Writing

Teaching writing

Reasons for teaching writing

Writing Issues

Writing sequences

More writing suggestions

Genre

The writing process

Building the writing habit

- Gives more 'thinking time'

- Allows opportunities for language processing

Writing-for-learning

Writing-for-writing

- Writing is used as an practice tool to help students practise and work with language they have been studying.

- The purpose of the activities is give reinforcement to students

- Occurs when we have students write sentences in preparation for some other activity.

- Directed at developing the students’ skills as writers.

- Provide practice in order to make students better at writing.

- Focused on the language itsel, the text construction, layout, style and effectiveness.

The kind of writing we ask students to do will depend, as most other things do, on their age, level, learning styles and interests.

A genre is a type of writing which members of a discourse community would instantly recognise.

- One of the decisions that we will need to make, therefore, is which genres are important and/or engaging for our students.

- Involves planning what we are going to write, drafting it, reviewing and editing what we have written and then producing a final version

- It is not a linear process

- We may plan, draft, re-plan, draft, edit, re-edit, re-plan, etc before we produce our final version.

- Students don't like to write.

- We need to engage them, from early levels, with activities which are easy and enjoyable to take part in.

- When students have acquired this writing habit that they are able to look at written genres and involve themselves in the writing process with enthusiasm.

Example 1: postcards (pre-intermediate/intermediate)

- Fill the blanks with the words in the box.

- In another postcard, circle the words that can be left out.

- Discuss their holiday in pairs or small groups, deciding where they will send the postcard from and what they want to say

Example 2: email interview (pre-intermediate upwards)

- Show students an example of this kind of interview and discuss how it is put together (questions that are emailed to the interviewee)

- Students now write a fair copy of their questions and send them to one of the other students in the class

- The interviewees answer as many questions as they want to.

- They ‘send’ the replies back to the questioners, whose job is to write up the interviews appropriately.

- Instant writing

- Using music and pictures

- Newspapers and magazines

- Brochures and guides

- Poetry

-Collaborative writing

- Writing to each other

- Writing in other genres

Example 3: writing a report (upper intermediate)

- Students listen an interview

- Matching sections exercise

- Fill the blanks exercise

- Use of synonyms

- Choose a topic

- Gather information.

- Plan the report

- Draft

- Check the report

- Write the final report

Correcting written work

- For avoid the ‘over-correction’ problem teachers tell their students that they are only going to correct mistakes of punctuation, or only spelling or only grammar, etc.

- It makes students concentrate on that particular aspect, and it cuts down on the correction.

- List of written symbols (S = spelling, WO = word order, etc)

- We need to react not just to the form of what they have written, but also to the content. Also need to make sure that students do not just put corrected work into their folders without fully understanding why we have reacted as we have.

Regardless of digital media, people today continue to write by hand, some write with different symbols. For these people it is doubly difficult to learn English, is necessary that the teacher also teaches the strokes and the direction to write (left to right)

Handwriting