A critical review of EFL writing syllabus at tertiary level in the Arab world

Abstract

Research into the written performance of Arab EFL learners centres for the most part upon their failure to handle a variety of assignments as prescribed by the writing syllabus. All things considered, writing problems are primarily attributed to the students’ linguistic incompetence, immature mastery of rhetorical structure of the English text and Arabic discourse transfer (Al-Khuweileh and Al-Shoumali, 2000; Al-Hazmi and Schofield, 2007) By contrast, educational policies and teaching usually evade criticism. This study is an attempt to provide a new interpretation of learners’ writing problems. In other words, it posits that writing problems could also be caused by the employment of outdated approaches and resources. To verify this argument, the present paper explored the existing writing courses in three Arab Universities, revealing that English Departments adopted approaches and materials characteristic of the 1940s and 1950s. Needless to say, unless new developments into the linguistic theory and writing pedagogy, i.e. genre analysis, contrastive rhetoric and discourse analysis, are incorporated into the existing writing syllabus, Arab EFL learners will continue to have writing problems.