Teaching Writing

The tasks of teacher in writing

Teachers have a number of crucial tasks to perform, especially when students are doing 'writing-for-writing' activities, where they may be reluctant to express themselves or have difficulty finding ways and means of expressing themselves to their satisfaction. Among the tasks which teachers have to perform before, during, and after student writing are the following:

• Demonstrating – Since students need to be aware of writing conventions and genre constraints in specific types of writing, teachers have to be able to draw these features to their attention. For example, lay out issues or the language used to perform certain written functions.

• Motivating and provoking - student writers often find themselves 'lost for words', especially in creative writing tasks. This is where the teacher can help, provoking the students into having ideas, enthusing them with the value of the task, and persuading them what fun it can be. Sometimes teachers can give them the words they need to start a writing task as a way of getting them going.

• Supporting. Students need a lot of help and reassurance once they get going, both with ideas and with the means to carry them out

• Responding - the way we react to students' written work can be divided
into two main categories, that of responding and that of evaluating.
When responding, we react to the content and construction of a piece
supportively and often (but not always) make suggestions for its
improvement.

For example, when students write journals, we may respond by reacting to what they have said (e.g. 'your holiday sounds very interesting, Raza. I liked the bit about running out of petrol but I didn't understand exactly who went and got some petrol. Could you possibly write and tell me in your next journal entry?') rather than filling their journal entry full of correction symbols. Comments about their use of language and suggest ways of improving it (e.g. 'be careful with your past tenses, Hassan. Look at the verbs I've underlined and see if you can write them correctly.')
• Evaluating - We do want to evaluate students' work and know what standard we have reached (in the case of a progress/achievement test). We may also award grades.
Building the writing habit

1. Building confidence and enthusiasm

The unwillingness to write in English may derive from anxieties students have about their handwriting, their spelling, or their ability to construct sentences and paragraphs.

The students’ reluctance to write can also be because they rarely write even in their own language, and so the activity feels alien.

Another powerful disincentive is the fear that they have ‘nothing to say’.
Finally, writing just does not interest some students.

With such students, we need to spend some time building the writing habit – that is, making students feel comfortable as writers in English and gaining their willing participation in more creative or extended activities. This will involve:

1. Choosing the right kinds of activities
2. Providing them with enough language and information to allow them to complete writing tasks.

2. Choosing writing tasks and activities

It is important to choose writing activities that have a chance for appealing to our students and also have some relevance for them. For example, writing fairy tales might appeal children but could fail to inspire a group of university students.

We need to have a good idea of not only what students are likely to be doing in English in the future, but also what kind of subject and tasks they will enjoy – or have enjoyed in the past.