The first-class instruction of English as a second language

Setiono, Jakarta

The status of English language as a lingua franca throughout the globe has compelled non-English-speaking countries to brace themselves for the free trade era. While China, Japan and Indonesia include English as a compulsory subject in their national curricula, other countries such as Malaysia, the Philippines and India, to mention a few, have been relatively successful in implementing a policy to use English in numerous sectors like education, politics, government and entertainment.

Indonesia, in fact, is still struggling to promote the importance of English through education -- both formal and informal -- although English is the first foreign language taught. The Ministry of National Education has made English a mandatory subject at secondary schools, but it is only recently that the language has become compulsory at the primary level.

Sadly, however, English-language instruction has not yet yielded satisfactory results, seen in the fact that many high school and university graduates are unable to communicate in English, particularly in its written form. This ensues from teachers' fallacious perceptions about the essence of teaching literacy.

A student in my writing class, for example, once lamented that in a previous writing class, she always felt intimidated by the assignments given out by the instructor. She said the class was boring, the teacher often made discouraging comments on her papers and the teacher seldom supported freedom of expression.

According to this description, teachers of writing are much more concerned with the written product and seem to overlook the students' overall learning experience in regards writing.

This inevitably brings about a negative result for students: They become confused, distressed and bored with the demands on their writing assignment, and end up feeling constantly intimidated in class. In addition, they often fail to meet their teacher's expectations. The flip side is that when they do manage to fulfill expectations, the students feel they have not acquired the abilities needed to write well.

Teaching students to write successfully to meet the academic demands of their college or university careers is a challenging and arduous enterprise. Endeavors have been made to enhance the efficacy of writing instruction by introducing new approaches and theories to teaching. Nevertheless, writing is still perceived as a notoriously arduous and intricate skill to teach.

Writing is indeed a complex skill to teach and to learn, as it involves not only the mastery of grammar, diction, syntax and the ability to arrange sentences in logical order, but it also involves the skill to make the written word intelligible to readers. Writing is not just a matter of generating, composing and revising ideas on paper, but an act of translating these ideas into readable texts in a context appropriate to different audiences.

Put simply, writing is not a mere product. It is an undertaking of complex cognitive processes.

Unfortunately, it is this very critical understanding of writing that our teachers lack.

Due to the inherent complexity of writing, teachers often become frustrated, focused on succeeding in their instruction. What is more, with the emergence of so many conflicting writing theories and so many applications to consider, many language teachers feel daunted by teaching writing.

Beset by the uncertainties and perplexities of adopting the appropriate approach, teachers feel they no longer need coherent perspectives, principles or models -- theories of thought -- upon which to base their instruction. The ideology behind teaching is thus ignored and even neglected by teachers.

A pragmatic approach to teaching writing only presupposes an assumption about writing per se. Questions related to ideology such as the students' purpose in learning to write in a new language, different writing styles, intended audiences and writing context are not given sufficient consideration in composition classes taught by teachers with pragmatic aims.

Writing teachers clearly need a strong basis in educational ideology and theories to be competent. A firm grounding in theories that shape writing instruction in the classroom can help teachers gain a significant insight into previous assumptions about writing.

The fact that many university graduates are unable to write well stem primarily from a teacher's fallacious notion that teaching writing is tantamount to teaching the linguistic components embodied in written language. This is to say that teachers instill writing correctly in the students' minds, rather than good writing. The result is that students regard writing as a skill associated with the application of graphic rules, not the fluent communication of ideas.

It is common practice -- even at the university level -- that the objectives of writing instruction still cling to a mechanistic approach, dealing with the accuracy of grammar and rhetorical structure of the language studied. As such, writing continues to be taught based on rigidly prescriptive principles.

A teacher's limited knowledge of what actually differentiates writing from other linguistic skills, such as speaking, can also be a great impediment to producing mature student writers. It may thus come as no surprise if a university graduate's writing is typically characterized by the "spoken code", rather than those features that govern the written form.

A vital perspective on writing that many composition teachers lack is the fundamental idea that writing is a process of discovering meaning. This implies that during the process of writing, students are given an opportunity to formulate, elaborate, clarify and reformulate their ideas. In order to enable students to discover and express their ideas, teachers should facilitate classroom activities and an environment designed to promote fluency in writing.

The practice, however, seems to be the other way around. Teachers often view student compositions as fixed and final products to be judged, assessed and scored. At this juncture, such an evaluation is counterproductive as it limits the notion of writing as an exercise in deriving meaning.

Finally, it is truly ironic that many university teachers are assigned to teach writing, even though they have never had any writing experience -- that is, in publishing their work in newspapers, scientific journals and other media. At best, they are able to assist their students in learning grammatical structure and acquiring knowledge of those graphic conventions needed for writing correctly, nothing more.

As a final remark, there seems to be no better way to teach writing to our students and nurturing their growth as mature writers than to assign teachers who are not only knowledgeable of teaching ideologies, but who also have ample experience in publishing their own writing in national and international journals.

The writer is a lecturer in the Department of English Education at Atma Jaya Catholic University.