Prospects for Considering the Role of Syntactic Awareness in Academic Writing

Abstract

Speaking or writing in a foreign language can be predominantly performed for the sake of communicating with others and interacting with the social community of that language. Besides, EFL learners may not put a strong emphasis on the grammatical components of that language in their speech or within their EFL language classroom discourse. Ultimately, familiarizing learners with the syntax of academic written English in the ELT classrooms may be a matter of interest. Adequately, writing effectively requires being aware of how learners write rather than how they learn what to write. Despite the fact that students learn grammatical aspects unrelatedly in the ELT classes, they may be deficient to switch this syntactic knowledge into an authentic written language. This can be because syntactic knowledge cannot produce effective writing without regularly practicing and incorporating these grammatical components into their writing. This study has been conducted with the aim of investigating the relationship between syntactic knowledge and learners’ writing performance in an ELT classroom. To further up the study, the researchers have opted for an experiment with second year students of English at ENS of Laghouat who are studying online through Edmodo application. They have received a test through which the researchers tested their syntactic competence through the quality of their writing and their writing performance. Preliminary results suggest that the students, who have a good mastery of practical grammatical aspects, will have ability for producing effective and good writing competence. Hence, being aware of language grammar in writing might not be efficient; this might be because writing requires applying grammatical knowledge and also the need for a high control over it.