Teaching Productive Skills to the Students: a secondary Level Scenario

2.7 
Writing Skill 
 
Writing is the productive skill in written mode. It, too, is more complicated than it 
seems at first, and often seems to be the hardest of the skills, even for native speakers 
of a language, since it involves not just a graphic representation of speech, but the 
development and presentation of thoughts in a structured way.There are various ways 
how to define writing. 
The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Writings Systems, Florian Coulmas defines a 
writing system as: “a set of visible or tactile signs used to represent units of language in 
a systematic way, with the purpose of recording messages which can be retrieved by 
everyone who knows the language in question and the rules by virtue of which its units 
are encoded in the writing 
system.” (“What is writing?”) 
Writing is one way of providing variety in classroom procedures. It provides a 
learner with physical evidence of his achievements and he can measure his 
improvement. It helps to consolidate their grasp of vocabulary and structure, and 
complements the other language skills. 
2.7.1 The Nature of Writing 
From the four language skills, writing is categorized as one of the productive 
skills along with speaking since they involve producing language rather than receiving it. 
These two skills are basically different in various ways. The differences lie on a number 
of dimensions including textual, features, socio-cultural norm, pattern of use and 
cognitive process. 
Writing is slightly different from speaking in term of communication context. 
Speaking is always intended for face-to-face communication among the audience 
present, while writing is always used by the writers to express and communicate their 
ideas to the readers who are actually separated by both time and space distances. 

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Therefore, it requires clearer and more comprehensive message. In other words, when 
people communicate orally, they can use various types of prosodic features such as 
pitch, rhythm, pauses that enable them to get feedbacks from the listeners. In contrast, 
those features of speaking do not exist in writing because the communication context is 
created by the words alone without having direct interaction between the writer and the 
reader. The differences between speaking and writing can also be seen from the 
language characteristics. Permanence, production time, distance, orthography, 
complexity, vocabulary, and formality are some characteristics that differentiate written 
language from spoken language (Brown: 1994). 
Here are list of the characteristics that differentiae written language from spoken 
language as stated by Brown: