This week, instead of commenting on one of the readings, I thought I would write about the practice of teaching writing in Portugal, based on a survey carried out by Prof. John Elliott at the University of Lisbon (http://ler.letras.up.pt/uploads/ficheiros/6021.pdf). For many educators, writing is still seen as the primary indicator of literacy and academic success. However, the strategies used often fall short of actually motivating students to write or developing their writing skills.

The teaching of writing in Portugal still tends to emphasize theoretical frameworks in detriment of practical activities where the student has the chance to apply what he/she has learned. Classes are still very much based on the teacher speaking and showing a set of rules and the students having to absorb them for later application in tests. Students are taught into all sorts of fictional and nonfictional genres, mostly through reading and analysis, with the sole purpose of being able to distinguish them, but not necessarily to write in them.        But what is most noticeable is the amount of attention paid to grammar as a marker of good writing. Extensive class time is spent on the explanation of grammatical rules and terminology and applying them to isolated instances (fill in the blanks type of exercises) instead of working them into the actual process of writing. The ultimate goal of teaching writing is to enable students to respond to generic prompts (often argumentative essays between 200-300 words) and succeed in exams where they are assessed for reading skills (even the teaching of reading is a problem, since students are often drilled on concepts disembodied from real text and assessment depends much more on the students’ ability to memorize and dump information on to paper than on their ability to interpret and analyze the piece of text in front of them) and grammar.

The results of Elliott’s survey of the students’ relationship with writing at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon seems to indicate that this pedagogical approach does not prepare students for academic writing or even writing in general. According to Elliott, students attach less importance to writing than to speaking and do not feel motivated to write because of the theoretical focus and the limited creative outlet. He states that “there is a world of difference between the idea and the execution of that idea” (59). In other words, students express interest in writing, but do not feel motivated to perform the written tasks for class. The survey reflects another problem: students appear to equate good writing with good grammar and the ability to follow certain conventions. When asked about their preferred mode of assessment, a majority of students replied that the most useful comments were those on grammatical correction, punctuation and spelling.

In the final part of the survey, Elliott asked students to further comment on writing and several mentioned the lack of creativity and freedom as reasons for not being interested in improving their writing. Others did not feel that they had enough skills to write (which may be attributed to the focus on surface-level issues instead of higher order concerns) and some even suggested doing more writing in class and as homework (which may indicate that there is insufficient practice).

This study suggests, then, that teachers in Portugal need to rethink their approaches to teaching writing, as they are clearly not preparing or motivating the students to the task at hand. There needs to be a bigger focus on writing as an activity that encases more than just grammar, that has a purpose other than assessment and that the student can become truly engaged in.