The first-class instruction of English as a second language

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.