Writing in an FL

Date: Tue, 07 Dec 1999 15:01:55 +0100

From: Timothy Mason (tmason@timothyjpmason.com) To: Foreign Language Teaching Forum (FLTEACH@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU)

Writing is a difficult activity ; many people never fully master it. Indeed, there's a case to be made out that no-one ever masters it - certainly not in the way that one can say that most people master the spoken language. If I write a message for a listserve, on reading it later I nearly always notice a misspelling, a grammatical infelicity or a failure of expression when I re-read it on the list. When I write for publication, I have to read through several times, and even then, I usually miss something - any writer will tell you that a good editor is a precious asset. Often enough, I write pages and pages of stuff that I finally screw up and throw away.

Learning to write, whether in ML or FL, means learning to use different rules to those used in speech. If you want to write well, then, as Stephen Krashen argues, you certainly need to read a lot. I think you also need some guidance - writing well is a collaborative exercise, whether it be a shopping list, a business letter, or a poem.

Many of the children that we see in the schools have not had the opportunities to read that we have. It's not surprising that they do not know how to write. FL teachers need to take account of this ; I would even say that one of the main reasons for taking an FL at school is that it should complement the work done in the ML classes on writing.

Back in the good or the bad old days, whichever they were, most children who came from non-reading schools tumbled out of the educational system long before getting to the stage where they might be asked to translate into a FL. Nowadays, they're still in school. In a more wonderful world, perhaps they wouldn't be. Perhaps they'd be working down the mines and in the stuff-shops, and that would be good for their souls and for ours. As it is, they're not. They're in our classes. Even in Higher Education. Youth unemployment being what it is, over in France, there's nowhere else for them to go. And diploma inflation exaggerates that trend.

Educationalists wanted it. Now we are stuck with it. Can't really complain. After all, if they weren't there, maybe we'd be down the mines too. Good for our souls.

So if you want them to write in FL classes, you have to work at it. You have to give them a lot of help. They need to learn to draught and to edit. To use dictionaries, style-sheets, compendiums of usage and guides to etiquette.

And if you want them to translate into the FL, you have to help them read the ML ; a fair number of the translation errors my students make come from their not having well-read the ML text.

What it comes down to is that the FL-teacher is also a ML teacher, and needs to look at the ways ML teachers work. We teach reading. We teach writing. Children who come from homes where books are read and letters written need our help a lot less than those who do not. If all parents were as literate as mine were, we wouldn't need teachers at all, and school would be what Bourdieu says it is - a place where cultural capital is recognized and certified. Only everyone would be certified in at about the same level.

The children who might conceivably need us are the ones who are difficult to reach and difficult to teach. The ones some of us would so like to see excluded from our classes.

It can be done. Some centuries ago, working men and women, who came from homes where no books were known, and no reading done, would club together and pay an itinerant teacher to give them their letters. They helped each other - reading the bible, Pilgrim's Progress, political tracts and almanacks. And they learned to read, and they learned to write. Some of them learned to write very well indeed - others learned only to scratch out a wildly spelled missive over the signature of Captain Swing. Now some of their great-great-great-great-great grandchildren are sleeping in the backs of our classes.

Regards

TM