Teaching Activities:
Writing
Writing is an essential skill in our everyday lives and that makes it a really important aspect of our teaching too! Students need to know how to take notes as well as how to write essays and letters, which makes this basic skill as important as speaking or listening.
Writing skills are important because they are a good way to reinforce what a student has learned as they will benefit from seeing new vocabulary in written form.
Speaking and listening are natural, though, and as such they do not strictly need to be learned. For example, if an English person moves to France, they will eventually learn to speak French just from being around native French speakers. They will, however, struggle to write in French. Consequently, writing can be frustrating and disliked. When we speak, we do not really think about the grammatical correctness or the mechanics of what we are saying. Everything flows as speech happens rather quickly; we do not repeat our speech to check for mistakes or the appropriateness of what we are saying. Writing, on the other hand, does not flow smoothly. We write a few lines, re-read them, edit what we’ve written if necessary, and then carry on the process – we are constantly checking for correctness.
For these reasons we need to make writing an enjoyable activity that our students will not want to avoid. We need to encourage students, initially at least, to write without worrying about the correctness of everything they put to paper – get them to generate ideas and then edit their written English afterwards. It is also important to be involved every step of the way as leaving your students to produce a written piece of work with little help can be a rather daunting prospect for them. Furthermore, to help our students become self-sufficient writers, rather than marking a student’s work in red pen and handing it back to them it is much better to meet individually with them to discuss the strong and weak points of their work.
For TEFL students to improve their skills in written English, they need to attain correctness and accuracy in:
- Grammar
- Vocabulary
- Spelling
- Punctuation
- Layout conventions
- A range of sentence structures
- Linkage of information across sentences and paragraphs to develop a topic
- Appropriate register for the type of writing
- Awareness of the conventions in different genres of writing, such as letters, poems, essays etc.
This is a possible sequence of a TEFL writing lesson in which you are getting your students to write a short story for children:
- Introduce the topic students will be learning about. You can use pictures if you like. Conduct a group discussion of the subject in general – this will give everyone ideas for what to write about. Assign the writing task and deal with any misunderstandings.
- Ask a student to think about who is going to read the piece of writing (e.g. children) considering style, information, layout etc.
- Show the students other short children’s stories to illustrate the correct form.
- Using the initial discussion as a springboard, get the students to brainstorm ideas in groups, which you can then write up on the board. Students can then choose which ones they want to use in their own story.
- Edit and put the ideas into a logical sequence individually or in groups.
- Construct an example framework text in small groups or with the whole class.
- Get the students to prepare a rough draft in groups or individually.
- Get the students to discuss their work with each other and finally with the teacher.
- Prepare and write final text.
- Go through each student’s work individually with them, discussing strengths and weaknesses of the work.
Another good task is to ask your students to keep a diary. This will get them into the habit of writing every day and encourage them to be less apprehensive about this skill.
