Analyzing English Language Teaching and Testing Praxis in Developing Discourse Competence in Eassy Writing

Essay writing is one of the basic and most prized competencies in our post-industrial and global world. One of the serious indictments of the traditional teaching approaches to essay writing is their essential inadequacies and incompatibilities with the present-day pedagogical trends. Writing essays in SL is, indeed, one of the most difficult and most significant tasks we engage our students in as human beings. Writing essays can assist us to find out what we think, and consequently, to know who we are. Not only does it help us to interact with others, but also to participate in our discourse community. Moreover, essay writing also requires from a writer to communicate persuasively in a disciplined way. In short, essays entail creativity of ideas and thoughts which reveal the critical perspective of the writer, and a form which is intelligible, logical and free from errors of lexis, syntax, discourse, spelling and punctuation. The following research study was, in fact, conducted to find out how SL teachers teach essay writing to learners to develop communicative/discourse competence in them to enable them to perform in real-life situations. Further, the study was carried out to realize the assessment practices of the teachers in two of the universities of Pakistan. It was, primarily, a mixed method research, utilizing quantitative and qualitative paradigms of research. For this purpose, the researcher made use of the Common European Framework of Reference 2001 (a worldwide renowned document for teaching and testing of English language) for language teaching and testing as a theoretical framework and designed questionnaires, an interview guide and an observation sheet for data collection. These instruments were pilot tested, and their validity and reliability were established thereby. Later, the questionnaires were administered to learners and teachers. Moreover, the researcher conducted interviews of the teachers and made the classroom observations as well. These three different research tools were used to triangulate, compare, contrast, and validate the data. The quantitative data were analyzed through SPSS (version 21), and the qualitative data were analyzed through thematic analysis. The research findings demonstrate that there exist gaps in the teaching and testing practices. Finally, it has been, therefore, recommended that a student-centered, content-based and task-oriented communicative classrooms ought to be created in such a way that the learners’ linguistic needs and content goals along with communicative/discourse competence in essay writing could develop to deal with the real-life challenges.