Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

particular structures. This very often consists of copying
down sentences in order to establish patterns which have just
been orally presented. While such an activity may have a
general teaching purpose, it is distinct in intention from work
which is aimed at teaching students to write effectively in
English, and it is with this last activity that we shall be
concerned in this chapter.
A writing programme
Ideally, there should be a programme to develop writing
skills which works all the way through the educational
system. Such a programme would list the main types of
writing which it felt students should be able to master by the
end of their education, and would offer guidelines to teachers
on ways of achieving success with each of these. It is fairly
easy to draft the main points which would need to be
included in such a programme, but too little is known about
exactly how human beings learn to write effectively to be
able to relate these points to a satisfactory learning theory.
None the less, it is possible to structure the development of
writing skills in the foreign language situation, and there are
a number of strong reasons for this being desirable.
The strongest reason is that writing is—to the practised
user—an extremely fluent and easy activity for at least part

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Writing
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of the time, but very often foreign learners can only be fluent
at the expense of accuracy. At the same time, as the
conventions of writing are more restricting than those of
speech—we are less tolerant of deviation—the need for the
writer to be accurate is very great. In fact, any teacher who
has had to try and assess the ‘free’ writing of inexperienced
foreign learners of English will appreciate the need for some
kind of controlled or guided writing, at least at the early
stages.
It seems convenient, then, to structure a writing course
through three main stages. These will be: (i) controlled
writing, (ii) guided writing, and (iii) free writing. These terms
have been fairly loosely used in the past, and the first two are
often used as if they are interchangeable. However, it seems
sensible to distinguish between writing exercises in which the
final product is linguistically determined by the teacher or
materials writer, and exercises in which the final content is
determined. Thus a paragraph with blanks to be filled may
be a legitimate early part of a writing programme, and can be
considered a controlled composition, as is one in which, for
example, picture prompts, or memory of a model presented
by the teacher, leads to the students reproducing more or less
exactly the same final product as each other. On the other
hand a composition in which the teacher provides the
situation and helps the class to prepare the written work,
either through written or oral assistance, is a guided
composition, because each piece of work is different in the
language used, even if the content and organisation are
basically the same throughout the class. A free composition
usually means a composition in which only the title is
provided, and everything else is done by the student.
After these distinctions have been made though, two
points need to be stressed. The first is that they represent
three points on a cline, a sliding scale. As a class becomes
more confident in working with controlled composition
exercises, more and more alternative possibilities become
available in the choice of language, and the exercises tend to
become more and more guided. At the other end of the scale,
no composition in school is likely to be truly free, for the very
act of a teacher in proposing the writing, let alone suggesting
one or more topics, ‘guides’ the pupils, while any kind of

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preliminary discussion by the teacher establishes the
‘guiding’ principle very clearly. The other point to be made is
that the movement from controlled to free is not necessarily a
movement from easy to difficult. Indeed, some situational
compositions in which writing has to be adapted to a