Page 182 - Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies 2009

Chapter 11: Write or Wrong? Teaching Writing Lessons
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Structuring a Writing Lesson
For a writing lesson to be successful, you need to set the writing task up so that students are clear about what they have to do and how best to tackle it.
A wide variety of tasks cover various sub-skills too, for example using regis- ter, which means the right formal or informal style, and adapting to different kinds of texts.
When deciding on a writing task to set, ask yourself some questions as an initial checklist.
✓ Is it appropriate for the class in terms of level, relevance and interest?
✓ Is it clear what the purpose of the task is?
✓ Is it clear who the imagined reader is?
✓ Do the students have sufficient information to complete the task (vocab- ulary, layout, background, examples)?
If you have a task which seems to fit the bill, you now need to build a lesson around it.
Energising the class with pre-writing tasks
As writing is often a quiet, solitary activity, a pre-writing task is usually nec- essary because such tasks energise and prepare the students. They allow for collaboration and help students put together ideas which will make the actual writing task more successful.
Fostering discussion
A class discussion is a good way to generate ideas on the writing topic.
To begin the discussion provide an example of the topic. Tell a story, use a visual image or provide a text which gets students thinking along the right lines. You could also put some keys words on the board and ask students what they have in common. Then, ask students to add some more relevant words to the ones you have presented.
If the task you intend to set is a composition about an interesting experience while on holiday, for example, you can begin the lesson with a personal anec- dote about one of your holidays and then open the topic up to the students to tell each other similar stories, which should get the creative juices flowing. Alternatively, a short reading about a trip, an exotic piece of music or stimu- lating photograph from a far away land can stimulate conversation which leads in the direction of the writing topic.