Reading and Writing Skills: The Challenges of Teaching at College Level

Abstract

Throughout my teaching career I can claim that reading and writing are interchangeable skills. One cannot improve without the other.That is why I keep asking my students how we can improve our reading and writing skills? They give unclear answers simply because they do not read and write academically; they just read and write to pass exams and get a degree to get a job or wait for a promotion. At this point, students should be motivated well enough so that they like reading and writing as a means of improving their academic performance. To solve these problems or challenges, I have made claims that there are common grounds between reading and writing. Both require certain skills such as note-taking, good language as an aid to understand any topic and to write well. Both reading and writing need topics to read and write about. Similarly, reading and writing require a student, who should have a good command of rich vocabulary to understand topics, and to choose words that suit any topic they may tackle in English. However, there are basic differences between reading and writing. Firstly, in the process of reading, students focus their attention on the topic and the main idea. However, in the process of writing, students need to read as much as possible to find a topic to write about. Furthermore, during reading, students should take notes of the main ideas. However, on tests, students do not need to use documentation, as, in the process of writing a research paper, documentation is a must to avoid plagiarism. Thus, this paper tackles teaching reading and writing for EFL students at the college level in the Arab world and provide remedies based on observation, experience, and corrections of thousands of students’ exercises, assignments, and exams. The researcher has delved into many research areas to come up with remedies and recommendations for the challenges discussed in the article.