What is writing?

Writing can be defined by a series of contrasts:

It is a physical and a mental act.

Its purpose is both to express and impress.

It is both a process and a product.

Background to the teaching of writing.

o At the beginning of the twentieth century, writing instruction was based on a inflexible set of assumptions.

• L1:

• Teacher’s role: they had to provide these rules to students.

• Student’s role: they had to follow these rules.

• L2:• In this period “rules of writing” were concerned more

with correctness of form over function.

Writing Process change

• 1911: The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) was founded. They demanded a more progressive writing instruction.

• 1960: From this year, writing instruction began to include the entire process of writing-invention, drafting, feedback and revision.

• Contrastive rhetoric: introduced by Robert Kaplan, it is the study of how a person's first language and culture influence on their writing in a second language.

First language writers Second language writers

Expressivism Students are encouraged to write freely and personally.

For some traditional academic settings,

personal writing is not required.

Cognitivism Students define problems, investigate them thoroughly, present they arguments and

logical conclusions.

In ESL/EFL classrooms students are

encouraged to use brainstorming, drafting, and

conferencing among students and the

instructor.

Writing Across the Curriculum

programs (WAC)

For L1 students this program taught them how to write in

different disciplines.

For L2 writers this program appeared in the form of adjunct programs.

Principles for teaching Writing.

Meaning-Focused input: Learners bring previous knowledge

to their writing.

• Meaning Focused Output: the writing should be done with the purpose of communicating something to the reader.

• Language-focused learning: Learners should be able to create strategies for dealing with parts of the writing process.

• Fluency development: Learners should increase their speed at writing.

Designining task

• Experience task: Teacher thinks in a topic that students are very familiar with.

• Shared task: Students do a collaborative writing.

• Guided Task: Teacher provides focused guidance.

• Independent task: Learners do an autonomous work.

Writing acquisition

• Writing is learned by means of discover.

• Learner start to "write" by using certain strategies for writing.

• Reading is very important in writing learning.

Responding to written work

• Motivating: Teachers have to motivate students to improve their attitude to writing.

Improving the quality of writing • Written feedback to the class: written report with mistakes and comments.

• Oral feedback to the whole class: Teacher analyze an student work in front of the class.

• Marking grammatical errors: Learner can identify errors to avoid them.

Principles for teaching writing

• 1. Understand your students’ reason for writing.

• 2. Provide many opportunities for students to write.

• 3. Make feedback helpful and meaningful.• 4. Clarify yourself, and for your students,

how their writing will be evaluated.

Types of writing tasks

• A note or formal letter.• A summary.• Narrative text.• Descriptive text.• Exposition, analysis, definition, classification.• Argumentative.• Literary.• Advertisement.• Journal writing.

Classroom techniques.Writing activities encourage the idea that learning to

write is more than creating a final product.

Invention techniques:• Brainstorming: students list all the ideas that they

can relate or think about a topic, quickly and without much planning.

• Wordmaping: students relate ideas or words and draw relationships among the ideas.

• Looping: students write quickly and then summarize.

• Quickwriting: students write rapidly about a certain topic during 10 or 15 minutes.

Writing: • Drafting: organize the ideas.

• Feedback: teachers should not entail correcting a student’s writing. Teachers should provide students with comments that guide them to find their mistakes and correct it by their own.

• Revising: looking back over what has been written. This is done to check the ideas that have already been included to keep the coherence.

Proofreading and editing: read for mistakes in spelling, grammar, punctuation, and so forth.

• Teachers should not correct students’ draft by giving them all the correction, students would feel afraid of writing if they see a large number of errors.

• Marking using a graph: give to students an average of their mistakes. By having this average mark students can see if they are improving.

Conclusion

• Teaching writing as a foreign or a second language can most effectively be done by applying a rather short list of principles that are largely supported by research.

Reference

• Nation, P. (2009). Teaching Reading and Writing. London: Routledge.

• Nunan, D. (Ed.). (2003). Practical English Language Teaching. New York: Mc Graw Hill.