Before my preparation for TOEFL iBT, writing a 300 words essay will kill me. When I took College English Band 4 and Band 6, compared with high scores in listening and speaking sections, I got the lowest scores in writing section. Any student, who has the same experience with me, that is learning English as a foreign language in high school or college, suffers from these difficulties as well. How can we account for this problem?

To answer this question, we only need to know a simple fact: the national college entrance exam doesn’t test the oral presentation of students. But how can this point be related with writing?

As we all know, reading and speaking are about receiving information, writing and speaking, on the other hand, are about expressing thoughts and sending information to other people. Reading and speaking are always emphasized by high school teachers, because these two parts consist of more than 80 percent of total scores in the national college entrance exam. However, students and teachers turn a blind eye to the other two skills, especially, ignoring oral English. Indeed, speaking is a more basic skill for English learner. That’s to say, if a learner cannot speaking fluently, he or she can hardly write well. It is claimed that writing is just a paper record of speaking. I strongly agree it.

After reflecting on this problem these day, I come to the conclusion that speaking and writing are integrated language skills, and more importantly, speaking is a prerequisite of writing.