Comparative Essay

Vivian Cook & H. Douglas Brown

Students: Ana Luna

Gary Torres

Teacher: Roxanna Correa

The term ‘second language learning’ is understood in different ways by those

carrying out SLA research and it is also an element which characterizes us as social beings

who communicate in various ways. Due to this, teaching a second language has always

been on discussion since it involvesfirst learningcarefully how to teach in order to promote

in students the development of listening, reading, writing and speaking skills.In this essay

we will focus mainly in the writing skill by comparing and contrasting ideas of two

recognized researchers on second language learning, Vivian Cook and H. Douglas Brown,

which have a big amount of similar perceptions and at the same time, a big amount of

differences to take into consideration.

Firstly, according to Brown(1994),it is important toteach second language writing in

an integrated manner, involving the four communication skills together. Hence, it is not

possible to teach writing in an isolated way, but first it is necessary to focus on teaching

students the necessary strategies and methods which will help them to improve their writing

skills in order to get better results intheir production stage. He considers written language

as the graphic representation of spoken language, and most importantly, he has found that

written performance has a lot to do with oral performance. Cook clearly agrees on this by

explaining that writing depends highly on speech rather than in another mode of language

(Cook, 1991). This sort of relation applies not only to teachers but also to students who are

learning a second language. Students should be exposed to the appropriate functions for

both types of language, spoken language for the less formal, and written language for the

more formal, according to their particular needs. Cook also makes a relate writing with

speaking by assuming that some students may need informal roles like – 'Hi, I'm Tom – or

some formal role – 'DrAranguiz, I presume'. The perceptions that teachers have of

beginners’ informal conversationsare not the nature of the students' real-life encounters.

They may need informal written language to use in daily chatting as well as formality in

academic writing. Brown remarks the importance of teaching writing to develop other

skillssuch as reading. Emphasizing that in the process of learning writing, it is important to

take into consideration help student writers to understand their own composing process ; to

build repertoires of strategies for prewriting, drafting , and rewriting ; give them feedback

and time enough to write – rewrite (Brown,1994). Unfortunately, Cook (1991) states that

skills of written language are constantly being undervalued when teaching an L2. This

happens basically because teachers focus their attention to other skills of language.

According to this, it is important to remark that spelling mistakes are as important as

pronunciation mistakes, since bad spelling usually carries overtones of illiteracy and

stupidity, which bad pronunciation does not.

Secondly, according to Brown(1994) the process approach is also an attempt to take

advantage of the nature of the written code to give students a chance to think as they write;

indeed Brown mentions it as a thinking process.The current emphasis of the process of

teaching writing must of course be seen in the perspective of a balance between process and

product.However, Cook (1991) provides a different and organized selection of what he

believes students need to learn about second language writing, which includes the

appropriate direction of reading and writing, making and recognizing letter or character

shapes, using phonological processing route, using lexical, morpheme-based processing

route, orthographic regularities in less transparent systems and using punctuation marks and

other typographic features.

Thirdly, Brown remarks the importance of the teacher’s role.On one hand, he

explains that we must be one of facilitator and coach, not an authoritative director and

arbiter. As a facilitator, the teacher plays the role of a guide which constantly helps students

to engage in the thinking process of composing. On the other hand, it can be inferred that

Cook considers the teacher as an instructor but with the same positive characteristics

provided by Brown. These features encourage students not only to get involved with

activities made in class, but also to develop positive creative thinking at the moment of

writing tasks, either pre-intermediate; intermediate or advanced. In relation to this, Cook

points out the importance of assessing the students positively. For instance, checking

whether the students know how to spell the most frequent words and also the most often

mispronounced words by making them memorize and practice these words. Another good

way to promote the development of skills in students is to highlight the positive elements in

writing and also to provide good feedback. Brown considers feedback as an element that

we as future teachers must always have on mind. Although, feedback needs to be usefulin

order to respect students’ values and beliefs. A good example of this is the use of guidelines

for making teacher commentary more effective. Ferris (1997) found that when teachers (a)

requested specific information and (b) made summary comments on grammar, more

substantive student revisions ensued than when teachers (a) posed questions and (b) made

positive comments. Researchers are still exploring ways to offer optimal feedback to

student’s writing. The meaningful response to student writing has a lot of implications for

students of second language.

As a conclusion we can say that even though they have been overshadowed with

time, writing skills are actually as important as the rest of the skills.Whatever the language

is, it is necessary that students dedicate time at writing in order to get outstanding results at

the moment of evaluation. Cook and Brown clarified that it is not an easy task but we as

future English teachers have to find the best strategies to facilitate the process of improving

this sort of skills in our students. Their main agreement is on the fact that writing should be

taught together with the other skills and not separately, because they work together in the

acquisition of a new language. As we are living in a world of diversity, we must be

prepared to deal effectively with the social cultural and linguistic differences of L2 students

and more importantly, we need to determine the appropriate approaches for writing

instructions for L2 writers in different contexts. These two authors have provided us two

different points of view concerning writing, supplying not only different strategies for us ,

but also interesting ways to make writing more entertaining and engaging for students.

Consequently, following the strategies that these three authors have given us will to provide

our students the necessary tools not only for developing writing skills, but also for getting

excellent results at the moment of learning how to write in English.

References

Brown, H. Douglas. (1994). Teaching by principles: Interactive approach to language

pedagogy. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Cook, V. (1991) Second Language Learning and Language Teaching. London: Edward

Arnold. 3rd edition, 2001.

Ferris, D. (1997). The influence of teacher commentary on student revision.TESOL

Quarterly, 31, 315-339.