The Teaching of EFL Writing

By: Rida Afrilyasanti

Writing plays an important role in our personal and professional live; however, teaching EFL writing is not an easy stuff because many EFL students still get stuck in their writing class. Most of them get problems almost in all writing process; pre-, during and post- writing. In pre-writing process, students get difficulties in finding an idea to write. Furthermore, in the writing process, EFL students have to struggle with grammatical problems, dictions, and coherency. Those problems make the students lose their motivation on their EFL writing class. Thus, it somehow creates a big burden for the teachers.

the teaching of EFL writing

As it is verified by Mojica (2010:1), on her study on writing difficulties, students’ report shows their deep involvement in thinking processes before writing, but it diminishes during the writing stage. Students spend more of their time in thinking about an idea to write. The hardship that students find on the pre-writing process can de-motivate them to write in English. Additionally, as they find an idea to write, the other problems rise on during and post writing stage, their concern being on grammar, vocabulary, and the final output. As the results, students, especially EFL students, will lose interest in writing and, in turn, when they are being forced to write, they will not convey a good writing product. Therefore, it is a great duty of teachers to motivate students by creating the atmosphere and environment that enable students to learn English comfortably and enjoyably.

Meanwhile, the main purpose of EFL teaching in general is aimed to enable students to communicate orally and written using English. However, that EFL language teaching purpose somehow is modified and varied based on the national curriculum, for instance, for Indonesian curriculum, the language teaching is targeted based on the text genre. Besides, the activities and programs in order to achieve that EFL language teaching purpose are also differentiated on the basis of school levels and language skills. Hence, to accommodate EFL students with good writing ability, teacher has to be able to provide an effective teaching writing class for her/his students. In order to provide the students with the most appropriate teaching media and technique, teacher has to be able to recognize students’ problems in learning writing.