In the second of his series of posts on writing in the early stages (A1-B1), Urs Kalberer, teacher, and teacher development chair of the English Teachers Association of Switzerland, suggests some ways to get students practising.
This post adds to the ideas presented in my previous post. In his Principles for Teaching Writing, I.S.P. Nation states that ‘Learners should do lots of writing and lots of different kinds of writing’1. However, at elementary level students tend to freeze when faced with the task of writing a text. We therefore need to give them support, i.e. through content prompts and visual stimuli.
It is often not the well-constructed activity that pays dividends but the simple use and re-use of materials. An intriguing image in the course book or a recently read story can become springboards for texts. Staging a regular ten minute writing storm about a topic set by you or your students will have immediate effects and confirms Nation’s statement. You will notice a steady growth in confidence with improved accuracy and higher fluency. Practice makes perfect!
A basic and authentic task is form-filling. You can present a given form or let the students devise their own. Note how specific prompts favour one word answers while others invite full sentences.
Lies can be a rich resource when used as a true/false dictation. Students prepare four sentences about themselves which do not need to be true and dictate them. The learners decide whether the sentences are true or false and write them into the appropriate column. This activity links listening and writing and offers the teacher an opportunity to share more personal information with the class.
I enjoy doing dictations because they are so flexible and easy to set up. Let the students dictate or even select texts themselves. In a 50:50 dictation the writers get the chance to create parts of the content – so your fast and slow learners decide on the length and complexity of their texts. Start dictating: It was a difficult day for Jonathan at school. First he had a test in history and then … (students complete this part). When he left he felt hungry and … (students complete this part). He got a sandwich and …. A fun way to write is to create cartoons with the help of webtools such as Toondoo. Or try Bombay TV and write subtitles to incomprehensible Bollywood movies. Another option is to design a photostory using Photovisi. Want it more traditional? Use photos from newspapers or from your course book. Your students can write comments, captions or dialogues using the visual information that is on the image.
(c) Urs Kalberer
Hand out photos of similar things or arrangements. Ideally, each student gets one photo. Then students write a description of what they see. Collect all the photos, display and number them. Shuffle the texts and hand them out to the students to match to the photos.
Don’t forget that readers make good writers! Extensive reading kills two (or more!) birds with one stone and presents text models for your learners. Finally, instead of collecting keywords for guidance, create a wordcloud of the text you want to reconstruct. Here’s one generated by Wordle of this blogpost.
1 I.S.P. Nation ‘Teaching ESL/EFL Reading and Writing’ Routledge (2009)