Teaching Writing Skills

This paper is based on my M.Phil research Project “A Discoursal Approach To Teaching Writing.” Seven essays were analyzed using the discourse analysis approach to identify the discourse pattern, functions and relations. The essays were considered in rhetorical terms and they represented different modes of writing - First person Narrative, public speech, personal, descriptive, Biographical and two Argumentative essays. The discourse organization was studied and found important features, common at three levels. (a) Macro level - Patterns situation - problem - solution - evaluation (b) Micro level - functions Elaboration, Evaluation Inference and summing up (c) Micro level- relations condition – consequence, cause – effect, reason – result, contrast, question – answer and claim – counterclaim. These findings showed that certain discourse features were used in similar ways by writers to structure and organization texts irrespective of what genre they belong to.   On the basis of the findings, two types of tasks were designed at the above mentioned three levels. Tasks that help the student (a) To identify the discourse features (b) To develop their ability to produce coherent writing involving the use of these features. The trying out of selected tasks showed that the tasks were feasible and helpful. Though some of the students had problems initially in comprehending, they could perform the tasks quite successfully once explanations were given and when content was given than otherwise.