Whitewashing writing

On an interesting Teacher Talking Time podcast Jason Anderson makes the following complaint:

"...that side of language learning [explicit knowledge used for written communication] has been whitewashed out of communicative language teaching because communicative is essentially obsessed with spoken language learning which requires the implicit learning that is centralised here but things are changing. Think about the vast majority of learners around the world...the vast majority of them are using English in far far more written contexts...these people need language for written usage"

Anderson 2020: 21m04s - 21m36s; https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-bigyz-dbce7b

Anderson's point that communicative language teaching whitewashed written language can be contrasted with the historical development of the field of language teaching. In the drive for nation states which culminated in the 19th century, language teachers, starting from the 16th century, were recruited to impose a standard language on the developing nations - following a one country one language doctrine. The standard language that was used to fufill this doctrine was drawn from written use.

As Howatt (1984) describes:

"The Renaissance had inherited a framework of linguistic description from the Middle Ages which, in its standard from, divided grammar in four components: Orthography, Etymology, Syntax and Prosody. There was no special category devoted exclusively to the study of speech...Of the big four only Orthography and Prosody had anything to say about spoken language, but the former was mainly concerned with the teaching of spelling and the latter with the rules of versification"

Howatt, 1984: 77

So in the above sense writing has indeed been whitewashed.

References:

Howatt, A. P. R. (1984). A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.