Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Teaching Writing

Spring 2007

Eisterhold (1990)

Introduction

       In this article, we get a lot of information about connections between reading and writing. There seems to be a lot of debate as to which effects the other more in fist language acquisition. All this seems a little distant for us as English teachers who want to know something about teaching writing. Let`s not worry about L1 acquisition too much. All we need to know, and no one will disagree with this, is that reading and writing are related skills and that information does or can transfer from one to the other. We could further argue that the amount and direction of transfer is affected by how much and what is taught overtly (that is through focussed classroom teaching. Let`s take a good look at L2 acquisition and what this article tells us about what we need to do in class to teach writing and maybe even reading.

Argument

       One thing which none of the researchers talks about is that reading and writing are fundamentally different from speaking and listening. What do you think the difference is?

       The bottom line is that reading and writing are skills created by humans, whereas listening and speaking are natural. Baring this in mind, it seems clear that there should be large differences between the acquisition of reading/writing and listening/speaking both in the L1 and L2 principally because reading/writing are unnatural skills, the product of human intellect, rather than evolution. Of course they behave unnaturally. The LAD does not work on reading/writing. We must learn it overtly. Simple input will never make anyone learn to read/write.

       The truth is that writing is a very new invention and puts a lot of pressure on the brain when acquiring it. Many people nowadays, however, equate writing/reading with language. This is a terrible mistake. It is probably easier to equate reading/writing with another learned skill, like typing. If you know how to type in Korean, for example, and you have to now type in English. Knowing how to type in Korean will only help you a little. You still need to memorize the keys. Once more, having a high level of English will not automatically make you a better typist.

       Because reading/writing are unnatural this also means that the various systems will be more diverse than language itself. Some systems will be inherently harder to learn, both at the L1 and L2 level. This has implications for learning. In addition, reading/writing patterns will be much more closely linked to the culture of the society.

       All this does not mean that there is no transfer of skills from L1 to L2 and that having a high level of proficiency will not help someone to be a better writer. Transfers do occur, but any kind of transfer has to be coerced, or forced, by an outside instructor to a large extent. It also is clear that if the target language culture is similar to the learners` L1, there will be more transfer than if the systems and cultures are dissimilar. This is due to the fact that things like cultural information, in addition to information about writing, is housed outside of the linguistic parts of the brain, i.e. the mental lexicon. It is easy to form connections there if there is a very strong overlap in the information. To illustrate this, let`s go back to the example of typing. We said that knowing how to type in Korean doers not necessarily make you a better typist in English because the location of the characters is all different. A person, however, who can type well in German will have an easy time learning how to type in English because the differences between German and English keyboards are minimal. Writing, because it is a skill that functions to a large extent outside of our normal linguistic capacity (e-language).

Conclusion

       As English teachers we need to teach reading and writing overtly. We can use reading instruction to help with writing and vice-versa, but we must mention specifically how the two are related. Transfer from one skill to another or from L1 to L2 will not occur naturally. Teachers should be careful to form links between skills and languages. It is important to pick reading texts and give writing assignments which are culturally sensitive and are calculated to address important issues.