Sue Parminter is one of the authors of Level Up, a new Primary course that helps young learners take their English to the next level by fostering mindset of continuous improvement and resilience.
What is process writing exactly? And how can we organize it in our lessons with upper primary learners? These are questions which I often get asked when I am running training sessions on writing skills with teachers of young learners.
The first question is relatively easy to answer: ‘process writing’ is a way of dividing up what learners must do when they write a text into different stages.
There are different models that you can follow, but one of the most basic is like this:
| Before writing | While writing | After writing |
| Getting ideas Organizing ideas |
Writing the first draft | Revising Editing |
Brainstorming together
A good way of helping learners to get ideas is through organizing a class brainstorm. For example, if you want learners to write about a picture showing a scene ‘At the beach’, you could show them a picture like this:
Put learners in pairs to list all the things that they can see in the picture. If you like, you can give them a list of beach words that they can mark Y (for Yes, it’s in the picture.) or N (for No, it’s not in the picture.), like this:
| beach ball bucket and spade boat man plane pool |
rubber ring sandals sandcastle sandwich sea sea bird |
sun sun umbrella surfboard towel watermelon woman |
(Note: The words pool, sandwich, and woman are N words, which aren’t in the picture! The others are Y words, which are in the picture!)
If you want to make this activity a bit more challenging, you can show the picture only for a moment or two and have the learners list the words from memory.
Organizing ideas
Once you have activated the vocabulary in the picture, point to different parts of the picture and elicit and drill the following phrases describing position. After that, in order to help learners to organize their ideas, you can write them on the board in a table, like this:
| at the top, on the left | at the top, in the centre | at the top, on the right |
| in the middle, on the left | in the middle | in the middle, on the right |
| at the bottom, on the left | at the bottom, in the centre | at the bottom, on the right |
If you point to the dolphins, you can elicit the following describing sentence:There are dolphins in the picture.
If you point to the towel, you can elicit the following describing sentence:There’s a towel in the picture.
Following this, you can get learners to work in groups to write sentences combining the language pattern there is / there are for describing + beach vocabulary + position phrases, like this:
There’s a sea bird in the top, on the left of the picture.
There’s the sun at the top, in the centre of the picture.
There’s a plane at the top, on the right of the picture.
There’s a boat in the middle, on the left of the picture.
There’s a sun umbrella in the middle of the picture.
There’s a rubber ring at the bottom, on the left of the picture.
There’s a starfish at the bottom, in the centre of the picture.
There’s a surfboard at the bottom, on the right of the picture.
As you can see, this sequence of mini-stages in this lesson brings in all four of the language skills: reading, speaking, listening, and writing – in a logical and communicative way. This sort of ‘integrated skills’ approach will help to make your writing lesson fun and stop learners from getting bored while they get, and organize, their ideas for writing.
If you’ve enjoyed this post, have a read of Part 2 of this series.