Writing in a foreign language at university: background issues
Now that you have considered the writing tasks you use in your teaching, it is useful to look briefly at your department's policy on setting and marking writing tasks. Firstly, it may be helpful to think about what expectations your department has of you. Look at the following statements and tick 'yes' or 'no' as appropriate:
| My department expects me… |
YES
|
NO
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| 1. to collect in and mark my students' writing regularly. | ||
| 2. to give my students a mark for every piece of work I collect in. | ||
| 3. to set prescribed work, not work which I choose to set. | ||
| 4. to correct all the mistakes my students make. | ||
| 5. to report back on students who are performing badly in writing. | ||
| 6. to set writing tasks mainly as homework activities. | ||
| 7. to be 'strict' when I am marking my students' work. | ||
| 8. to give individual feedback to students on their writing performance. | ||
| 9. to insist on the importance of accuracy in writing. | ||
| 10. to set remedial work or to provide extra help for those students who are struggling. |
You may have noticed, in doing this task, that there were discrepancies here between what your department expects of you and what you yourself feel is good practice when teaching writing. For example, your department may expect you to be 'strict' when you correct written work, but you may feel that a more sensitive, encouraging approach might be more appropriate for certain students. Or, you may be asked to give your students a mark out of 20, but you may think that this could be demotivating. Perhaps your situation is similar to that of the teachers who have made the comments below:
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TUTOR VOICES (1) I would like to try out new ideas for writing in the classroom, but we have little time, we just have to follow the syllabus. People who decide what we've got to teach on the course seem to be out of touch, because they don't teach language themselves. My department seems happy for me to approach writing any way I choose, as long as they are doing writing regularly. I just give writing as homework, because there is no time to do anything else, and anyway, my students wouldn't be prepared to spend much class time writing. Nothing has changed in my department for years. They still set the same old writing tasks. |
Some of these comments suggest that FL tutors may face a number of constraints. However, even though you may feel quite critical of certain traditional attitudes to writing instruction (perhaps those that you experienced yourself), it would be unwise to try and change too much, too quickly within your department. Your department's policy on writing will have built up over time, and will often be based on sound experiences of what 'works'. More useful, perhaps, is to reflect on what factors are responsible for the way in which writing is taught in your department. If you understand what those factors are, you will be better able to teach effectively within your particular environment. We shall now consider some of these factors, and you will be asked to think about how they relate to your own departmental setting. These factors are:
- institutional;
- individual;
- methodological.
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KEY ISSUES FOR TEACHING (1)
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