CHALLENGES IN TEACHING WRITING AND ITS SOLUTION IN SECONDARY SCHOOL

Iroda Zafarjon Kizi Abdurahimova; Mohira Olimjon Kizi Barotova

Central Asian Research Journal For Interdisciplinary Studies (CARJIS)

www.carjis.org DOI: 10.24412/2181-2454-2022-11-127-132

CHALLENGES IN TEACHING WRITING AND ITS SOLUTION IN

SECONDARY SCHOOL

Iroda Zafarjon kizi Abdurahimova Mohira Olimjon kizi Barotova

Student of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature, Chirchik state Pedagogical University of Tashkent E-mail: irodaabdurahimova002@gmail .com Scientific supervisor: Aminova Sohila Abduhalimovna

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a systematic review of relevant published studies on challenges in teaching upper secondary writing skills in ESL classrooms and solutions to overcome them. This systematic review attempts to answer two research questions: what are the students' writing challenges, and what are the solutions to the writing challenges faced by ESL students. The systematic review of 12 single studies and two systematic reviews revealed that the most common challenges encountered by students in writing are word choice, vocabulary, grammar, and poor idea organization. The findings also shed some light on solutions to overcome the challenges from the perspectives of teachers and students. Teachers should provide guidance by providing sample essays, providing feedback, and selecting an appropriate approach.

Keywords: Second language writing, cohesion and coherence, thinking process,

INTRODUCTION

English is used as a lingua franca throughout the world by people of various cultures, ethnicities, and social backgrounds. One of the most important skills for English teachers is the ability to effectively teach writing in elementary schools. Writing is an important part of English instruction. Writing instruction has begun as early as the first grade, when students begin to learn how to form letters correctly.

There are numerous consequences that could have a significant impact on students' academic performance if they have a weak foundation in writing. Writing is not only important for improving academic performance, but it also helps with social and emotional development. Furthermore, in today's competitive world, writing is

Central Asian Research Journal For Interdisciplinary Studies (CARJIS)

www.carjis.org DOI: 10.24412/2181-2454-2022-11-127-132

one of the skills required to excel. Their inability to write well may jeopardize their future job prospects. As a result, this issue must be addressed effectively.

However, due to the difficulties students face in learning writing skills, teaching writing has become difficult. Some of the difficulties that ESL students face include a lack of vocabulary, poor grammar, poor spelling, students' readiness, and a lack of exposure to books and reading materials.[Cheung, 2011; Lee, 2008].

The difficulties that students have faced have made it difficult for teachers to teach writing skills. Teachers face challenges in teaching writing skills because it is difficult to motivate their students, students of various levels, difficult materials, and time constraints. To improve a student's writing ability, a teacher must devote more time to teaching writing, such as providing guidance and feedback.

What makes a successful essay? In a study on various ways writers can write good essays, Crossley, Roscoe, and McNamara suggest that "Successful writing cannot be defined simply through a single set of predefined features. Rather, successful writing has multiple profiles". Specifically, some successful writers compose longer essays [Crossley, Weston, McLain Sullivan, & McNamara, 2011] with more infrequent vocabulary [McNamara, Crossley, & Roscoe, 2013], and fewer grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors. Other successful writers produce essays with more syntactically complex sentences [Crossley, et al., 2011) and with a better control of text cohesion]. Hence, besides a basic goal to write texts accurately, free of grammatical errors, student authors should consider stylistic factors such as choice of words, sentence complexity, text cohesion, and length of their essays.

In fact, achieving good composition is difficult task for both native speakers and non-native speakers of English. Even if one writer in one's own language, discipline is requisite for precision and form; hence going through multiple revisions of drafts is the norm rather than exception. This issue to achieve the mastery of words, was pointed out by Widdowson.

In order to teach writing effectively, teachers should be explicitly cognizant of the skills and processes that are involved. This view treats writing of profession, a qualification to be attained with disciplines and hard work, rather than an innate ability of subconscious habit. In order words, we need to led students know that few authors possess an inborn 'native' command of writing English as lingua franca. If the students want to write well, they need to learn the skills adopt deliberate strategies to enhance their writing competence.

In what follows, I will outline some of the skills that are basic to competence in

Central Asian Research Journal For Interdisciplinary Studies (CARJIS)

www.carjis.org DOI: 10.24412/2181-2454-2022-11-127-132

writing. I will also discuss the non-linear process of academic writing that teachers an introduce to students in writing classrooms to raise their awareness of how writing develops. Then I will suggest some practical methods for enhancing students' writing performance in second language classes.

WRITING COMPETENCE

Writing competence is about composing an effective piece of written work to fulfill a specific purpose. For instance, when writing an entertaining and engaging story, students adopt a narrative style and rhetorical moves in order to fulfill the requirements of a specialized context (e.g. in-class examination, take-home assignment, classroom practice). Once students are aware of the importance of the purpose, audience and context of writing, they can employ the following basic academic discourse skills to achieve effective implementations.

WRITING PROCESS

Traditionally, many writing teachers explicate the writing process as a linear process. For example, Paltridge, identifies four distinct sub-process in writing. First, in the conceptualizing stage, writers generate and select ideas that they can use in their writing and organize the ideas in the net way. The second is called formulating, which means putting ideas into sentences. The third is revising, where writers rewrite and improve the essays. The revisions can be related to the context, grammar and mechanics. The fourth sub-process is reading. Writers read the essay's instruction. They read to gather information for the essay topic. They re-read their writing to make sure that they are answering the essay's prompts. The linear process model may "under conceptualize and and over simplefy" the writing process. This oversimpfilication may be problematic because it can be inflexible and limits the freedom to explore, whereas writing in practice could be an instructured process of self-discovery.

UNDERSTANDING FEATURES THAT MAKE A TEXT COHERENT

Knowledge of coherence is an important factor in the students' ability to produce coherent texts. Research studies have shown that teachers need to help students understand the meaning of coherence from a narrow sense to broader sense. Coherence may seem like an abstract concept to teach learn and teach. However, it is possible to describe coherence in a structural framework. It has five common

Central Asian Research Journal For Interdisciplinary Studies (CARJIS)

www.carjis.org DOI: 10.24412/2181-2454-2022-11-127-132

features: Macro-structure, information structure, proposition development and cohesive devices. Macrostructure is about the outline of a text. For instance, the outline of a complaint letter is situation-problem-evaluation. The outline story is onset-complication-resolution. Example of cohesive devices include pronouns, conjuctions, repetitions, superordinates, synonym/antonyms. Another feature that can used to develop coherence in writing if metadiscourse markers, which some students commonly confuse with coherence devices.

THE STRATEGY OF GOOD EDITING

Careful editing strategy is very significant because a well-crafted essay gives a positive impression to the reader that the writer is competent. Second language writing researchers suggest useful strategies for food editing that can enhance the effectiveness of the written work. First, students should try to finish their writing earlier rather than wait until the last minute before starting. It is because well known writers rely on effective editing and will allow sufficient time for it. Second, it is advisable to read the composition aloud. Through the reading aloud, student writers can more easily identify the bad sentences. Third, students may consider using a word processor's editing tools to check for grammatical, spelling and typographical errors. These word processors can identify some of the surface level errors effortlessly. Students may consider the software's suggested corrections. If they are not sure about certain corrections, they can check the dictionary or other tools. Lastly, for the time writing development, students are advised to keep track of their error patterns. They can keep a log book and record their recurring errors. They may aim to address a few errors at a time and review appropriate grammar rules if necessary. Students may be overwhelmed if they have to address a large number of errors in their compositions every time.

WRITING IS A COMPLEX ACTIVITY

Teach students that writing is a non-linear process involving many stages, not limited to conceptualizing, formulating, reading and revising.

Recognize that students will encounter difficulties during the writing process such as „setting macro rhetorical goal', „considering the reader' and others.

Plan group activities that heighten students' awareness of the nature of writing. Help students develop an understanding that pre-writing, drafting and revising cannot be separated from each other into neat independent stages.

Central Asian Research Journal For Interdisciplinary Studies (CARJIS)

www.carjis.org DOI: 10.24412/2181-2454-2022-11-127-132

Traditional approaches to teaching L2 writing- the controlled composition approach, the rhetorical function may not be sufficiently effective as writing pedagogy.

Knowledge-transformation is a significant implementation device in the socio-cognitive approach to writing. Teachers need to explicitly teach students how to establish the macro-rhetorical goal. By adopting the socio-cognitive approach to writing, student consciously define their goal as impact on the intended readers. In organizing and presenting their ideas, they need to learn how to make a text coherent, which includes but goes beyond using cohesive devices.

Giving peer feedback is also good training their critical thinking. In most situations the peer review activity enhance students' ability to revise and improve their writing. Given that many students are quite tech-savvy these days, teachers may consider using peer assessment software to implement the peer review activity. With the use of peer review assessment software, students' names could be anonymized. Thus, they are more likely to give their honest peer feedback as their names would not be disclosed to their peers.

CONCLUSION

No one is a „native speaker' of writing" Teachers need to let students know that there are no „native-like' standards when it comes to academic writing. In teaching writing, we need to explicitly teach the writing processes and the specific strategies to enhance students' writing competence. It is useful for writing teachers to learn the various approaches to teaching and writing. However, teachers need to understand that helping students in idea generation and in planning as well as teaching the rhetorical moves of the particular genres alone are inadequate in helping students improve their writing. Teachers also need to teach students the socio-cognitive approach to writing, which takes into consideration readers' expectations, socio -cultural contexts, and thinking processes involved in planning, organizing, and writing/revising the essays. Teachers need to make clear to the students that writing is a recursive, complex activity. In order to move forward, we need to re-read and revise our writing. A good piece of writing has to go through multiple times of revision. This applies not only to novice writers, but to experienced writers as well. Understanding this can help clarify a misconception that many students may have -that only non-proficient writers will need significant revisions to their work. The socio-cognitive approach to writing ensures that students will establish the macro-

Central Asian Research Journal For Interdisciplinary Studies (CARJIS)

www.carjis.org DOI: 10.24412/2181-2454-2022-11-127-132

rhetorical goal of the essay, and all the information in the essay contributes to achieving this purpose. For the readers, they will be able to grasp the one thing or one key message that they can take away from the essay.

REFERENCES

1. Bereiter, C, Scardamalia, M. (1987). The psychology of written communication. Hillsdale, Lawrwnce Erlabum.

2. Cheung, Y.L. (2011). Teacher training for effective writing instruction: Recent trends and future directions. Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences journal, 15(1), 531-534.

3. Clark, R. Ivanik. R, (1991). For effective writing instruction: Recent trends and future directions. Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences Journal, 15(1), 531-534.

4. Crossley, S. A. Roscoe. An investigation into the multiple ways the writers can write successful essays. Written communication, 31(1), 184-214.

5. Emig, J. (1971). The composing processes of twelfth grades. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

6. Hyon, S. (1996). Genres in three traditions: Implications for ESL. TESOL Quarterly, 30(4), 693-722.

7. Lee, I (2002). Teaching coherence to ESL students: a classroom inquiry. Journal of second Language Writing, 11(2), 247-250.

8. Leki, I (1992). Understanding ESL Writers: A guide for teachers. Portmouth, New Hampshire: Boynton/Cook Publishers.

9. McNamara, D.S. Crossley, (2013). Natural language processing in an intelligent writing strategy tutoring system. Behaviour Research Methods, 45(2), 499-515.

10. Paltridge, B.Harbn, L. Hirsh,(2009). Teaching academic writing. An introduction for teachers of second language writers.

CHALLENGES IN TEACHING WRITING AND ITS SOLUTION IN SECONDARY SCHOOL Текст научной статьи по специальности «Языкознание и литературоведение»

Аннотация научной статьи по языкознанию и литературоведению, автор научной работы — Iroda Zafarjon Kizi Abdurahimova, Mohira Olimjon Kizi Barotova

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