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Students often find it difficult to engage with reading and writing instruction and practice,
particularly when large, intimidating texts are involved. This is the second in our series of
insight blog posts, aimed at helping teachers to overcome this problem. Here are the Top 10
Tips for Writing, from teacher-trainer Olha Madylus.
Writing is the most difficult of the four language skills. In order to write well, students need to not
only have mastery of grammar, a large bank of vocabulary, know how to structure texts, and be able
to plan and edit their own writing - they also need to have ideas, opinions and imagination. They are
also expected to write things they would never normally write in their own language, let alone in
English. Little wonder that so many students dont like writing and find it hard to see any progress in
this skill.
Here are 10 tips to help you teach writing in the classroom.
1. Start small
Initially do short writing tasks in class. Writing even one good sentence is a great start. All too
often, teachers ask students at low levels to produce long texts, which they have not been
prepared for. Students will become confident with a step-by-step approach based on the success
of mastering skills one by one.
Whatever the focus of the lesson, encourage students to produce their own sentences which
incorporate the target language.
2. Provide good models and discuss what makes them good
Students need to see what they are aiming for. Ensure that lessons focusing on reading texts
include a discussion on what makes it an effective text - why is a particular description good?
Maybe because it uses vivid adjectives and builds up a picture that can easily be visualised by the
reader. Remember: just reading a lot of texts is not enough - students have to notice how they
work in order to then reproduce those skills.
3. Plan to develop different aspects of writing separately
There are so many different skills which students need to develop in order to become proficient
writers in English, they cannot be developed simultaneously. So, plan tasks in class which
develop these skills separately. Course books often have lots of writing tasks to develop
grammatical accuracy, but what about other writing sub-skills? You could create a gapped text of
a story with no adjectives and ask students to add powerful adjectives to see how they add
colour and tone to the text i.e. using different adjectives could make it funny, serious or even
frightening.
Note which writing sub-skills your students have problems with and create tasks to address
these problems.
Writing poems is a great way to allow students to focus on quality of writing rather than
worrying about quantity. (Have a look at Creative Poetry Writing by Jane Spiro, Resource Books
for Teachers, Oxford University Press).
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