Rethinking the Teaching Approaches of ESL/EFL Writing Skills

Abstract

English is among the international languages that is used in many domains across the globe. Mastering the language is essential to get better chances at being employed especially if one acquires excellent writing skills since the world has become so text-oriented. However, students’ performance is reported as low for English as second language (ESL) or English as foreign language (EFL) writing skills. There has been a long debate on which approach is the most ideal to teach writing skills to ESL/EFL students. So, this paper will explore the trend of approaches used in teaching writing skills to ESL/EFL students. First, it will describe the common approaches used (i.e. product-based, process-based, genre-based and multimodal approaches) and their strengths as well as weaknesses. This paper will then go on to attempt to account for the essential factors to be considered in teaching ESL/EFL writing for the lesson to be effective beyond just the approaches.