Different models or theories of teaching writing in TESOL (Teaching Essay

Different models or theories of teaching writing in TESOL (Teaching English to Speaker of Other Languages) - Essay Example Learning academic English composition skills can be especially challenging and stressful for ESL students. In addition to mastering the linguistic and grammatical features of written English, second language students must learn to think, create and compose in ways that may be quite unfamiliar and different from those in their native language (Swales, 2004; Crystal, 2003). While there is a plethora of methods or approaches that have been used in the teaching of writing (see, for example, Kroll, 1990; Petrosky & Bartholomae, 1986), this paper focus on the major instructional practices which are widely used in English as secondary language teaching: the controlled composition approach, the current-traditional rhetoric approach, the communicative approach and the process approach. It discusses first the earliest approaches, then the more recent ones, with a particular focus on the process approach. The process approach is discussed in greater detail because it is widely used in TESOL. The structuralist linguistic view dominated theory and practice in the field of ESL literacy and almost exclusively guided pedagogy until about the middle of the 1960s (Kaplan, 1988; Crystal, 2003). L2 writing instruction was no exception in following audio-lingual teaching methods. Although writing was considered one of the "survival" language skills, writing was taught as a subsidiary component to oral language and was usually not dealt with until after students had acquired oral competence in English. It was believed that oral competence would automatically lead to written competence (Grabe & Kaplan, 1996). The primary technique of writing was called controlled composition, or guided composition, which modelled the "audio-lingual method" of second language teaching, focusing on recurring forms of spoken English rather than on written language (Mangelsdorf, 1989; Silva, 1990). Writing was seen as a