In the first of a series, Urs Kalberer, teacher and teacher development chair of the English Teachers Association of Switzerland, looks at writing in the early stages (A1-B1) and shares some ideas about how to teach it.
Writing is like swimming – it needs a conscious effort and doesn’t come naturally. We as teachers need to be aware of the difficulties our learners have when embarking on writing at elementary level.
I am always surprised how hard it is for my elementary students to simply copy a couple of lines without making mistakes. How much more difficult must it be for these learners to produce written language on their own? Therefore, I initially set tasks that enable learners to write in English without having the burden of thinking too much about content and text organisation.
There is usually only one possible and correct option in controlled writing tasks like copying text. You can spice it up by presenting a sentence, then cover it and make the class write it from memory. Or hand out a text in which you (or the students) hid some mistakes for the class to find. Other tasks include gap-fills (revising new vocabulary) or various forms of dictations. Take a story – jokes work well – then cut the sentences into strips and distribute them in the classroom. In pairs the learners organise themselves: One is writing and the second student is running to find all the paper strips in the room and then dictate them from memory to their partners. After dictating, the sentences need to be ordered correctly.
While there is only one correct version in controlled writing, students have more options in a guided task where they create their own texts. Let your learners read a text and note 5 to 7 keywords. Then they put the text aside and try to reconstruct the original text. Seems too difficult for your learners? Then try it in groups of 3. If it seems too easy, then instead of reading the text, the students can listen to it and take notes.
An obvious activity is to ask questions that the learners are answering based on a picture. What/who can you see? Where is it? What happened? What will happen next?
It’s important to expose your learners to the type of text you want them to write. In parallel texts students write a new version based on a given text. This works well with factual information in tables like city or country fact files or personal profiles.
Writing doesn’t need to be a frightening chore. By experimenting with controlled and guided activities you can find a balance between rule oriented (spelling, grammar) and creative expression.
If you’ve enjoyed this post, take a look at Controlled and guided writing tasks for beginners, Part 2 – practice makes perfect.