An Insight Into Difficulties Faced By Pakistani Student Writers: Implications for Teaching of Writing

Abstract

Writing is one of the most difficult and complex human activities. It involves a variety of cognitive activities for example; the
development of a design idea, the capture of mental representations of knowledge, and of experience with subjects. The cyclic and
nonlinear processes of writing by novice and expert authors have been studied by such diverse disciplines as cognitive psychology,
stylistics, rhetoric, text linguistics, critical literary theory, hypertext theory, second language acquisition, and writing pedagogy. In an
article named, "CognitiveF Development and the Basic Writer" Andrea A. Lunsford(1979) made an effort to establish the notion that
students are developmentally incapable of drawing understandings outside of themselves. Lunsford provided references from Vygotsky
and Piaget, summarizing that students form concepts from day to day learning but cannot think scientifically about these concepts by
separating themselves, defining them, and drawing inferences on them. Lunsford (1979) noted that we learn by doing and includes a
quote from Eleanor Duckworth, "thoughts are our way of connecting things up for ourselves. If somebody else tells us about the
connections he has made, we can only understand him to the extent that we do the work of making those connections ourselves.
Lunsford encourages collaboration in learning, as well as new ways to approach basic writing classes. From such a vast reassure of
approaches and themes, this paper will be concerned with what is immediately relevant to the teaching and learning of writing in
Pakistan .In the end I have also made an effort to propose some practical designs for the teaching of writing in real classroom situation.