The role of writing skills

One of my difficulties while preparing to interpret for the European Parliament, is first of all, to understand the texts which are really dull sometimes. For example, I know that in the Parliament tomorrow three directives will be discussed, and each consists of at least 25 pages, and I should read all three, it really does not make me very happy. Often, I cannot focus on the main points in the text because they are so dense and formal. I understand though they are not comic strips but legal texts. They do not need to be humorous. (Szonja, EUPR/3)

This extract demonstrates not only the relevance of reading skills in the EU context, but it also reflects the respondent’s emotional standpoint of legal texts. The way she feels may indicate that the students who have to read such texts might react in a similar manner. According to the author, it is highly recommended that awareness of the EU genres should be raised in a heterogeneous EU English class, their names, their structure in general and one or two examples should be given. It can be linked to the students’ areas of interest or it can be selected from the field of employment or education. However, it is not advised to select a great number of legal texts to read, only if the target audience requires a high degree of specificity in this regard should that action be pursued. Additionally, it is worth presenting a sample of an EU Treaty, as it is closely linked to the working mechanism of the EU and the students demonstrate aninterest in it. Apart from readings on legal texts, it is suggested that EU English learners be familiarised with general materials available on the EU official website, as documents of a special EU subject field are too specific, and their comprehension requires a great deal of specific technical background knowledge.

thoroughly improve their writing skills. The item belonging to the improvement of the students’

writing skills showed a 3.07 mean. Erik in the interviews mentioned that it would be useful for him to be able to write higher quality compositions. He mentioned the aim of performing a cut above at a language examination, and he thought it would be useful to refine his writing skills in general because writing in English is crucial in any area of the job market. Another student, Kira, spoke honestly about the relevance of improving her writing skills in terms of future goals.

This idea is shown in the following excerpt:

I would prepare an exercise to write up applications for EU jobs. I think it would be good to be able to write a good covering letter too. Last time I found it very useful to write up the Europass CV. I would like to write other things as well, not only on EU-related topics. (Kira, S/10)

Lilla mentioned that learning written correspondence in the EU context would be useful for her; this was again mentioned with reference to a prospective future job. She thought it would be important for her to be able to write respectable emails or letters to be printed when applying for a job.

Building on data gained from teacher-researcher interviews, writing skills are not in the focus of EU English classes. Only one teacher-researcher mentioned the importance of writing in the context of summarising longer texts. She used to work for an EU institution and one of her duties involved summarising long texts in memo format. According to her, managers do not have time to read extensive reports or studies, therefore employees are often asked to sum up the content of important documents. Lea, in the next excerpt, speaks about writing summaries as a possible component of EU English to prepare learners for workplace tasks.

In my view, it is good to improve those skills, which can come up in the course of working for EU institutions. Such a skill can be writing up a summary of a long document. Although university students in my class had attended academic writing courses, it was still puzzling for them to prepare quality compositions, which involved the write up of accounts of longer texts. It was one of my most frequent assignments in Luxembourg. (Lea, TR/2)

She explained that she had worked at the human resources department, which was a fast -paced working environment. There was not enough time to wait for translators to provide the translation of the texts, which were significant for work on a daily basis. She also mentioned that sometimes she had to sum up texts for her manager verbally in English because of the lack of time. She was, for example, asked to summarise EU speeches or to write down the main points of them in a very short period of time. She added that the ability of summing up might be important at workplaces outside the EU. It can be a periodic task in Hungarian civil service as well. In spite of finding the improvement of the knowledge of writing summaries, she returned to stressing the relevance of reading skills in the EU context:

EU documents do not have to be drafted as frequently as they need to be read. (Lea, TR/2).

The importance of writing skills was mentioned in a more detailed manner in one of the EU professional interviews. Szonja participated in all the phases of the EU R&D projects of the company she worked for. As a full-time employee, she was engaged in the preparation of written reports on EU projects. She reported that she regularly had to provide written evidence of project achievements mostly in the form of summaries. The next excerpt illustrates a particular phase of Szonja’s work:

Researcher: What does project documentation mean? What did you have to report on?

Szonja: I had to write about the various technical developments of the project. It meant writing about how we designed a device, what principles we took into account to assemble it, what tests we ran and what kind of software we developed for the device.

(Szonja, EUPR/2)

She added that these reports were mainly summaries of the work they carried out, however, they had to be done in a specific way, they had to be uploaded to the project management website of relevant projects and they were meticulously verified by EU project coordinators. Additionally, the same respondent mentioned that it caused difficulties for her to

write spontaneously about the various phases of the project. It was, on the one hand, owing to the lack of adequate proficiency in English required for the language of the reports, on the other hand, it was because this task did not have to be performed routinely as there were long breaks between two submission dates of project reports.

On the basis of a comparison of the responses given relative to writing skills in the EU context, it can be suggested that teaching writing in the EU class is to be accessed at different levels. As suggested by Dudley-Evans and St John (1998), the ESP class benefits a lot of the instruction of writing skills if it takes a social-constructionist approach into account. This approach aims at teaching how to recognise the expectations of the discourse community learners would like to enter. To achieve this in the pedagogy of EU English, the students can be shown model texts to develop rhetorical awareness. For example, EU project reports can be collected which correspond to the fields of interest or subject specialism of the learners. Other EU genres can be selected to practice specific genre features, which can be tailored to the specific individual needs in the class. It is suggested that job advertisements or the Europass CV should be reviewedat since all respective responses assume that the students’ primary motivation in an EU English class is to increase their employability. Consequently, practising writing corresponding to genres, which are most closely related to the target audience’s target needs will contribute to the successful outcome of their writing skills improvement. Practising writing skills can be done individually or in pairs. It can be a home assignment and it can be submitted for teacher evaluation.