Writing Skills and Writing Approaches in ESL Classroom: A Systematic Review

Abstract

The English language is used as the universal language to communicate with people worldwide in the era of globalisation as more global citizens take up English as a Second Language (ESL). In line with that, the Ministry of Education (MOE) has emphasised the importance of the English language especially in the aspect of writing. This paper presents systematic literature review of relevant published paper from 20152021, a span of seven years. It discusses the writing approaches implemented by English as a Second Language teachers to teach writing skills. A total of 15 papers related to the writing approaches were obtained using the PRISMA method from Google Scholar, Scopus and ERIC. The two questions addressed in this research are; (i) what are the approaches which is suitable for ESL writing classroom? and (ii) what are the impacts of using the selected approaches in improving writing difficulties? The findings revealed that five approaches were commonly used to teach writing process based approach, product based approach, genre based approach, process- product approach and processgenre approach. The results indicated more positive outcomes then negative outcomes. Keywords: