THE IMPACT OF DETECTING TEXTUAL DISTINCTIVE LINGUISTIC FEATURES TO TEACH LETTER WRITING TO HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

This study investigates how the linguistic analysis of discourse contributes to ameliorating the teaching of letter writing to high school students. To delve more into the topic, a study was conducted during the academic year 2021/2022 in which ten high school teachers of English from three different institutions in the city of El-Oued in Algeria were interviewed face-to-face about the impact of conducting linguistic analysis of model texts on the teaching of letter writing. Results reveal that all participants opt for the explicit teaching of the writing skill. According to them, heterogeneous classes in the Algerian context hamper the implementation of the implicit teaching of writing. They stated that presenting textual features of all types will make text production easier. They clarified that letter writing lessons are better understood when mainly the distinctive linguistic features of model texts are initially detected in a collaborative way with students. They added that the Teaching Learning Cycle (TLC) is an efficient approach to explicitly teach letter writing.