The Dilemma of Second Language Writing Teachers in a Higher Learning Institution

Academic discourses surrounding the major approaches in the field of teaching writing have resulted in several paradigm shifts in writing pedagogy. The battles over competing theories of approaches to teaching writing have been intense that many teachers and practitioners are often confused by the protracted genre-process debate. L2 writing practitioners often found themselves in a state of a dilemma in making a decision on which of the many and often, conflicting approaches to teaching writing will actually help to improve learners’ writing. This paper argues for a synthesis of approaches, the process genre-based approach for teaching L2 technical writing students. The effectiveness of integrating the various approaches to the teaching of technical writing in a higher learning institution was investigated. A total of 138 engineering students were selected through stratified random sampling to participate in the study. The pre-post tests control group experimental design compares the mean scores gained by the subjects in the experimental group, adopting process genre-based approach, to those in the control group, adopting the existing genre-based approach. Results of holistic scoring of learners’ writing revealed that the learners’ writing in the process genre-based approach group achieved significantly higher marks in the raters’ scores than the learners’ writing in the genre-based approach group. The pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.