Argumentative Essay Assignments

La Autora - Impresiones FL de Natalia Rondini

Lugar: Córdoba; Año: 2010 p. 47

978-987-1591-72-5

Writing is a complex and multifaceted skill which occupies a central position in personal, social, academic, and professional contexts. For undergraduate ESL students, writing is equally central because it is through their mastery of a variety of writing skills that their knowledge is evaluated and their linguistic competences judged. The bad news for students is that there are no infallible blueprints or easy shortcuts to the acquisition of writing proficiency. Writing requires extensive reading, lexical development and enhancement, and a variety of thinking skills. The good news is that knowing how to write efficiently for a variety of rhetorical intentions and social contexts will typically lead to the successful accomplishment of their academic and professional goals. It is no less auspicious to know that the preoccupations that plague students also afflict researchers and writing instructors, who take advantage of a growing body of research about how to make informed decisions about methods, materials, and procedures. Indeed, writing instructors are becoming increasingly sensitive to students’ needs as well as skillful in combining the benefits of a variety of writing orientations. The present material has been designed taking into account the notion that in order to become competent writers, students need to develop knowledge of various kinds—content, system, process, genre, and context knowledge. It seeks to enable learners to advance from “language scaffolding” skills to “composing” fluency and places itself within stages 2 to 4 (Modeling and deconstructing the text; joint construction of the text; independent construction of the text) of the teaching learning cycle devised by Feez (Hyland, 2009). It has been assumed that the student has already been exposed to a variety of theoretical and practical activities directly contributing to the first stage in this cycle, i. e., the building of the contexts of writing, in accordance with the writing objectives established for the course of English Language III.