seen as something completely separated
from the other activities.
If we define the main aims of the writing course as
developing appropriate ranges of style coherently and easily
used, teachers may well feel that the traditional concerns of
spelling and basic grammatical errors are being neglected. In
fact, while these are of some significance, and should be
corrected by students as they learn to write good English,
correction of these alone will not ensure that satisfactory
English writing results. We would expect a good writing
course to help students to correct their mistakes, but natural
writing does not result primarily from exercises in avoiding
mistakes, so we need to fit help with correction into a
framework of more positive development of writing skills.

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Writing
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