Although this was true for my basic French writing skills, my spoken, reading, and listening French skills remained much higher than my writing. This was similar to what my students experience and demonstrate here in an Arab country where college students enter with so many years of English language experience.
(The only obvious difference is that my hiatus from writing or typing answers in French had been longer than my students who had had only a short break between high school and college.) My students often speak and sometimes listen with much higher English skills than writing, vocabulary and grammar ones.
The "Ahah" thought came to me then.
Just as I had learned decades earlier, without practice and self-correction, ones writing skills are going to atrophy over time much faster and more evidentially than any of the other three writing skills, i.e. reading, listening, and speaking.
This means that in the lower grades and in my own daily life, the only way to maintain or to improve the skill of writing (including vocabulary and grammar skills) is through constant practice and input from others (like teachers or peers)--followed by the subsequent revision and rewriting which I have long expected of my students, but which the current educational system does not often offer nor require of the Native Arab learners of English.
In short, because writing was acquired last in the history of language skills, we need to spend the longest time honing this skills--or overtime we will forget how to write or self-correct our own errors. Historically, the Middle East has maintained much more emphasis on the spoken word and has not emphasized (reading and) writing to as great a degree--even in Arabic. The time-on-task spent writing in (both Arabic and) English must be increased in the early grades of education so that the failures at college levels in the Middle Eastern tertiary system are greatly diminished.
One final thought for me: As Arab nations get around to improving their L2 delivery and educational training in general this millennia, old teachers like me,[6] need to hone my L2, L3, etc. skills. We live in a multilingual and multicultural world. We need to set better examples for others.
Write, Write, Learn, Learn, Learn.
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