Teaching Writing to Second Language Learners

About the Book

A treatise on factors that need to be identified and addressed in helping adult South-Asian students to enhance their confidence and improve their performance in writing. This is an area of increasing importance as higher education in these countries becomes more and more research oriented. Weaknesses in language exist—and persist--the unhappy legacy of poor educational policies, miniscule budgets and half-hearted implementation over the years. Remediation is said to be the most difficult and least successful undertaking in language teaching, but it might be possible to improve approaches and results by looking at some of the facts and factors of the situation

About the Author

Dr Riaz Hassan has been teaching in the third-world since 1961. He is currently Dean of the Faculty of Quality Enhancement, Research and Publication at the National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad. Among other things, he is required to look at the outpourings of mature candidates for research degrees such as the MPhil and PhD. This treatise is one outcome of a general dissatisfaction with student writing in the English language, which is used more than any other language for theses and dissertations at this level in this country. It is not an error analysis but a plea either to teach some internationally recognized variant of English such as British or American English right from the beginning, and teach it well, or to recognize and make an official accommodation of some aspects of Pakistani English in the nation’s general use of this language. Dr Hassan has written two novels, monographs on Aristotle, Russell, Psycholinguistics and English in Pakistan, and articles on diverse areas of linguistic and literary interest, including a recent one (2006) for the Kipling Journal (UK). Dr. Hassan lives with his family in Islamabad, Pakistan.