The Importance of Writing
The Importance of Writing
The Importance of Writing
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This paper explores writing skills which seem to be the least popular and most difficult skills to acquire in a foreign language.
Nevertheless, they are crucial in the development of other language and metacognitive skills. The article attempts to discuss
benefits and reasons why it is important to develop writing and supports them with the findings of empirical research conducted
at the Faculty of Informatics and Management, Czech Republic.
Writing has a unique position in language teaching since As far as the research sample is concerned, out of 33 respond-
its acquisition involves a practice and knowledge of other ents 20 (61%) were men and 13 (39%) were women (Fig. 1)
Ad1. This small scale research shows that students prefer the The questionnaire suggests that the most problematic area of
written tests (19/58%) to the oral ones (12/36%). Two stu- writing for most respondents (16/49%) seems to be the use
dents fancy both possibilities (2/6%). Compare Fig. 3. of formal language. The second area of difficulties concerns
the incorrect transfer of rules from the native language into
the foreign language and the correct punctuation (11/33% re-
spondents). 10 (30%) students mention the limited knowledge
of grammar, which is followed by the limited knowledge of
vocabulary and writing bibliographies and references in a for-
eign language (8/24% respondents). 7 (21%) students have
difficulties expressing one’s thought in a foreign language and
6 (18%) with logical structuring of ideas in a foreign language.
Finally, 4 (12%) respondents face problems with the choice of
relevant topic and 3(9%) respondents with spelling (Fig. 6).
Figure 3. Forms of testing
• being less nervous in comparison with oral testing; which makes students problems. Furthermore, the formal lan-
• being able to come back to the text after a while; guage requires the use of relevant register and corresponding
• no need to react instantly; vocabulary that students lack. In order to adequately describe
• no problems with pronunciation and thus easier under- rigorous research, students must also know how to make ref-
standing; and erences. Although the logical structuring comes almost the
• having a poor command of speaking. last on the list, for a native speaker this skill is quite essential
because to make the text coherent requires good thinking and
Nevertheless, as the survey indicates, students do not have thus making the whole text logical (cf. Chamonikalosova and
enough practice with formal writing since a great majority of Staskova, 2005: 58).
them (61%) writes only informal e-mails and only 30% do es-
says, not mentioning 15% of students who do not write any 5. Conclusion
document in a foreign language. In addition, they themselves The findings confirm that students are interested in second
(49%) confess that they have difficulties using the formal lan- language writing. However, they lack practice and experience
guage, which is undoubtedly connected with other phenome- in formal writing. Therefore, teachers during their classes
na, such as limited knowledge of grammar (e.g. articles, word should pay more attention to the development of formal writ-
order and tenses); the phenomena that are different from the ing skills. Obviously, it means much more burden for teach-
native language, in this case Czech, because the Czech lan- ers afterwards since they have to provide their students with
guage system has no articles, follows the flexible word order proper feedback on their writings. This is particularly true for
and uses perfective and imperfective aspects while the Eng- higher education where students should conduct research, do
lish language system has the articles, the fixed word order essays, seminars papers or professional articles. And as it
and tenses to express the verb aspect. The use of formal for- has been stated at the beginning, writing is important to suc-
eign language is also connected with the proper punctuation, ceed in one’s career.
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