ESL: How To Teach Writing

1. Introduction.: Hello there and welcome to ESL writing. In this course, we're going to discuss writing techniques such as controlled writing and free-writing. We're going to learn how to help students transition easily from controlled writing to free writing. And we'll also take a look at how we can use model texts, oral and elicitation strategies to help with this transition. As well as this, we're going to talk about the different methods of correcting students written work. Writing is easily one of the most underrated aspects of learning English is seen as boring or uninteresting remaining students and can even be taken for granted by some teachers. However, if presented correctly and efficiently, it can hugely benefit students learning in many different ways. Writing is an extremely important element of learning English as a second language. It reinforces grammatical structures, vocabulary, idioms, and it can help students focus and creative thinking as well. Moreover, it boost confidence with reading, dictation and test taking. The challenge for the teacher here is making it meaningful and engaging for the student. 2. Why Writing Is Important.: Before we start a question, we should ask ourselves and think about is our writing skills as important as the other English learning skills such as listening, reading, and speaking. Many teachers take this skill for granted in the same way that many students pass it off as boring or tedious or unnecessary. Despite what the students might think, writing is certainly just as important as it reinforces grammatical structures, vocabulary, idioms, as well as boost in confidence with reading, test taking and creative thinking as well. As well as this, most of the activities we do every day from work meetings, presentations, to even writing emails and normal conversations, bring out the need to communicate and writing is a big factor in this. The reason being, in order to be a good and effective communicator, you have to develop the four basic language skills. Listening, reading, speaking, and writing. Breaking these down, speaking and writing are productive where the action of producing language is needed as part of the process of learning the skills. As for listening and reading, there isn't a need to produce language, only the need to receive and understand it. Obviously, production of language is a huge factor in reinforcing grammar, becoming comfortable with colloquialisms and memorizing keywords. As a whole, writing activities are done a slower pace than other activities, but can help students focus and help their creative thinking. This is the challenge for the teacher. How can we make it meaningful for the student? Why should be right? Teacher? Writing is boring. Why should I write? Maybe your students will ask you this question and how can you respond harshly? Because I said so, no, of course not. You need to be constructive with your response. So think about this question and come up with a reasonable answer. Here is my answer. Most people learn a language with the main goal of speaking it, but they really consider writing because it doesn't help hold conversations. But no amount of listening and reading will allow you to shape your language structure entirely. If you really want to be fluent in a language that you're trying to learn, you should aim to speak, listen, read, and write. Here are some basic reasons that I think you should learn to write. Number one, it allows you to organize and refine your ideas. Writing is a much slower process, letting you organize your thoughts more before shaping your sentences. When writing, you can gradually process your words, maybe even looking them up for us before transplant them onto paper or even a digital document. As well as this, you're also able to learn new vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation as you go. Once you're done, you can also look back and what you've written and correct it if it's needed. Number two, it gives you a hard copy of your progress. Practice makes perfect, and it's even more so true and writing, who doesn't make mistakes. That's why you should write as much as you can when learning a new language. So over time, you'll see the progress of your language learning journey in order to evaluate your weak and strong points. The reason being is if you don't pay attention to mistakes, you're likely to make them in your speaking skills as well. So you treat writing in a way not just to apply your knowledge, but also as a tool to continually improve your vocabulary and sentence structure. Moreover, you can also practice your reading skills with it as well. And if you add dates your writings, you can look back and your progress will seem even clearer. Number three, it helps others give you feedback. Having someone thoroughly check what you've written and give you constructive feedback and tips on how to revise and improve is a great way to fix overall grandma and confidence in your overall language skills. Number four, it helps you recall what you've learned. There are many words, phrases, and rules in the English language. It may feel hard to memorize them all, but many studies have shown that writing things down is a proven technique to be helpful and retaining information. As practice creates new neural pathways in the brain. When you constantly write things down in your target language, you'll be less and less likely to forget what you've learned. Even doodles in a book and circling words are highlighting in colors is a good way to make a block of text more personalized, memorable. Number five, it can also develop your speaking skills. Uh, 2015 study on the relationship between writing and speaking revealed that learners who have skills to produce academic language in writing can easily transfer the argumentative skills to speaking skills. So if you develop your writing skills in a new language, you will increase your competence in speaking that language as well. It's a win-win. 3. Controlled Writing.: Controlled writing. Controlled writing activities are focused on lower level students and are great for students just learning how to read and write. They can be adapted to the easiest of sentences are, if needed, made harder and much more challenging for the older levels to. These activities that we'll look at are great for getting students to focus on helping students to review full carefully and structures. Just remember that these activities can take many forms. You can use them to include listening skills with the teacher will dictate the sentences and target vocabulary to be filled in or even speaking skills for the students can take turns to read it, load the sentences for the rest of the class to write. A low, you can make these type of activities more challenging and harder for high level students. Ultimately, the goal here is to transition from controlled writing skills to free-writing activities. A gap fill is a controlled writing practice exercise in which learners have to replace words missing from a text. These words are chosen and removed in order to practice a specific language point. Here are some common types of gap-filling exercises. This standard multi-word gap fill. Gap-filling exercises can take various forms, but the most common is the standard multi-word exercise with a number of sentences and words to choose from. For higher level students here, you don't even have to provide the words. You can get them to brainstorm the words first and then provide them with the words. And then you can even ask them their reasons for choosing those words. The gap fill with clues and root form. This is a more challenging variation of the standard gap fill exercise. It's where the words which are gaps are presented in the root form. In this way, the students have to choose the correct word from the context given and supply the appropriate forms. The word bit past tense, present, or future. Multiple contexts for one word. This can help students to understand the various derivations for a word is a gap fill exercise with several different contexts for one word, each on a different form or derivation. Listening practice with gap fills. Gap-filling exercises can be presented as listening exercises. In this exercise, students hear the sentence rather than reading it and how to choose the appropriate answer. There are many controls, writing exercises out there. Here, just a few more examples of the most common ones that I use in my classes. Number one, reordering. This is where you rewrite and reorder the sentences so they can make grammatical sense. So the first one here, and we six o'clock tea, drink, get up at would obviously be, we get up at six o'clock and drink tea. This is a great exercise for younger learners. You can make the sentences as easy as you want, but it's also a decent exercise for the older learners. You can get them to create their own sentences and muddle up the words. And then you can have them in teams or groups trying to work out each other's sentences. To substitution. You look at a given sentence and then you make it about yourself. So for example, the boy likes playing football and eating chocolate in bed. You would write, well, I like playing basketball and listening to music on my bed. This can be a class activity where you write a single sentence on the board and everybody focuses on one sentence. Or alternatively, you could get them in groups and everybody write a sentence and pass it around the other groups. Number three, correct? The facts. This is where you rewrite a sentence, so it is correct and matches the picture that you provide. In this example, we're focusing on the picture on the right. The sentences are, the man is selling pizza. He is sitting down. He has a blue shirt and black hair. Well, obviously those sentences are wrong, so we would change them. The man is selling fruit and vegetables. He is standing up. He has an orange shirt and brown hair. There are many different ways to do this. And again, you can make it more difficult for older students, are easier for the younger students. What I do is I get them to circle the words that are wrong first and we make a word list. Then we add in potential words on the board and I get them to rewrite the sentences in their books. 4. Free Writing.: When our students begin progressing past controlled writing activities, we need to think about the next steps in their writing development. This next step is free writing. Free writing, the students were assigned the task of writing about any topic with the emphasis on freedom, it is essential to keep writing without worrying too much about grammar, spelling, or punctuation. They must be relaxed with the task and feel free to be creative and expressive. So let's think about the benefits. The benefits of free writing revolve around organization, improving test-taking abilities, brainstorming, and inspiration, as well as beating writer's block and relieving certain anxieties. Just getting anything written, even if it's imperfect, can jumpstart creativity. So how can we prepare our students to take this step forward? There are certain steps that we can take to provide a stepping stone to free-writing activities for our students. This can prevent students from being overwhelmed or anxious. We can provide the students with a model text. We can do oral preparation, and we can also provide a clear set of instructions and guidelines. So let's imagine you set homework task of a free writing paragraph for your students. You ask them to write about their hometown. Now as a free writing topic, this is good, but it also might cause some problems as well. If you were just to set this writing without taking the appropriate steps beforehand to get them used to this type of writing. You might have many students being confused or intimidated. You might also have many students doing the bare minimum and claimed to have no knowledge of what's going on or what to write. And as well as all this market will be difficult as the students will write about a varied amount of different things. So the way around these problems is to have prewriting steps. So the students have slightly more ideas about the structure and aims before starting to write. Here is a task for you. Look at the writing of the right-hand side and think about how you can encourage your students to use this model texts and write about their own village or town. There are many different ways to present this to your students. You can display it on the board or you can read it aloud, or even you could print it out and have them read it for you. Writing based on a text is a nice introduction to the basics of free writing. It gives your students and example of structure, length and the aims of the task. You can dissect it and take time to look at the texts in detail before asking your students to do their own writings. Here's an example of a method that I would use when presenting a writing based text to my class. First, you could read this with the class and get them to identify any important or keywords. So it shows small town, west coast, Atlantic, many shops. These are the words that they will eventually change to make a boat their own hometown. Next, you will brainstorm with the class and get them to write down or elicit a similar story about a fake town or even a town that everyone knows, such as London or New York. For example, you could start changing the story to be New York instead of oven. You can say new York is a very large city on the East Coast of America and so on. Finally, you would assign the tasks for them to do at home or in the class. Oral preparation. Even with free-writing activities, it is much better to provide steps are clear guidelines for your students. Creativity and freedom to write as one thing. But as previously discussed, it can be a double-edged sword. Students can feel overwhelmed and confused. Oral preparation is another nice method of helping our students transition to free writing. Here is another task for you. This teacher here is preparing our students for the free writing homework tasks that we talked about previously. Write a paragraph about your hometown. I want you to think about how you could present this to your class. How could you encourage them to think and discuss their ideas about what they could write about? An easy way to go about this would be to create mindmaps on the board and get them to brainstorm ideas while you write them on the board. We can encourage note-taking here or even a skeleton assay to practice. Here we want general associations with the hometown, such as population. Interesting facts. Things to do, places to go, and so on and so on. Next, we would build a vocabulary list and the board, using suggestions from the students, we would brainstorm interesting suggestions and foot forward funny ideas as well. We always try to make sure that they use full sentences to. The teacher might ask the class, can you tell me words that you associate with your hometown? And a student might answer, my hometown is very big and busy. Okay, good. We'll put the word big and busy. Okay. Anyone else? My hometown is in the mountains. Okay, good. We'll put mountains, countryside. Anyone else? And someone might say about their family, and so on and so on. Again, with the overall feeling of free writing, there are no wrong answers. We're just looking for interesting and creative suggestions. As well as this. If there are any specific sentences or facts that the teacher wants to address in the writing? For example, are there any markets in the town or what is the traffic congestion lake? Then we would need to brainstorm these details with the class and go over the types of sentences that they could right? Correcting written work. Correcting is something else that most teachers needed to, and it can be a challenge, especially for large classes and longer written work. There are many different methods here and you need to think about which ones are most efficient and effective for your classes. Here's a final task for you. Think about these four teachers and their methods for correcting written work. Which of these techniques will succeed in your class? I want you to think about which ones you would use and why you would choose that method. Teacher one says, I collect the books at the end of the lessons, correct them at homework during lunch, then I give them back the next day. This is a fairly standard method of correcting work. It's one that I have employed many times in the past, but it is very time-consuming and the students don't really get to do any peer to peer learning. Teacher to says, I go through the answers and write them on the board, then I get the students to correct their own work. Although this is a standard method of correcting work as well, I do feel it's quite time-consuming to write all the answers on the board and go through it with the class. And as well as this, you may get some students, not entirely honest about their marks. Teacher three says, I get the students to sit in pairs and correct each others work. Then we all go through the answers together. Peer to peer learning is a very effective method, but again, it can be quite time-consuming to go through all the answers together. So just be aware of your time constraints within your class. Teacher forces. I asked the students to exchange books, then I give them the answers while they mark the books. This is quite an effective method, in my opinion, is one that I use quite often. It can be quite quick if done correctly, and it's a good way to get peer to peer learning involved. However, there can be some disputes amongst students if they feel that someone has marked them too harshly. Okay, guys, that's all for now. Thank you so much for joining me. See you next time.