Product Writing for Better Linguistic and Cultural Acquisition by English Language Students

Product Writing for Better Linguistic and Cultural Acquisition by English Language Students

Josifović-Elezović, Sanja
Mitić, Svetlana

Product writing is considered uncreative and unstimulating, as it trains students to model their output according to rules and patterns. The risk students might particularly be exposed to when taught such writing is their memorising complete phrases, the most common grammatical forms and lexis used, and leaving a false impression of having mastered the register and form of selected writing patterns, and improved their linguistic and writing ability in general. Teaching product writing to students whose native culture has proven hesitant in regard to adopting correspondence as standard in certain situations, e.g. when applying for a job, complaining about a faulty product or substandard service, or writing a report to an authority, may prove additionally difficult and the achievements of a course based on it unintended. Most people’s daily experience shows that the culture of cultivated writing is losing the battle with truncated correspondence via e-mail and other electronic media. In light of this, learning to write and utilize such basic forms as applications, complaints and reports may prove beneficial for students’ writing, as well as their general linguistic competence and their adoption of the target culture. This paper presents the results of a writing course administered to first-year English undergraduates as part of a general English language skills course and analyses them in terms of the students’ adoption of the grammatical forms and the vocabulary/register that are required, or most commonly used, in the selected forms. This shows the extent of their real progress, as well as changes in their attitudes toward such writing as representative of the target culture. It also reveals the role the course has had in developing the students’ awareness of learning as a process and of formative assessment, or rather, specific assessment that focused on a product, while emphasising the relevance of teaching/learning as a process. Keywords: product writing, teaching/learning writing as a process, linguistic acquisition, cultural acquisition, formative assessment

Article
PeerReviewed

2015-04-21

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