Abstract:
The focus of this study was on the teaching of French in ten (to) Senior
High Schools (SHS's) in the Cape Coast Metropolis of Ghana. Captioned
'Towards strategic leaching of written expression', it sought to find out the classroom practices of leaching Written Expression to identify what really goes on. The main objective was to propose practical steps of teaching written expression which would enhance students' understanding and restore their confidence in writing. From 22 French teachers in the SHS's in the Cape Coast Metropolis quantitative and qualitative data were obtained through questionnaire, class lesson observation and interviews to find out the practices of teaching written expression in the schools. The cognitivists' theory of process writing proposed by Hayes and Flower (1980) which is widely accepted as a key measure of teaching of written expression was adopted for the basis of the analysis. The results revealed that most teachers did not use appropriate processes of teaching the written expression that could give their students the autonomy to effectively engage in the task of writing. At the end of the study, the teachers were urged to adopt appropriate process writing approaches and promote regular formative evaluation practices to enhance their students' competence and autonomy to deal with the task of written expression in French.
