USING THE COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH TO DEVELOP WRITING SKILLS AMONG ENGLISH LEARNERS
Keywords:
Communicative approach, communicative competence, writing skills, process writing, genre-based instruction, EFL.Abstract
It is precisely in the area of writing that learners of English most commonly stay dependent upon formulaic approaches, and traditional teaching has always regarded writing as an imitation of sentences rather than an attempt to communicate. This paper aims to investigate the implementation of the communicative approach in teaching English learners to write. First, the history of the concept of communicative competence and its development from the ethnography of communication to its well-known four-component model will be reviewed. The next part of the paper will reveal the principles of communicative writing and will describe nine methods by which they can be realized in the classroom and will review empirical evidence related to the impact of those methods. Findings revealed consistently positive results of their application in terms of organization, content development, coherence, and learner motivation, whereas their influence on grammatical accuracy is somewhat more controversial. The controversy is caused by the methodological problem in determining the effect of correction on learner writing. The author will claim that the most justified position is the one based on the integration of process and genre models of writing.
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