TEACHING WRITING

 Why and what do we write? What do people write in their real lives beyond the classroom? As said, function and purpose of writing has changed enormously over the past fifteen years or so with the introduction of both the computer and the internet. People still write personal letters on paper but far less than they used to. Do you parents and grandparents for example? What happens when that generation dies out?

 Writing is not just talk written down so it has to be separately learned, so what learners needs is the separate conventions and rules of writing with discourse structures as appropriate. Discourse refers to how written text is organized and expressed for various pragmatic or contextual purposes.  Teaching may focus on the product, that is the final written form, or teaching may focus on the process, for example the planning, the structure, writing and re-writing necessary

 This is the more traditional approach to teaching writing, in which students are encouraged to mimic a model text, which will be presented to the students and analysed at an early stage of the process.  Writing as Process. IN addition to writing as a product based approach, there is also the process based approach to teaching writing. The idea behind this is transforming ideas into a written text.

 Which approach you decide to use will depend on you the teacher and on the students according to their study purposes and targets (academic English would imply a process approach, English for business may imply a product approach). Certain genres or types of text may lend themselves more to one approach rather than another

 Such activities in writing may include relaying instructions, where written instructions maybe spoken or dictated and then written down and passed on tone more person who has to carry out the instructions, which are then checked to see if the instructions have been conveyed successfully, such a drawing a graph, simple model, preparing simple food etc. Writing reports and advertisements based on given texts may be interesting and engaging, if the students are given something to write an advert for, based on the style of a newspaper advert.

 Celce-Murcia, M. (ed) 2001 Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language Heinle & Heinle  Hedge, T., Teaching and Learning Language in the Classroom (Ch 9) Oxford U.P.  Hyland, K Teaching and Researching Writing Longman  Kroll, B. (ed.), 2003 Exploring the Dynamics of Second Language Writing, Cambridge U.P.  Lynch,T Communication in the Language Classroom (ch. 8) Oxford  McDonough, J & Shaw, C Materials and Methods in ELT Blackwell  Tribble, C Writing Oxford  White, R. and V. Arndt, 1991, Process Writing, Longman