Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

particular style, using specific information provided, may be
more difficult than most free topics. At the same time, a great
deal of real life writing is of the guided type. Whenever a
journalist reports a speech, or a student writes an essay in an
academic subject at university, or a secretary writes minutes
of a committee meeting, a guided composition is being
produced, for a conventional version of a restricted range of
material is being manufactured.
None the less, it is useful in discussing the development of
writing skills to think in terms of these three levels.
Generally, the controlled stage concerns itself with the
production of accurate language in context, the guided stage
with the organisation of material which is given, and the free
stage with the production by the student of both content and
language.
Goals of the writing programme
In most language teaching courses, the language is taught
sentence pattern by sentence pattern, with vocabulary being
fitted in according to the situations used to illustrate the
sentence patterns being presented. Even in courses designed
on different lines, there is a tendency for language to be
presented as a number of separate items, related to situation
or communicative act. And when writing is used to reinforce
work which has been initially presented, it often reinforces
either at the direct sentence level, or in relation to dialogues
or situations which are not those usually expressed through
writing. It is the responsibility of the writing programme
particularly to train students to produce sequences of
sentences which express their meaning most effectively.
Since, both when we speak and when we write, we work not
through isolated sentences but through blocks of sentences,
this should be a more natural activity than using exercises
which consist of lists of sentences without any context

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Writing
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whatsoever. None the less, the ability to put sentences
together effectively needs systematic encouragement, and
sometimes explicit teaching, and part of the work in a
writing course involves teaching students to be sensitive to
the rules of discourse in English.
Connected with the problem of discourse is that of
functional style, or ‘register’. When we use written language,
we obey certain conventions which are appropriate to the