Andrij D’jakov, Chernivtsi

Teaching communication will be incomplete without teaching writing essays as one of the ways of practising communicative skills. In essay writing students hone thereby their skills in expressing their thoughts in English. Moreover, such skills could be practically applied when students write scientific articles in English as well as various documents, business letters, etc. Thus, the main idea lies not only in honing writing skills as it is, but also in the perfection of students’ dexterity both in business and scientific writing.

The process of teaching writing involves two steps. On the first step students are taught general principles of essay writing, such as the structure of a paragraph (topic sentences, supporting sentences, closing sentences), ways of arrangement of ideas, transitional devices etc.

Particularly, studying the material about topic sentences, students have to realize that wherever such sentences may stand (at the beginning of a paragraph or in the middle or even at the very end — such cases also may occur), they express the main idea of the paragraph. Therefore students should be able to express their thoughts as laconically as possible (briefly but exactly). As for practicing in writing closing sentences, students are taught to express the conclusions briefly but clearly. An important role is plaid by different ways of arrangement of ideas. For practicing skills both in business and scientific writing a special attention is paid to different orders of arrangement (chronological order, spatial order, climatic order (from more important to less important), movement from general to specific or vice versa, from specific to general; as well as various patterns: question — answer, problem — solution and so on). This program also touches upon the ways of logical transition: transitional words and phrases (or gambits), repetition of key words, parallel constructions, transitional paragraphs.

The second step includes teaching four types of essay:

• narration (enumeration of events in the chronological order with the main purpose to show some experience);
• description (enumeration of features in the spatial order on the basis of sensory details);
• exposition (presentation of facts and explanation of ideas to inform the reader);
• persuasion or argumentation (an intention to influence the reader’s attitude or opinion as well as to make the reader accept the writer’s idea).

Students get acquainted with the peculiarities of all the four types of essays as well as their practical application both in business and scientific writing.

Besides those questions students are taught some adjacent topics: English business style, English punctuation, the ways of romanization of Cyrillic characters (the last aspect could be practically applied in e-mail).