Official Blog Entry #5

Tarnopolsky, O.  (2000). Writing English as a Foreign Language: a Report from Ukraine.  Journal of Second Language Writing, 9 (3), 209-226.

This article continues the theme of EFL education in Central and Eastern Europe.  It examines the history of English education in the Ukraine and where it is heading i.e. what are the current needs and expectations of students.  As in Poland, the initial main focus was on communication and reading.  However, as the Ukraine moves forward in its efforts to become more international and part of the greater world community, there is a greater need and desire for EFL writing skills both for business/academics and pleasure.

Tarnopolsky outlines the challenges of developing appropriate course curriculums.  At the time of the article’s publication, there was a lack of specialists.  That may or may not have changed in the intervening 12 years.  There is also the economic consideration of the expensive of materials and teachers’ time.  Also a problem is the modification of Western training and instructional materials, most ESL oriented, to the diverse needs of students studying in a given country, in this case the Ukraine, and the somewhat different needs of an EFL classroom. 

In 1996/1997, Tarnopolsky was part of a survey that polled the needs of English language learners.  What they found was that

70 percent of potential students needed an ESP course, and not less than 65 percent of those that were eager to learn ESP preferred it to be Business English.  At the same time, all potential learners without exception said they wanted a course of General English to precede ESP (Tarnopolsky 214).

Further survey questions noted that 85% of interviewees felt a need for the four main areas of language skills.  Out of this 85 %, 99 percent claimed that they “absolutely needed reading and writing for communication” (Tarnopolsky 214).  Still further 21 percent indicated that “they required reading and writing skills in that language (English) even more for their jobs [than speaking and listening]” (Tarnopolsky 214).  Tarnopolsky attributes this to “well-established and regular contacts on personal and professional levels…[that] requires dealing with foreign friends and/or partners not so much in person as through written papers, documents, letter, etc.” (Tarnopolsky 214).  Students wanted to learn the basics writing skills but they also wanted them to be adaptive.

This survey resulted in 2 versions of writing courses.  The first was highly structured and used both the process approach and the genre approach.  For various reasons the course was unsuccessful and had a high dropout/boredom rate.  The second version was more successful and focused on writing for fun and team writing.  Writing for fun turns out to be Tarnopolsky’s main argument and it was back up by the results from the 2 versions of the writing classes and interviews of the students.  More was gained by the students when they learned things in a fun, collaborative and inductive reasoning type environment. 

Would I recommend this article to others?  Definitely!  It is even better than the previous article in that it gives concrete ideas on types of creative EFL writing assignments and the reasons behind them.