Teaching writing

Hi everyone! Welcome to another entry of my blog😊

We've moved on to another interesting and very important topic which is teaching writing, this one is just one of the four macro skills: Writing, speaking, listening and reading. Also, it is one of the productive skills.

It is so important to know how to teach this skills in the appropiate way and make it entertaining as well for the students since it might be challenging for people from other countries who are not familiar with our alphabet. 

Writing is not just about learning how to trace the letter a and write just one word, we should take into account the following:

1. Handwriting

2. Spelling

3. Punctuation

4. Sentence construction

5. Organizing a text and paragraphing

6. Text cohesion

7. Register/style

A student who wants to achieve an advanced level of the English language should master all seven of these elements.

On last week's class we did some exercises that we can use and teach to students who are starting to learn how to write and it felt so strange since I had not done this since pre-school and my hand writing for letters was not the best.

We also discussed how students can focus on the process and the product when writing a composition and they can follow a simple structure for example the one of a movie review or a bread and butter note, most commonly known as a thank you note and that way they can start producing small compositions while working on their spelling, punctuation and cohesion. 

This is one of the best exercises since the student can work on a lot of different things by writing about something of their interest, for example, the best day of their lives, like teacher Orlando asked us to write about. It is also a great opportunity for teachers to show them the different pre-writing techniques and how they can organize their ideas to create a more good looking composition.

Students can also exchange their notebooks and review what their classmate has written and give suggestions about spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. This can be a good exercise to work in pairs.

We also created a story between four people and it was so fun, we were not allowed to read what our classmates were writing about and we had to continue with the story. This can be useful as part of a collaborative apporach since students can feel more comfortable when working with their classmates.

Here is my group's story about Juanito and the crazy mushrooms😂

You can clearly see the four different handwritings.

Here is María quite invested in writing the story😆

On Tuesday's class we talked about teaching grammar and vocabulary and discussed the inductive and deductive way of teaching them. I personally think that teaching grammar in an inductive way is better for the student since you can also have the feedback from the teacher and they have more time to practice and they can kind of learn and discover on their own unlike teaching grammar in a deductive means going straight to the point and learning from a text book or just by what the teacher explains on the board.

We also talked about the input and how it can be restricted and authentic. A restricted input means that the source from teaching are teaching books or all the class related material while an authentic input is the one that was not designed to teach but the teacher can adapt it to the class anyway, for example incorporating songs in the classroom (Suggestopedia) or podcasts to improve the students listening and any other thing that can help the students practicing their English but was not originally meant for class use.

Another important thing that a good teacher has to take into account is time, you need to know how to manage your time, sometimes a topic can be so fun and interesting and you can get carried away while teaching it but we need to remember that students need a good amount a time to produce and practice what they just learned.

Teaching vocabulary is another good opportunity for the teacher to incorporate different activities, you can start by just one word and students can continue writing down words related to the initial word, for example "Beach", they can start brainstorming and write down "Sea" "Sand" "Salty" "Sunny" and so on. I think this is similar to the example proliferation from the direct method. Students can also label different objects on a picture, for example a kitchen and they are given the labels with the name of the objects written on it and they can start doing it.

And for teaching grammar, I came up with the idea on class that students can also practice a sentence structure with different colored papers and as well with the names "S" "Verb" "Complement" and they can start creating different sentences which is similar to what we did with the Cuisinaire rods in the Silent Way.

As you can see, everything is connected in the world of teaching! There are many ideas you can apply to the classroom and you don't have to stick to just one method of teaching. 

This was it for teaching writing, stay tuned for my next entries on teaching speaking, reading and listening, which are part of the four macro skills. Bye-bye!👋