Guidelines for an EST Writing Course.

Abstract

The teaching of writing is probably a thorny task for a teacher of English inasmuch as a careful planning is needed so as to make room for all the components involved, whether structural, rhetorical or discursive. The process, the product and the genre approaches are often proposed in the relevant literature, their application depending on a set of variables such as second or foreign language teaching, present and target situations, linguistic competence of learners, etc. However, in our view none of them has proved to be successful, at least independently, in the case of EFL writing instruction. Given the characteristics of EST students in Spain, an eclectic approach is proposed by activating the four different types of knowledge, that is, the language system knowledge, the context knowledge, the writing process knowledge, and the content knowledge. In this fashion, in the present paper we will select and arrange the course material for an EST situation so as to offer a framework valid for any FLT context.