Etpedia by John Hughes

Author:John Hughes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pavilion Publishing
Published: 2015-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

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Unit 50

10 subskills for teaching writing

Writing lessons don’t always have to involve the students writing full-length texts. You can also devote shorter sections of a lesson to developing specific subskills, depending on the age, level and needs of the students.

1. Forming letters

Young learners who are also learning to write their own first language will need help with forming letters. The same can also be true for older students whose first language uses a script that is very different from their own – Arabic or Chinese, for example. You can ask young learners to try drawing the letters in the air with a finger or making large, colourful posters of each letter of the alphabet. Older students will need practice in copying the 26 letters of the English alphabet if they need to write by hand in English.

2. Punctuation

If you have been teaching punctuation rules, one way to practise is to take a text and remove all the capital letters, commas, full stops and any other types of punctuation. Give a copy to the students and get them to rewrite it with the punctuation in.

3. Conjunctions 1

At lower levels, you will want your students to join sentences with conjunctions such as and, but, because and so. Give the students pairs of sentences and ask them to rewrite them with a conjunction. For example: I live in England. I work in France. = I live in England but I work in France.

4. Conjunctions 2

At higher levels, your students will need to make their writing more cohesive, with words such as However, Although, Nevertheless, Fortunately, etc. Try to find a text with a few of these types of words and create a gapfill exercise where the students have to choose the correct one and write it in the text.

5. Spelling

English spelling is notoriously difficult. One approach to dealing with it is to take a selection of words that your students commonly misspell and base parts of a lesson on them. For example, write 10 words on the board. Spell five of them correctly and five of them incorrectly. Get the students to discuss in pairs which five they think are wrong. Another way is to write some of the words twice and ask the students to tick the correctly spelt word.

For example: accommodation ü accomodation û

6. Register and formality

Students need practice in identifying the correct level of formality or ‘register’ when writing. For example, a report for work will use more formal language than an email to an old friend. An exercise such as the following raises this kind of awareness. Students have to match the less formal words in group A to the more formal synonyms in group B:

Group A: Tell, change, get, try, give, stop

Group B: Amend, terminate, receive, endeavour, donate, inform

(Answers: tell/inform, change/amend, get/receive, try/endeavour, give/donate, stop/terminate)

7. Layout

Some texts have very specific layouts. You can exploit this by drawing the ‘shape’ of the text and inviting the students to say what kinds of expressions and phrases go into which part.

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