You will probably be aware by now that the whole subject of writing (along with reading) is emotively linked to the issue of standards in education, and to the production of a literate society. You may, for example, have heard in the news of the introduction of tests for primary teachers at PGCE level. Many daily newspapers seem to delight in exaggerating the low levels of attainment of trainees in these areas, and lamenting a future generation of teachers unable to undertake basic writing or number tasks.

In FL teaching, too, we sometimes hear of the need, expressed by lecturers, to do something about the apparently falling standards in literacy, and to reverse a perceived decline in standards of accuracy in FL writing. You should now consider how the issue of standards is perceived in your own department.

Reflection activity 2

You will probably find that 'standards' and aspects of literacy are discussed in your own department at least some of the time. You may feel that you get little credit for maintaining or trying to promote such standards, or perhaps, that such maintenance of standards is not really necessary. Either way, it is important to be aware of the variable meaning of the word 'literacy' itself. As Hyland (2002), a researcher in FL instruction, comments, literacy is basically a 'deficit word', which carries with it the social power to define, categorize and exclude people from many aspects of life. The term 'literacy' is often used without taking into consideration the fact that it is used in many ways across a huge range of social contexts. Only some of these, Hyland (2002) observes, have institutional and cultural prestige. Writing a prose translation with no mistakes, for instance, may count as a highly prestigious and sought-after form of literacy within an FL department in a British university. However, it may be seen as somewhat marginal outside university circles, and not immediately useful in professional contexts.

Sometimes your students will be criticized in meetings for a lack of basic ability in spelling, punctuation and grammar. Some typical comments one hears from time to time are as follows:

Comments such as these are, at best, elitist. If post-A-level students seem to be less accurate than their counterparts twenty years ago, they often make up for it with a heightened sense of appropriateness, confidence and communicative ability. With the advent of the communicative approach, which places emphasis on meaning rather than on form, attitudes towards accuracy, both among students and teachers, have changed from seeing mistakes as 'bad' or 'wrong' to seeing them as 'good', or at least, normal, because they provide helpful insights into learner performance.

Nevertheless, it is worth bearing in mind what Mitchell (1994) says about the more negative aspects of applying an 'indiscriminate' communicative approach to everything one does. She raises concerns about certain teaching situations where students can produce little other than 'unanalyzable global phrases' and have not internalized a creative language system which allows sentences to be produced correctly in transferable situations. She warns that work still needs to be done to allow grammar to be tackled in an effective way in a communicative teaching context.

As your own teaching develops, you will need to get a balanced view regarding the usefulness of communicative activities, and especially, the balance that you want to achieve between accuracy and fluency. The view that communicative writing tasks constitute a decline in intellectual challenge, a 'dumbing down', is unfair. Happily, perhaps, FL teaching nowadays sees language as more than just a series of rules, regulations and constraints, so that students may feel more willing to experiment with the language and to try new strategies. Consider what Cox (1995) says about this. He states:

The teacher's response to written work should foster confidence in the exploration of ideas and the manner of their presentation. Pupils benefit from the opportunity to shape and reformulate their thinking in a helpful, non-threatening atmosphere, where experiments in language are not only acceptable, but encouraged.

However, it is also important that the most able students in FL departments continue to be challenged by the writing activities that are set, and that they are given plenty of scope to develop their written expertise in the language. This means that there is still a place for prose translations and essays in situations where students need or want to be challenged in those directions.