Teaching Writing to Low Proficiency EFL Students by Arthur Firkins, Gail Forey, and Sima Sengupta

           This article described an activity-based genre approach to teaching writing to students with learning disabilities. In this article, the authors briefly describe the theory of genre-based pedagogy and show how it was used to inform a very practical activity-based approach used as the basis of teaching plan for EFL students with a learning disability. At first, the researchers applied the activity-based genre approach to the teaching of writing procedural texts. They then evaluated the approach and revised it to provide students with the essential linguistic tools to support their learning of information report genres. In the end of this article, the authors stated that the findings are particularly suitable for educational contexts where the students are low proficiency English as a foreign language.

            The study provides me another useful perspective on teaching writing, especially for those who are low-achievers. Just as I know, teaching writing involves lots of focuses. I need to pay attention to learners’ proficiency, learners’ expectation, learners’ cultural background and the concept of teaching writing. Therefore, I used to teach writing form constructing a sentence, then move to construct a paragraph and, ultimately, students need to accomplish a composition with different rhetorical patterns. The teaching process is rigid and inflexible. However, I ignore the genre-based pedagogy for teaching low proficiency learners. For novice learners, it’s usually important to o engage students in learning by doing. The learning-teaching cycle in the study gives me an idea to assign students a real-life writing task. Learners get certain writing assistance from modeling to independent writing gradually. From such learning-teaching cycle, students can unobtrusively and implicitly “pick up” the certain sentence patterns and specific vocabulary in the genre-based writing activity.     

Moreover, based on the concrete and specific texts which are chosen by teachers, it could motivate students’ learning awareness and attention. In Taiwan, there is more and more obvious discrepancy of students’ proficiency levels in the same class. As an English teacher, it takes time and wisdom to design a writing lesson to mitigate such wide discrepancy. The study makes me keep an idea in mind: providing an authentic text and real-world task would be beneficial for both low-achievers and high-achievers.