1. How to Support our Students when Writing in English
by Elaine Cockerham Director, ELC, College of Banking and Financial Studies.

2. Outline Why write? Problems for our students
Things to consider before writing
Getting ideas and how to start
Support whilst writing
Modelling the Process

3. Why Write? To communicate Permanent record More organised and formal
Requirement of course or job

4. Problems for our Students
Ideas
How to start
Organisation
Helping without doing it for them
Grammar & Spelling
Understanding the PROCESS

5. Things to Consider Before Writing
Audience/purpose
Topic/title/question
Length of text
Time limit
Preparing (gathering what you need)

6. How to Begin
Using pictures
Providing sentence starts
Brainstorming

7. How Could You Use this?

8. How could you use this?

9. Generating Ideas Pictures as prompts
Describe the picture itself
What happened before/next
Why did it happen?
What’s the problem/solution?
What would you do/have done?
What’s your opinion?
(more concrete, things to describe etc.)

10. Generating Ideas Sentence starts
Example: because His car broke down before after She was happy when/while in spite of.....

11. Generating Ideas - Brainstorming
Who?
What?
When?
Title/Topic
Key words/vocab for each category
How?
Where?
Why?

12. Ideas (grouping) Sentences Paragraphs
The Process
Ideas (grouping) Sentences Paragraphs

13. Support
Vocabulary lists
Sentence starts
Grids of sentence outlines

14. Outline Sentences The bar graph pie chart line graph shows compares
changes in
differences between
the distribution of
(use title or axes for details)
by _______________________
in ___________________
between ________ and _________
from ____________ to ___________

16. Modelling the Process Whole class ideas
Pair or small groups with specific tasks
Whole class feedback/collation
Building up slowly
Providing scaffolding

17. An Example (part 1) Picture of a place/person
Pairs to complete mindmap or grid with categories
Whole class – teacher collates ideas on board
(class decides what is irrelevant or off topic)
T provides lists of vocab/connectors etc
Groups write sentences or short paragraphs for each category.

18. An Example (part 2)
Whole class – T collates so paragraphs are built up (1 sentence from each group?)
Groups write topic sentence(s)
Then editing/revising – groups swap texts?
Now modelling has been seen – for home work set a mind-map task?

19. Describing a Person My friend (name) Character Likes and dislikes
Appearance
My friend
(name)
Key words/vocab for each category
Hobbies
How we first met
Family

20. Revising and Editing
Collate common mistakes give as example text to edit/correct and improve
After first draft is written T gives feedback and guidance using correction symbols
Students self or peer edit

21. Low Levels? Sentence level - words to order
- Sentences lacking adjectives
- Get students to list all vocab on a topic then use sentence outlines/starters to write own
Paragraph level
Group sentences to make paragraphs- add topic sentences
Whole text
Paragraphs to be ordered, add discourse markers, conjunctions etc., discard irrelevancies

22. Remember – it’s a process!
Summary
Task
Generate ideas
Support/scaffolding
Build up the parts
Edit/redraft
Remember – it’s a process!

23. Thank you for taking part tonight. eltpn@om. britishcouncil
Thank you for taking part tonight. See you again next academic year?