In the third 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 collaborative writing tasks to help familiarise elementary learners with writing practice.
Collaborative writing can ease the initial difficulties elementary writers have when asked to bring their own ideas onto paper. Here are some of the collaborative writing tasks I rely on in my classroom:
In person, place, type of story, the students use cards in three different colours and describe:
- the main character of the story by name, age, job etc.
- the place where the story unfolds. It can be anywhere and students are encouraged to be specific, e.g. a restaurant in a run-down neighbourhood of Chicago.
- a type of story: love, crime, fantasy, disaster, science fiction, etc.
Collect the cards in three piles according to their colour. Students come up and take one card from each pile and start writing using the prescriptive elements on their cards. A more advanced version could include two characters who must meet in the story.
Write questions to short answers and then try to match them. Photo: Urs Kalberer
Students, typically, are conditioned to answer questions. A nice little tweak is moving from answer to question for a change. Students write a short answer – Yes, she does. No, we don’t etc. – and pass their paper on to a pupil who composes a suitable question in return. Or let your students prepare a large number of paper slips with short answers and place them centrally in your classroom. This way each of your learners can help themselves at their own writing pace. Instead of short answers, you can make your students write more detailed answers (“At three o’clock”!) and then think of suitable questions. Don’t throw away the papers: The written questions and answers are precious feedback and indicate where there is need for some remedial teaching.
An Agony Aunt answers letters on personal problems in newspapers or magazines. We can adapt this for school with groups of 3 and assign the role of making-up a problem and answering it in a funny or imaginative way to each group.
Get your students to write their names on paper and dictate the first two sentences of a story. Then the students continue the story by adding the next two or three sentences before passing the paper on to the learner sitting next to them. This one first reads the story so far before adding the next two sentences and subsequently passes the expanding text on. The procedure is repeated according to the potential of the class. Then the texts are returned to the first writers who read with great interest how “their” story evolved.
Teaching writing can become a burden for the teacher as there are so many texts to read, correct or comment on. Hence my advice: Never correct a first draft! Insist on careful handwriting and paragraphs – they can make life easier for you. Furthermore, you can involve your learners in the revising stage by setting up groups of 4 students. Each one gets a specific job: One looks at spelling, the next at text organisation, one at grammar, and another at vocabulary. Your learners will profit as they realise that constant re-drafting, revising and editing are part of the writing process and cannot be left to the teacher alone.