Teaching Writing

Teaching Writing

10 Steps to Plan a Writing Course

• Establishing a writing course may be a challenge where many teachers can feel uncomfortable even if it is their native language.
• Based on the "Methodology in Language Teaching" book I am going to present to you ten steps to follow in planning a Writing Course and Training teachers of writing.
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1Acertaining Goals

• Here are a few courses of action that are open to us, to get our students goals.
• we can work politically to change the constraints. We can join and form committees, we can make proposals, and we can run pilot projects. Pilot projeccts are a good way to test our alternate methods, since administratiors do not view them as too theatening.
• we can make only a part of our course address the test or the assigned curriculum.
• we can avoid seeing ends as means. Is a student has to learn how to write an essay in 30 minutes on a prescribed topic, that does not mean that the whole course should consist of 30 minute writing tasks. The ends dictate only the destination, not how we get there. We need to find ways to ensure that wee vary our means of working toward the prescribes ends.

2Deciding on Theoretical Principles

• ESL has been discussed about the ideology in teaching writing. Some teachers say that their teaching is not associated with ideology in any way but others don't think like that.
• Sarah Benesch points aout that "all formsof ESL instruction are ideological, whether or not educators are conscious of the political implications of their instructional choices".
• Closely allied to ideology comes theory and our views of language, the nature of language learning, writing, and the nature of the learning of composition.closely allied to ideology comes theory and our views of language, the nature of language learning, writing, and the nature of the learning of composition.
• So what we decide to emphasize in the classroom is not just a practical matter of choosing an activity to fill the next day’s lesson plan. Principled teaching will always reveal principled theoretical underpinnings.So what we decide to emphasize in the classroom is not just a practical matter of choosing an activity to fill the next day’s lesson plan. Principled teaching will always reveal principled theoretical underpinnings.
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3: Planning Content

• Teachers have a controversy about what the content of a writing class should be, they are questioning if they should use a personal experience, social or cultural issues, literature or other areas content.
• There is no one right answer to the question of content, but there is one wrong answer. That wrong answer is that the content of a writing course takes a back seat to practice in prescribed models of paragraph or essay form; that it does not matter what you write about as long as it conforms to an accepted rhetorical model. Why is that wrong? Because it misses the point about using writing as a unique tool for language learning. It returns to an early view of writing as one (and the least important) of the four language skills to be used to test that other skills have been mastered.
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4: Weighing the Elements

• Writing consists of many constituent parts and we need to consider which ones will be the most important for a course: content, organization, originality, style, fluency, accuracy, or using appropriate rhetorical forms of discourse.
• Giving instruction in writing is not like giving instructions for assembling a toy or a mail-order computer. It is not simply a question of getting the right tools and following directions. If it were, more people would be good writers, and more teachers and textbook writers would be very rich.
• It is helpful to do a needs analysis on the first day, balancing institutional goals with what students say they need to learn and what they need to use writing for; then we can weight the elements so that the chaos of composing is somewhat reduced for the students, since they can focus on one or two things at a time.

5: Drawing Up a Syllabus

• In The Language Teaching Matrix, Richards (1990) lists the kinds of syllabi commonly found in speaking and listening courses in ESL. The following is an adapted list to the types of syllabus organization for writing courses:
• 1. Structural. Writing courses, particularly at beginning levels, can be organized around grammar and sentence patterns. A present tense paragraph one day, then a past tense paragraph, and so on. This was common in the 1960s, but is less so now. Structural courses nowadays are often organized by patterns of writing forms or genres: paragraphs with topic sentences, descriptions, analyses, and so on.
• 2. Functional. Writing courses can be organized around rhetorical activities: describing, telling a story, writing autobiography, comparing and contrasting, classifying, defining, explaining, arguing, persuading, or supporting a thesis with examples, illustrations, and other evidence.
• 3. Topical. A writing course can be organized around themes, such as housing, health, education, or abstractions such as success or courage. In the United States, ESL writing courses in college are often linked with a content course. At Hunter College in New York, students in an intermediate-level ESL course are also enrolled in “The Greek and Latin Roots of English” and many of the readings in that course are examined in more linguistic detail in the ESL course.
• 4. Situational. Writing courses can be organized around situational transactions, such as applying for a job, complaining to a landlord, writing letters to the newspaper, writing a business memo, or writing essays to pass a course.
• 5. Skills and processes. Writing courses can be organized around skills and processes such as generating ideas, organizing ideas, revising, writing fluently, writing effective beginnings and endings, and developing an argument to convince a reader.
• 6. Tasks. Writing courses can be organized around problem-solving activities, such as producing a class magazine of accounts of student trips; comparing the structure of texts written for different audiences and purposes; writing, editing, and producing a play; and examining the differences between ESL textbook situations and the expectations of the students’ culture.

6: Selecting Materials

• Teachers of writing are beginning to view the main texts of a writing class as what the students write and what the teachers write in response. Before selecting a book, either as an individual or as a committee, it is advisable to take a section or a task or two and work through it to see what is asked for and what assumptions the author makes, because sometimes authors make claims on which they do not follow through.
• If you decide to use an ESL writing textbook and not books and articles written for authentic purposes, I would suggest looking for the following seven features:
• 1. Topics. Will they engage the students’ interests? What are they based on– experience, materials in the book such as readings and pictures, activities and inquiries beyond the classroom, or out-of-the-blue random topics? Are the topics culturally appropriate for your students? Is the content relevant and engaging?
• 2. Types of writing. Are the students writing essays, letters, or paragraphs? Is that what they need to be writing?
• 3. Opportunities for and instruction in methods of generating ideas. Which of the following are included: brainstorming, free writing, listing, mapping, outlining? Which are appropriate for your students?
• 4. Instruction on principles of rhetorical organization. What information is provided to help students organize various types of writing–letters, description, narration, Ann Raimes 312 exposition, and argument, for example–and which types do your students need to practice?
• 5. Opportunities for collaboration. Is group work a part of the activities? If so, how are collaborative activities viewed in your culture?
• 6. Opportunities for revision. Are students encouraged and directed to write drafts? Does the book provide instruction on what to do at various stages? Does your curriculum allow for revision of essays?
• 7. Instruction in editing and proofreading. What can students learn from the book about how to edit their own work? What instruction is provided in finding and editing grammatical errors?

7: Preparing Activities And Roles

• There is a lot of theoretical talk about student-centered classrooms, and teachers can f ind out what that means when they analyze their own classes and their own experience as students.
• That is why it is important for teachers to be students, too–in their own class rooms, by writing reflective teaching journals, and, wherever possible, in another teacher’s classroom.
• We have to make sure that we do not try to bank too much in our students’ brains all at once. It helps if we think about what students will be doing and learning in the classroom rather than the comprehensiveness of the information we will be imparting.

8: Choosing Types And Methods Of Feedback

• First, in the case of large classes, not every piece of writing has to be corrected or even seen by the teacher. Students can do journal writing, response logs to reading, or free writing in which the aim is to generate ideas, and so increase fluency rather than accuracy.
• Second, whoeverrespondshasavarietyofphysicalmethodsofresponding:acomment to or a conversation with the writer; an interlinear response with computer software, using such features as the “Comment” capability and redlining; an audiotaped response; or a written response.
• Third, you have to select the type of response you prefer to give, with time and class size being important factors in the decision. Some teachers do the following:
• They evaluate by giving a grade.
• They locate, indicate the nature of, and/or correct the student’s errors.
• They make suggestions for changes: “I think you need to rewrite the sentence about your boss so that we understand his point of view more clearly.”
• They reflect–and subtly correct as they do so: “I’m not surprised that your grandmother felt upset.” (The student had actually written: “My grandmother feeling upset.”)
• They rewrite passages: “I am easy to change a fuse.” → “Changing a fuse is easy.”
• They comment on strategies: “It might be useful to define the term success.”
• They ask questions: “Where was your grandmother born?”
• They emote: “What a terrible experience!”“I feel this way, too.”
• They criticize: “The conclusion is weak. It introduces new points.”
• They describe: “You start out by mentioning four ways in which language learning is beneficial.
• Then you provide two specific examples.” (less frequently)
• They praise: “The paragraph about your aunt’s language learning experience makes its point very strongly through the story you tell.” I used to type up student sentences with errors in them for the whole class to edit. Now, to emphasize the positive, I type up those that work well and we discuss these “winners.”
• Fourth, you and your students need to agree on the purpose of the response. The key question here is: What are the students supposed to do next? Does the feedback help them do that? If we fail to make our expectations clear, we have only ourselves to blame if the students cast a mere cursory glance at all our hard work and file it in the circular file.

9: Evaluating The Course

• One form of evaluation that is becoming increasingly popular in writing courses actually helps to combine student evaluation and course evalution: the use of portfolios. All semester students work on multiple drafts of their writing, which are guided by their instructor but not graded. At the end, they select three or four specified types of writing to include in the portfolio, both in-class writing and revised work. They write a cover letter assessing their work and their progress and what they have learned in the course. The portfolio is then evaluated by another instructor in the program, who assigns a grade. So the original instructor is coach, not evaluator. These portfolios lead students to want to revise, to present their best work.

10: Reflecting The Teacher's Experience

• Goals, theories, content, focus, syllabus, materials, activities, feedback, and course evalua tion are substantive matters that we have to address whenever we design a writing course, but they pale into insignificance beside one thing: ourselves and our experience.
• Teachers do not always consider themselves researchers. But any teacher who ponders why one class or activity works and another does not, any teacher who tests out a new approach and notes its effects, is a researcher, theorist, and practitioner– a busy person.
• The best way for a teacher to record this sense of plausi bility and analyze it is, of course, through writing. A key component of any teacher-training course should therefore be a massive amount of writing: reflective teaching logs, reports, essays, research papers, and responses to other teachers’ and students’ writing, with the hope that teachers in writing courses will then write along with their students and present their own writing for discussion. That way, we will keep in the forefront what we and our students learn and experience as we work together, and we will let that set the framework for the other nine steps in planning a writing course.